the San Joaquin expanded, Titanic, before the eye of the mind,
flagellated with heat, quivering and shimmering under the sun's red eye.
At long intervals, a faint breath of wind out of the south passed slowly
over the levels of the baked and empty earth, accentuating the silence,
marking off the stillness. It seemed to exhale from the land itself, a
prolonged sigh as of deep fatigue. It was the season after the harvest,
and the great earth, the mother, after its period of reproduction, its
pains of labour, delivered of the fruit of its loins, slept the sleep
of exhaustion, the infinite repose of the colossus, benignant, eternal,
strong, the nourisher of nations, the feeder of an entire world. Ha!
there it was, his epic, his inspiration, his West, his thundering
progression of hexameters. A sudden uplift, a sense of exhilaration, of
physical exaltation appeared abruptly to sweep Presley from his feet. As
from a point high above the world, he seemed to dominate a universe, a
whole order of things. He was dizzied, stunned, stupefied, his morbid
supersensitive mind reeling, drunk with the intoxication of mere
immensity. Stupendous ideas for which there were no names drove headlong
through his brain. Terrible, formless shapes, vague figures, gigantic,
monstrous, distorted, whirled at a gallop through his imagination.

He started homeward, still in his dream, descending from the hill,
emerging from the canyon, and took the short cut straight across the
Quien Sabe ranch, leaving Guadalajara far to his left. He tramped
steadily on through the wheat stubble, walking fast, his head in a
whirl.

Never had he so nearly grasped his inspiration as at that moment on the
hilltop. Even now, though the sunset was fading, though the wide reach
of valley was shut from sight, it still kept him company. Now the
details came thronging back--the component parts of his poem, the signs
and symbols of the West. It was there, close at hand, he had been in
touch with it all day. It was in the centenarian's vividly coloured
reminiscences--De La Cuesta, holding his grant from the Spanish crown,
with his power of life and death; the romance of his marriage; the white
horse with its pillion of red leather and silver bridle mountings; the
bull-fights in the Plaza; the gifts of gold dust, and horses and tallow.
It was in Vanamee's strange history, the tragedy of his love; Angele
Varian, with her marvellous loveliness; the Egyptian fulness of her
lips, t