a place where every word comes back self-enclosed
causing every sound to sound self-enclosed and every utterance to seem flatly soft and somehow overintimate, almost postcoital.
Context
The outcropping's acoustic is the theme made into physics: the empty desert expanse "sucks all resonance," so that every utterance falls back "self-enclosed," flat and overintimate, a voice with nowhere to travel and nothing to bounce off. Two men speaking all night into a space that returns each word to its speaker — the setting itself renders conversation solipsistic, sound that cannot get out of the mouth's own vicinity.