s. How the time had sped! For this reason
we did not tarry long on that side.

Facing the sun we found the return trip more formidable. Hot indeed it
was--hot enough for me to imagine how terrible Death Valley would be in
July or August. On all sides the mountains stood up dim and obscure and
distant in haze. The heat veils lifted in ripples, and any object not
near at hand seemed illusive. Nielsen set a pace for me on this return
trip. I was quicker and surer of foot than he, but he had more
endurance. I lost strength while he kept his unimpaired. So often he had
to wait for me. Once when I broke through the crust he happened to be
close at hand and quickly hauled me out. I got one foot wet with some
acid fluid. We peered down into the murky hole. Nielsen quoted a
prospector's saying: "Forty feet from hell!" That broken sharp crust of
salt afforded the meanest traveling I had ever experienced. Slopes of
weathered rock that slip and slide are bad; cacti, and especially choya
cacti, are worse: the jagged and corrugated surfaces of lava are still
more hazardous and painful. But this cracked floor of Death Valley, with
its salt crusts standing on end, like pickets of a fence, beat any place
for hard going that either Nielsen or I ever had encountered. I ruined
my boots, skinned my shins, cut my hands. How those salt cuts stung! We
crossed the upheaved plain, then the strip of white, and reached the
crinkly floor of yellow salt. The last hour taxed my endurance almost to
the limit. When we reached the edge of the sand and the beginning of the
slope I was hotter and thirstier than I had ever been in my life. It
pleased me to see Nielsen wringing wet and panting. He drank a quart of
water apparently in one gulp. And it was significant that I took the
longest and deepest drink of water that I had ever had.

We reached camp at the end of this still hot summer day. Never had a
camp seemed so welcome! What a wonderful thing it was to earn and
appreciate and realize rest! The cottonwood leaves were rustling; bees
were humming in the tamarack blossoms. I lay in the shade, resting my
burning feet and achiag bones, and I watched Nielsen as he whistled
over the camp chores. Then I heard the sweet song of a meadow lark, and
after that the melodious deep note of a swamp blackbird. These birds
evidently were traveling north and had tarried at the oasis.

Lying there I realized that I had come to love the silence, the
loneliness, the se