Ruins

Light and space still prevail in New Mexico. There are still mesas rising from nothing and trailing off to nowhere; still fields of pale desert grass, clumps of deep green cedar and blue sage; still the sense of what D.H. Lawrence called "the magnificent fierce morning. " This is not to say that New Mexico hasn't been mucked up. It has its share of fast-food eateries, trailer preserves and motel strips. And some of the more fabled towns, notably Santa Fe and Taos, have long since become parodies of themselves, fantasies laid out and maintained for the determined consumer.

From the Ruins of Empire The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia By Pankaj Mishra Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 368 pp. $27. Reviewed by Madhusree Mukerjee   'The minstrel, and the music, and the melody have all changed," lamented poet Akbar Illahabadi after the crushing of India's 1857 rebellion against the British East India Company. The last of the Mughal emperors was gone, his sons dead, their dazzling capital of Delhi razed. Nature herself had been transformed: "Another kind of rain falls from the sky; another kind of grain grows in the fields.

One probably can never tire of going to London. It is such a glorious, compelling city. But perhaps you have been there, and have decided that on this trip to England, you might like to see some of those legendary, picturesque towns in the hinterland. If that's the case, you'll want to take a look at Short Walks in English Towns by Bryn Frank (Harmony Books, hard-cover, $19.95). With the help of wonderful color photography by Derry Brabbs, Frank takes you on detailed walking tours of 10 of England's most charming towns, including Bath, Canterbury, Cambridge, Chester, Oxford and York.

When I mentioned I wanted to go to Extremadura, my Spanish boyfriend looked at me as if I was loca. Extremadura isn't exactly high on the lists of most tourists in Spain. Or natives, for that matter. It's the region to the west of Madrid that borders Portugal, home to a rugged landscape and walled towns that appear nearly untouched by the 21st century. It's not that Extremadura isn't appealing. Most Spaniards simply don't think about it. Visitors to Spain flock to the beaches, to the sunny south or the verdant north, or to the cosmopolitan big cities.

Indiana Jones has survived a scrape with an archaeologist, who objected to filming his next adventure inside the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. The regional office of the National Park Service has decided that the filming would have no adverse impact on the spectacular, 700-year-old mud-and- sandstone cliff city in southwestern Colorado, Denver regional director Lorraine Mintzmyer said last week. The ruling, which was a reversal of the finding of the park's archaeologist, Jack Smith, was sent to Barbara Sudler, Colorado state historic-preservation officer, who has no power to veto the permit.

He walks in the zone of shadows, a demi-god of death and bloody ritual steeped beyond the memories of man, falling back into the edge of chaos, to the time of before there was before . . . - Karen Porter, "Dream Creeper" The words conjure the spirit of the vampire - a figure of evil that has fascinated for centuries, and perhaps especially at that time of year when the days grow short and the shadows long, the otherworldly...

Gareth Edwards, a visual-effects brainiac from Britain, has, in his writing and directing debut, delivered a deft existential road movie, a muted romance, and, above all, a sci-fi allegory with giant squidlike creatures thumping around Mexico, cutting a deadly path to the walled borders of the United States. These tendriled behemoths are the titular Monsters , and the way they yelp and moan (think distressed elephants) and overturn pickup trucks and knock down buildings is a scary thing.

HERE'S SOME advice for all you budding filmmakers out there: Don't ruin the ruins. Walter Leonidas Espinoza is a camera crane operator, who, five years ago, was shooting a commercial for Backus beer at the Machu Picchu Inca ruins. His equipment (and by that we mean his camera equipment) tipped and chipped an ancient stone sundial - Intihuatana, or "hitching post for the sun. " Last week, Espinoza was found guilty of destruction and alteration of cultural goods. His punishment?

Weeds shoot mercilessly from the earth next to the crumbling stone pillars at the brow of the hill. Though the precarious piles of rocks seem quite unremarkable, the Yellow Springs hilltop is heavy with colonial history. That winter of 1777-78 was tough for the soldiers encamped at Valley Forge. More men died from illness than in battle. Hospitals set up in homes, barns and churches were overcrowded and undersupplied. To combat the decimation of his troops from within, George Washington ordered that a special military hospital be built at Yellow Springs.

In Paula Wilson's exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, art imitates all-too-familiar life, especially in a frayed-edges, postindustrial city like Philadelphia. My initial response to her hanging multimedia murals of distressed building facades was that while they're pleasingly artful, blocks and blocks of the real thing lie just around the corner, in every direction. Well, perhaps not literally around the corner, but cities such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago (where Wilson grew up; she now lives in New Mexico)