tch the valley I made the discovery that near me
were six low gravelly mounds. Graves! One had two stones at head and
foot. Another had no mark at all. The one nearest me had for the head a
flat piece of board, with lettering so effaced by weather that I could
not decipher the inscription. The bones of a horse lay littered about
between the graves. What a lonely place for graves! Death Valley seemed
to be one vast sepulchre. What had been the lives and deaths of these
people buried here? Lonely, melancholy, nameless graves upon the windy
desert slope!

By this time the long shadows had begun to fall. Sunset over Death
Valley! A golden flare burned over the Panamints--long tapering notched
mountains with all their rugged conformation showing. Above floated gold
and gray and silver-edged clouds--below shone a whorl of dusky, ruddy
bronze haze, gradually thickening. Dim veils of heat still rose from the
pale desert valley. As I watched all before me seemed to change and be
shrouded in purple. How bold and desolate a scene! What vast scale and
tremendous dimension! The clouds paled, turned rosy for a moment with
the afterglow, then deepened into purple gloom. A sombre smoky sunset,
as if this Death Valley was the gateway of hell, and its sinister shades
were upflung from fire.

The desert day was done and now the desert twilight descended. Twilight
of hazy purple fell over the valley of shadows. The black bold lines of
mountains ran across the sky and down into the valley and up on the
other side. A buzzard sailed low in the foreground--fitting emblem of
life in all that wilderness of suggested death. This fleeting hour was
tranquil and sad. What little had it to do with the destiny of man!
Death Valley was only a ragged rent of the old earth, from which men in
their folly and passion, had sought to dig forth golden treasure. The
air held a solemn stillness. Peace! How it rested my troubled soul! I
felt that I was myself here, far different from my habitual self. Why
had I longed to see Death Valley? What did I want of the desert that was
naked, red, sinister, sombre, forbidding, ghastly, stark, dim and dark
and dismal, the abode of silence and loneliness, the proof of death,
decay, devastation and destruction, the majestic sublimity of
desolation? The answer was that I sought the awful, the appalling and
terrible because they harked me back to a primitive day where my blood
and bones were bequeathed their heritage of the