selves in that vast and melancholy desert by the skeletons of men
and animals. Then they inclined their route a little to the north, and,
losing even these dire memorials, came into a country of forbidding
stillness. I have often heard my father dwell upon the features of that
ride: rock, cliff, and barren moor alternated; the streams were very far
between; and neither beast nor bird disturbed the solitude. On the
fortieth day they had already run so short of food that it was judged
advisable to call a halt and scatter upon all sides to hunt. A great
fire was built, that its smoke might serve to rally them; and each man
of the party mounted and struck off at a venture into the surrounding
desert.

My father rode for many hours with a steep range of cliffs upon the one
hand, very black and horrible; and upon the other an unwatered vale
dotted with boulders like the site of some subverted city. At length he
found the slot of a great animal, and from the claw-marks and the hair
among the brush, judged that he was on the track of a cinnamon bear of
most unusual size. He quickened the pace of his steed, and, still
following the quarry, came at last to the division of two watersheds. On
the far side the country was exceeding intricate and difficult, heaped
with boulders, and dotted here and there with a few pines, which seemed
to indicate the neighbourhood of water. Here, then, he picketed his
horse, and, relying on his trusty rifle, advanced alone into that
wilderness.

Presently, in the great silence that reigned, he was aware of the sound
of running water to his right; and leaning in that direction, was
rewarded by a scene of natural wonder and human pathos strangely
intermixed. The stream ran at the bottom of a narrow and winding
passage, whose wall-like sides of rock were sometimes for miles together
unscalable by man. The water, when the stream was swelled with rains,
must have filled it from side to side; the sun's rays only plumbed it in
the hour of noon; the wind, in that narrow and damp funnel, blew
tempestuously. And yet, in the bottom of this den, immediately below my
father's eyes as he leaned over the margin of the cliff, a party of some
half a hundred men, women, and children lay scattered uneasily among the
rocks. They lay, some upon their backs, some prone, and not one
stirring; their upturned faces seemed all of an extraordinary paleness
and emaciation; and from time to time, above the washing of the stream