bars running near the roof, and trailed on the
soft Axminster carpet. The temperature was carefully kept at 70
degrees. It was 29 degrees outside. Silence and freedom from jolting
were secured by double doors and windows, costly and ingenious
arrangements of springs and cushions, and a speed limited to eighteen
miles an hour.

As I lay down, the gallop under the dark pines, the frosty moon, the
forest fires, the flaring lights and roaring din of Truckee faded as
dreams fade, and eight hours later a pure, pink dawn divulged a level
blasted region, with grey sage brush growing out of a soil encrusted
with alkali, and bounded on either side by low glaring ridges. All
through that day we traveled under a cloudless sky over solitary
glaring plains, and stopped twice at solitary, glaring frame houses,
where coarse, greasy meals, infested by lazy flies, were provided at a
dollar per head. By evening we were running across the continent on a
bee line, and I sat for an hour on the rear platform of the rear car to
enjoy the wonderful beauty of the sunset and the atmosphere. Far as
one could see in the crystalline air there was nothing but desert. The
jagged Humboldt ranges flaming in the sunset, with snow in their
clefts, though forty-five miles off, looked within an easy canter. The
bright metal track, purpling like all else in the cool distance, was
all that linked one with Eastern or Western civilization.

The next morning, when the steward unceremoniously turned us out of our
berths soon after sunrise, we were running down upon the Great Salt
Lake, bounded by the white Wahsatch ranges. Along its shores, by means
of irrigation, Mormon industry has compelled the ground to yield fine
crops of hay and barley; and we passed several cabins, from which, even
at that early hour, Mormons, each with two or three wives, were going
forth to their day's work. The women were ugly, and their shapeless
blue dresses hideous. At the Mormon town of Ogden we changed cars, and
again traversed dusty plains, white and glaring, varied by muddy
streams and rough, arid valleys, now and then narrowing into canyons.
By common consent the windows were kept closed to exclude the fine
white alkaline dust, which is very irritating to the nostrils. The
journey became more and more wearisome as we ascended rapidly over
immense plains and wastes of gravel destitute of mountain boundaries,
and with only here and there a "knob" or "butte" [6] to br