Our march, no longer enlivened by merry stories or exciting narratives, had become wearisome in the extreme. The heavy fogs of the night and the great mist which arose at sunset prevented all possibility of tracing the path, which often required the greatest skill to detect, so that we were obliged to travel during the sultriest hours of the day, without a particle of shade, our feet scorched by the hot sands, and our heads constantly exposed to the risk of sunstroke. Water, too, became each day more difficult to obtain; the signs by which our guides discovered its vicinity seemed, to to me, at least, little short of miraculous; and yet if by any chance they made a mistake, the anger of the party rose so near to mutiny that nothing short of Halkett's own authority could restore order. Save in these altercations, without which rarely a day passed over, little was spoken; each trudged along either lost in vacuity or buried in his own thoughts.
CHAPTER XXIII. THE PLACER
As for myself, my dreamy temperament aided me greatly. I could build castles forever; and certainly there was no lack of ground here for the foundation. Sometimes I fancied myself suddenly become the possessor of immense riches, with which I should found a new colony in the very remotest regions of the West. I pictured to myself the village of my workmen, surrounded with its patches of cultivation in the midst of universal barrenness; the smiling aspect of civilized life in the very centre of barbarism; the smelting furnaces, the mills, the great refining factories, of which I had heard so much, all rose to my imagination, and my own princely abode looking down upon these evidences of my wealth.
Then, I fancied the influences of education diffusing themselves among the young, who grew up with tastes and habits so different from those of their fathers. How pursuits of refinement by degrees mingled themselves with daily requirements, till at last the silent forests would echo with the exciting strains of music, or the murmuring rivulet at nightfall would be accompanied by the recited verses of poetry.
The primitive simplicity of such a life as I then pictured was a perfect fascination; and when wearied with thinking of it by day, as I dropped asleep at night the thoughts would haunt my dreams unceasingly.
This castle-building temperament—which is, after all, nothing but hope engaged practically—may, when pushed too far, make a man dreamy, speculative, and visionary, but if restrained within any reasonable limits, cannot fail to support the courage in many an hour of trial, and nerve the heart against many a sore infliction. I know how it kept me up when others of very different thews and sinews were falling around me. Independently of this advantage, another and a greater one accompanied it. These self-created visions, however they may represent a man in a situation of greatness or power, always do so to exhibit him dispensing—what he imagines at least to be—the virtues of such a station! No one, I trust, ever fancied himself a monarch for the sake of all the cruelties he might inflict, and all the tyrannies he might practise; so that, in reality, this “sparring against Fortune with the gloves on” is admirable practice, if it be nothing else.
It was on the seventeenth day of our wanderings that the guide announced that we had struck into the Chihuahua “trail”; and although to our eyes nothing unusual or strange presented itself, Hermose exhibited signs of unmistakable pride and self-esteem. As I looked around me on the unvarying aspect of earth and sky, I could not help remembering my disappointment on a former occasion, when I heard of the “Banks of Newfoundland,” and fancied that the Chihuahua trail might have some such unseen existence as the redoubtable “Banks” aforesaid, which, however familiar to codfish, are seldom visited by Christians.
“The evening star will rise straight above our heads to-night,” said Hermose,—and he was correct; our path lay exactly in the very line with that bright orb. The confidence inspired by this prediction increased as we found that an occasional prickly pear-tree now presented itself, with, here and there, a dwarf-box or an acacia. As night closed in, we found ourselves on the skirt of what seemed a dense wood, bordered by the course of a dried-up torrent. A great wide “streak” of rocks and stones attested the force and extent of that river when filled by the mountain streams, but which now trickled along among the pebbles with scarcely strength enough to force its way. Hermose proceeded for some distance down into the bed of the torrent, and returned with a handful of sand and clay, which he presented to Halkett, saying, “The rains have not been heavy enough; this is last year's earth.”