"We might as well eat lunch here and let 'em rest," he said.
There was no shade except the bit beside the wagon. We sat in that and leaned against the wheels. They would not move for Molly and Bill hung down their heads and the sweat streamed off them. The sand glittered with little particles of mica, which added to the glaring brightness. Toward the south the illusion of water appeared once more, not blue but a glassy gray with several strange-looking shrubs reflected in it upside down. There was nothing between us and the ranch to look so large, unless it were magnified like the stunted little bushes in the mirage at Silver Lake. The Worrier decided that these appearances could only be the palm trees, though they did not look in the least like palm trees nor could we see a sign of the green patch of the ranch. It is curious that we never saw Furnace Creek Ranch from any of the places where we had views of the valley, either before we had been there or afterwards, or while we were approaching or leaving it. It sprang from the earth by magic for our bewilderment and vanished the instant we went away.
That lunch-place was in the middle of Death Valley at the northern edge of the morass. Ever since coming down from the Keane Wonder Mine we had been below sea-level. Tradition has it that the lowest part of the valley is south of the Ranch, near the old Eagle Borax Works, but the bench-marks of the government's survey indicate that the part opposite the white and sulphur-colored hill by the borax-works which we had passed is the lowest. Two iron posts driven into the ground along the road had read respectively 253 and 257 feet below sea-level. The lowest point, 280 feet, was in the morass at our end of the valley not very far away. Whether being below sea-level has an effect or not we all suffered that day. The Worrier guessed the temperature at about 105 degrees, but said that it felt like 120 degrees at Silver Lake. The sun seemed to stand still in a hard sky. The heat rose solidly from the endless white sand, the vast glistening swamp and the metallic-looking mountains. We were in the midst of an immense movelessness, in a silence never to be broken.
After an hour's halt we started on again, Charlotte and I in the wagon, though we could hardly bear to be dragged through the heavy sand by that unhappy horse and mule. Even in the wagon our heads swam, the ground would not stay still under us, the sun seemed to drink every bit of moisture from our bodies so we burned in the heat instead of perspiring. The skin of our faces and hands felt dried up and as though it might chip off. We were blind and parched with thirst. The water in the canteens was hot and did not help us much. Molly and Bill kept trying to stop, and little stones the Worrier threw as he walked behind whizzed past our heads and thudded on their tired flanks. We had to fight the hope that they would stop for good and let us creep under the wagon and shut our eyes; but we never suggested doing it. "When you start you got to get there."
The Worrier himself suggested stopping two hours after lunch in the shade of a little grove of mesquites, though they were not much good as shade-trees. They were about ten feet high, each one with a little hummock of sand blown around its roots, and branches armed with long sharp thorns spreading close to the sand. We could not get under them, but for some reason they were more comforting than sitting beside the wagon.
"We'll stay until the sun gets above Tucki Mountain," he said. "We're getting along fine, if Molly and Bill don't lay down."
"Suppose they should lie down?"
"You'd stay by the wagon and I'd go back for help." He spoke cheerfully as though the idea of walking back over the burning sands was perfectly commonplace.
"I suppose you could walk out of the valley from anywhere?"