e that long, soft, hot dry stretch of blasted
desolation known as the Humboldt Sink. The sun stared, the heat rose in
waves, the mirage shimmered, the dust devils of choking alkali whirled
aloft or sank in suffocation on the hot earth. Thus it had been since in
remote ages the last drop of the inland sea had risen into a brazen sky.
But this year had brought something new. A track now led across the
desert. It had sunk deep into the alkali, and the soft edges had closed
over it like snow, so that the wheel marks and the hoof marks and the
prints of men's feet looked old. Almost in a straight line it led to the
west. Its perspective, dwindling to nothingness, corrected the deceit of
the clear air. Without it the cool, tall mountains looked very near. But
when the eye followed the trail to its vanishing, then, as though by
magic, the Ranges drew back, and before them denied dreadful forces of
toil, thirst, exhaustion, and despair. For the trail was marked. If the
wheel ruts had been obliterated, it could still have been easily
followed. Abandoned goods, furniture, stores, broken-down wagons,
bloated carcasses of oxen or horses, bones bleached white, rattling
mummies of dried skin, and an almost unbroken line of marked and
unmarked graves--like the rout of an army, like the spent wash of a wave
that had rolled westward--these in double rank defined the road.

The buzzards sailing aloft looked down on the Humboldt Sink as we would
look upon a relief map. Near the centre of the map a tiny cloud of white
dust crawled slowly forward. The buzzards stooped to poise above it.

Two ox wagons plodded along. A squirrel--were such a creature
possible--would have stirred disproportionately the light alkali dust;
the two heavy wagons and the shuffling feet of the beasts raised a
cloud. The fitful furnace draught carried this along at the slow pace of
the caravan, which could be seen only dimly, as through a dense fog.

The oxen were in distress. Evidently weakened by starvation, they were
proceeding only with the greatest difficulty. Their tongues were out,
their legs spread, spasmodically their eyes rolled back to show the
whites, from time to time one or another of them uttered a strangled,
moaning bellow. They were white with the powdery dust, as were their
yokes, the wagons, and the men who plodded doggedly alongside. Finally,
they stopped. The dust eddied by; and the blasting sun fell upon them.

The driver of the leading team m