and they put almost the
same effort behind the saltsowing as they would have in turning out
instruments of war.

The sowing itself was in a way anticlimactic. By the whim of Le ffacase
I went in one of the planes on the first day of the task. My protests,
as always, proving futile, I spent a very boresome time flying
backandforth over the same patch of ground. That is, it would have been
boresome had it not been for the dangers involved, for in order to sow
the salt evenly and thickly it was necessary to fly low, to hedgehop,
the pilot called it. If the parachutejump had unnerved me, the flying at
terrific speed straight toward a tree, hill or electricpowerline and
then curving upward at the last second to miss them by a whisper must
have put gray in my hair and taken years from my life.

The rivers, washes and creeks on the inner edge had been roughly dammed
to lessen future erosion of the salt and inappropriately gay flags
marked the boundaries of the area. Owing to our speed the salt billowed
out behind us like powdery fumes, but beyond the evidence of this smoky
trail we might merely have been a group of madmen confusedly searching
for some object lost upon the ground.

In reporting for the _Intelligencer_ it was impossible to dramatize the
event; even the rewritemen were baffled, for under the enormous head
SALT SOWN they could not find enough copy to carry over from page one.

_32._ The sowing of the salt went on for weeks, and the grass leaped
forward as if to meet it. It raced southward through Long Beach, Seal
Beach and the deserted dunes to Newport and Balboa; it came east in a
fury through Puente and Monrovia, northeastward it moved into Lancaster,
Simi and Piru. Only in its course north did the weed show a slower pace;
by the time we had been forced to leave Pomona for San Bernardino it had
got no farther than Calabasas and Malibu.

The westward migration of the American people was abruptly reversed.
Those actually displaced by the grass infected others, through whose
homes they passed in their flight, with their own panic. Land values
west of the Rockies dropped to practically nothing and the rich farms of
the Great Plains were worth no more than they had been a hundred years
before. People had seen directly, heard over the radio, or read in
newspapers of the countless methods vainly used to stop the grass and
there was little confidence in the saltband's succeeding where other
devices had failed. T