s were in reality the peaks of high mountains.

We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet-creased range that dipped
down and down to miniature canons far below. Not a single little
boulder broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses. Out from
beneath us crept the plain, sluggish and inert with heat.

Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague brown areas of
brush, showed indeterminate for a little distance. But only for a
little distance. Almost at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness
of atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay palpable
and brown like a shimmering changing veil, hiding the distance in
mystery and in dread. It was a land apart; a land to be looked on
curiously from the vantage-ground of safety,--as we were looking on it
from the shoulder of the mountain,--and then to be turned away from, to
be left waiting behind its brown veil for what might come. To abandon
the high country, deliberately to cut loose from the known,
deliberately to seek the presence that lay in wait,--all at once it
seemed the height of grotesque perversity. We wanted to turn on our
heels. We wanted to get back to our hills and fresh breezes and clear
water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our trails and the sweet upper
air.

For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses, gazing down. Some
unknown disturbance lazily rifted the brown veil by ever so little. We
saw, lying inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a great
round lake. We knew the water to be bitter, poisonous. The veil drew
together again. Wes shook himself and sighed, "There she is,--damn
her!" said he.

[1] In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced.

VI

THE INFERNO

For eight days we did penance, checking off the hours, meeting doggedly
one after another the disagreeable things. We were bathed in heat; we
inhaled it; it soaked into us until we seemed to radiate it like so
many furnaces. A condition of thirst became the normal condition, to
be only slightly mitigated by a few mouthfuls from zinc canteens of
tepid water. Food had no attractions: even smoking did not taste good.
Always the flat country stretched out before us. We could see far
ahead a landmark which we would reach only by a morning's travel.
Nothing intervened between us and it. After we had looked at it a
while, we became possessed of an almost insane necessity to make a run
for it. The slow maddening