The Colonel turned the letter over, eying it. The heaviness of his spirit was lightened. Through the few lines he seemed to feel the strong grip of the mining man’s hand, to meet the searching look of his keen, honest eyes. They would all be together in Virginia—not such a bad beginning for a new life at sixty.
END OF BOOK II
BOOK III
THE DESERT
CHAPTER I
NEVADA
The mountain wall of the Sierra bounds California on its eastern side. It is a rampart, towering and impregnable, between the garden and the desert. From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast, pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, lies California, the garden. On the other side—gaunt, hostile, gray—is Nevada, the desert.
In other lands nature and man have ended their struggle for supremacy. Man has conquered and nature, after long years of service, is glad to work for him, to quicken the seed he sows, to swell the fruit on the branch, and ripen the heads of grain. She laps him round with comfort, whispers her secrets to him, reveals herself in sweet, sylvan intercourse. And he, cosily content, knows her as his loving slave, no more rebellious, happy to serve.
But in Nevada, nature is still unconquered, savage and supreme. It is the primordial world, with man a shivering stranger amid its grim aloofness. When the voice of God went out into the darkness and said, “Let there be light,” the startled life, cowering in caves and beneath rocks, may have looked out on such a land—an unwatered waste, treeless, flowerless, held in an immemorial silence.
Man as we know him has no place here. He is a speck moving between the dome of sky and the floor of earth. Nature scorns him, has watched him die and whitened his bones in a few blazing weeks. The seed he plants withers in its kernel, the earth he turns up, frosted with alkali, drops apart in livid flakes. The rare rivers by which he pitches his tent are sucked into the soil, as though grudging him the few drops with which he cools his burning throat. An outcast from a later age he is an intruder here. These solemn wastes and eternal hills have not yet learned to call him master.
When the pioneers trailed across it, Nevada was to them only “the desert,” a place where the horrors of heat and thirst culminated. They knew it as a sterile, gray expanse, breaking here and there into parched bareness, and with lines of lilac-blue or reddish-purple hills seeming to march with them as they moved. From high places they saw it outspread like a map, its surface stippled with sage and the long green ribbon of a tree-fringed river looping across its grim aridity. At evening it took on limpid, gem-like colors. The hills turned transparent sapphire and amethyst, the sky burned a thin, clear red. An unbroken stillness lay upon it and struck chill on the hearts of the little bands who, oppressed by its vast indifference, cowered beneath its remote, unfamiliar stars.
As they passed across it they mined a little; here and there they scraped the surface, clustered round a stream-bed for a day or two and sent the water circling in their pans. But California, the land of promise, was their goal. With the western sun in their eyes they looked at the mountain wall and spoke of the Eldorado beyond where the gold lay yellow in the sluice box, and flecked with glittering flakes the prospector’s pan.