“Anybody who reads the present book will make a mistake if he takes everything literally," Dobie writes in his preface. "The characters are inventions, patched up from reali-ties. I invented a slight string of experiences on which to thread tales and people. I tried to weave the life of the Mexican earth into a pattern. It is truer, I think, than a literal chronicle of what I saw, whom I heard, and where I rode or slept would have been." Indeed, Tongues of the Monte rings true. Dobie has captured in lines of haunting beauty the myths, the folkways, the simple earthy wis-dom, and the elemental passions of the Mexican people.