THE DESERT Much of the Old Overland Trail lay across the “Great American Desert,” as it was named in the earlier geographies. Irrigation and progressive energy have made these wastes in many instances literally to “blossom as the rose”; but until that was done these stretches were weary enough. He who knows only the desert of the geography naturally conceives it an absolutely forsaken and empty region where nothing but dust-storms are born unattended and die “without benefit of the clergy.” But the desert has character and is as variable as many another creature. THE SAND STORM An experience in an actual sand storm is food upon which the reminiscent may ruminate many a day, being much more pleasant in memory than in the making. First come the scurrying outriders, lithe and limber whisking gusts, dancing and whirling like Now for the fierce onset. Like blasts of a blizzard, the shrapnel of the desert is hurled into eyes, face, ears, and nostrils; little rivers pour down the back and fill every discoverable wrinkle and cranny of the clothing with their gritty load. If in summer, buttoning the clothing is suffocation, and the perspiration soon makes one a mass of grime; if in winter, it is The whole landscape is obliterated by and by, and the trails are so often drift-filled that unless one is himself accustomed to such methods of travel or has an experienced plainsman as his driver and guide, there is danger of becoming lost, or so out of the way that night may overtake him and compel a waterless camp for himself and team. TWILIGHT AND DAWN But to see the morning slip off its night clothes and step out into daylight, or watch day don her night-wraps and snuggle down into twilight on the quiet sand-ocean! In summer it is a scene of splendor, often coming after a day or an evening of sandy wrath. At early dawn, lining the eastern horizon, are the soft pencils of bashful day over-topping the jagged sawteeth of the yet sleeping mountains, fifty or more miles away. A faint hinting of the lightening of the sky only deepens the blackness of the The stubborn mountains begin to let the sun’s forerunning rays glide between them; the sky, now old gold, is fast transforming into kaleidoscopic crimsons and other reds, while the swift arms of the day-painter are reaching from between the peaks of the precipitous crags and dyeing the scales of the mackerel sky with hues and tints the rainbow would covet. In the opposite direction a morning mirage inverts an image of a stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds of the west, while the belated moon peers through the half-unreal corridors. SUNSET The sunset is far more gorgeous; it often reaches grandeur. Let it be a winter evening. A suggestion of storm has been playing threats. The western hills have reached up their time-toughened arms and carried the burnt-out lantern of day to bed, tucking him away in gold-lace tapestry and rose-tinted down. Then the blue, black, and brown clouds change quickly to purple, pink, and red by turns, and the opaline sky itself forms a background for the dissolving community of interlacing filaments of priceless filigree, till in time too full of interest to compute by measure, the whole heavens are aflame with a riotous orgy of color, a prodigality of shifting scene, making one think of the descriptions essayed by the writer of the Apocalypse. We think of Moses who wished to see God “face to face,” but was told he would be permitted to behold only the “dying away of his glory.” No wonder the man who was forty years in the wilderness before that grand exode, and forty more through the unsurveyed deserts, was enabled to write the majestic prose-poems |