Road to the Delta in "Delta Autumn" (Location)

The 200-mile trip that the hunters take from Yoknapatawpha to their camp in the Delta gives Faulkner an opportunity to describe the interior of Mississippi in both spatial and temporal terms. Geographically, the they travel from the "cradling hills" in the east (270) to the "rich unbroken alluvial flatness" of the vast flood plain along the Mississippi River (267). And as Ike travels past the "countless little towns," the "tremendous [cotton] gins" and the occasional Indian burial mounds that dot the land, he thinks of the decades during which the white planters who "owned" the land and "the negroes who worked it" cleared the land for the "cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and then plantations" (270-71).