ight,
and at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the
forty-five-mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the
imported water was. The sun was just rising. It was easy enough to
cross a desert in the night while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to
reflect, in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered an
absolute desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence
of the ignorant thenceforward. And it was pleasant also to reflect that
this was not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated one,
the metropolis itself, as you may say. All this was very well and very
comfortable and satisfactory--but now we were to cross a desert in
daylight. This was fine--novel--romantic--dramatically adventurous
--this, indeed, was worth living for, worth traveling for! We would
write home all about it.

This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry
August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little hour--and
then we were ashamed that we had "gushed" so. The poetry was all in the
anticipation--there is none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless
ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted
with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude
that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through
the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust
as if it were a bug that went by steam; imagine this aching monotony of
toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far
away as ever, apparently; imagine team, driver, coach and passengers so
deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color; imagine
ash-drifts roosting above moustaches and eyebrows like snow accumulations
on boughs and bushes. This is the reality of it.

The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the
perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a
sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets
there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a
merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a
living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank
level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a
sound--not a sigh--not a whisper--not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or
distant pipe of bird--n