and, so pitiful. As the sun began to set and the
storm-clouds moved across it this wondrous scene darkened, changed every
moment, brightened, grew full of luminous red light and then streaked by
golden gleams. The tips of the Panamint Mountains came out silver above
the purple clouds. At sunset the moment was glorious--dark, forbidding,
dim, weird, dismal, yet still tinged with gold. Not like any other
scene! Dante's Inferno! Valley of Shadows! Canyon of Purple Veils!

When the sun had set and all that upheaved and furrowed world of rock
had received a mantle of gray, and a slumberous sulphurous ruddy haze
slowly darkened to purple and black, then I realized more fully that I
was looking down into Death Valley.

Twilight was stealing down when I caught up with Nielsen. He had
selected for our camp a protected nook near where the canyon floor bore
some patches of sage, the stalks and roots of which would serve for
firewood. We unpacked, fed the mules some grain, pitched our little
tent and made our bed all in short order. But it was dark long before
we had supper. During the meal we talked a little, but afterward, when
the chores were done, and the mules had become quiet, and the strange
thick silence had settled down upon us, we did not talk at all.

The night was black, with sky mostly obscured by clouds. A pale haze
marked the west where the after glow had faded; in the south one radiant
star crowned a mountain peak. I strolled away in the darkness and sat
down upon a stone. How intense the silence! Dead, vast, sepulchre-like,
dreaming, waiting, a silence of ages, burdened with the history of the
past, awful! I strained my ears for sound of insect or rustle of sage or
drop of weathered rock. The soft cool desert wind was soundless. This
silence had something terrifying in it, making me a man alone on the
earth. The great spaces, the wild places as they had been millions of
years before! I seemed to divine how through them man might develop from
savage to a god, and how alas! he might go back again.

When I returned to camp Nielsen had gone to bed and the fire had burned
low. I threw on some branches of sage. The fire blazed up. But it seemed
different from other camp-fires. No cheer, no glow, no sparkle! Perhaps
it was owing to scant and poor wood. Still I thought it was owing as
much to the place. The sadness, the loneliness, the desolateness of this
place weighed upon the camp-fire the same as it did upon my heart