y we travelled through these sad
mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair match
to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely
and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that
drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications--how
drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree,
not a patch of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form;
sage-brush, eternal sage-brush; over all the same weariful and gloomy
colouring, greys warming into brown, greys darkening towards black; and
for sole sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and
there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a canyon. The
plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a
contorted smallness. Except for the air, which was light and
stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-forsaken
land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at last,
whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside
eating-house, the evening we left Laramie I fell sick outright. That was
a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps did not go out; each
made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood, and the shadows were
confounded together in the long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay
in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs
like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon
his arm; there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the
bench. The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the
movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out their
arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in
their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate,
and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a half-formed word, it gave me a
measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although
it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for the degradation of
the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full
supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black,
amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for
morning have never longed for it more earnestly than I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and
unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tr