The windings of the ravine soon hid us from the river, and we found ourselves in a melancholy world, without life and without any human significance. It was very easy to imagine one's self lost amid the drear ashen craters of the moon. We pushed on up the creek, kicking up clouds of alkali dust as we went. A creek of a burnt-out hell it was, to be sure. It seemed almost blasphemous to call this arid gully a creek. Boys swim in creeks, and fishes twinkle over the shallows where the sweet eager waters make a merry sound. Creek, indeed! Did a cynic name this dry ragged gash in the midst of a bleak black world where nothing lived, where never laughter sounded?
A seething, fiery ooze might have flowed there once, but surely never did water make music there.
We pushed on five or six miles, and the evening shade began to press in about us. At last we issued forth into a flat basin, surrounded by the weird hills—a grotesque, wind-carved amphitheater, admirably suited for a witches' orgy. Some bleached bison heads with horns lay scattered about the place, and a cluster of soapweeds grew there—God knows how! They thrust their sere yellow sword-blades skyward with the pitiful defiance of desperate things. It seemed natural enough that something should be dead in this sepulcher; but the living weeds, fighting bitterly for life, seemed out of place.
I looked about and thought of Poe. Surely just beyond those summits where the melancholy sky touched the melancholy hills, one would come upon the "dank tarn of Auber" and the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
We gathered a quantity of the dry sword-bladed soapweeds, and with one of the blankets made a lean-to shelter against the steep hillside. The place was becoming eerie in the gray evening that spread slowly over the dead land. The mist driven by the moaning wind became a melancholy drizzle. We dragged the soapweeds under cover and lit a fire with difficulty. It was a half-hearted, smudgy, cheerless fire.
And then the night fell—tremendous, overpowering night! The Kid and I, huddled close in one blanket, thrust our heads out from under the shelter and watched the ghastly world leap by fits out of the dark, when the sheet lightning flared through the drizzle. It gave one an odd shivery feeling. It was as though one groped about a strange dark room and saw, for a brief moment in the spurting glow of a wind-blown sulphur match, the staring face of a dead man. Over us the great wind groaned. Water dripped through the blanket—like tears. We scraped the last damp ends of the weeds together that the fire might live a little longer. Byron's poem came back to me with a new force; and lying on my stomach in the cheerless drip before a drowning fire, I chanted snatches of it aloud to the Kid and to that sinister personality that was the Night.
I had a dream which was not all a dream;
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in eternal space,
Rayless and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.
Low thunder shook the ink-sopped night—I thought of it as the Spirit of Byron applauding his own terrific lines.