“It is thirty, if an inch,” quietly remarked Lucien.
“Thirty!” exclaimed the others; “thirty miles! You are jesting, are you not? Why, I could almost lay my hand upon it!”
“That is a misconception of yours,” rejoined the philosopher. “You are both calculating distances, as you would in the low dense atmosphere of Louisiana. Remember you are now four thousand feet above the level of the sea, and surrounded by one of the purest and most translucent atmospheres in the world. Objects can be seen double the distance that you could see them on the banks of the Mississippi. That butte, which you think is only ten miles off, appears to me fifteen, or rather more; and I therefore calculate that it is at least thirty miles distant from the spot where we now are.”
“Impossible!” exclaimed Basil, eyeing the butte. “Why, I can see the seams of the rocks on its sides, and trees, I fancy, growing upon its top.”
“Well,” continued Lucien, “with all that you’ll find I am not far from the mark. But let us strike for it, since you wish it. We shall meet with water there, I suppose; take notice, however,—we’ll have to journey all day before reaching it; and we may consider ourselves fortunate if we get there before night-fall.”
Lucien’s prudence was not too great. On the contrary, it was not even sufficient for the occasion. This arose from his want of experience on the prairies. If either he or his brothers had had a little more of this, they would have hesitated before striking out so boldly, and leaving the water behind them. They would have known that, to make a long journey, without the certainty of finding water at the end of it, is a risk that even the old hunters themselves will seldom undertake. These, from experience, well know the danger of being without water on the prairies. They dread it more than grizzly bears, or panthers, or wolverines, or even hostile Indians. The fear of thirst is to them the greatest of all terrors.
Our young hunters felt but little of this fear. It is true they had, all of them, heard or read of the sufferings that prairie travellers sometimes endure from want of water. But people who live snugly at home, surrounded by springs, and wells, and streams, with cisterns, and reservoirs, and pipes, and hydrants, and jets, and fountains, playing at all times around them, are prone to underrate these sufferings; in fact, too prone, might I not say, to discredit everything that does not come under the sphere of their own observation? They will readily believe that their cat can open a door-latch, and their pig can be taught to play cards, and that their dog can do wonderful things, savouring of something more than instinct. But these same people will shake their heads incredulously, when I tell them that the opossum saves herself from an enemy by hanging suspended to the tree-branch by her tail, or that the big-horn will leap from a precipice lighting upon his horns, or that the red monkeys can bridge a stream by joining themselves to one another by their tails.
“Oh! nonsense!” they exclaim; “these things are too strange to be true.” And yet, when compared with the tricks their cat and dog can play, and even the little canary that flits about the drawing-room, do they seem either strange or improbable? The absent and distant are always regarded with wonder and incredulity; while familiar facts, in themselves far more wonderful, neither excite curiosity nor challenge credulity. Who now regards the startling phenomenon of the electric wire otherwise than as a simple truth easily comprehended? And yet there was a time—ah! there was a time—when to have proclaimed this truth would have rendered you or me ridiculous. There was a time, indeed, when it might have cost us our lives or our liberties. Remember Galileo!
I was saying, then, that people who live at home do not know what thirst is; for home is a place where there is always water. They cannot comprehend what it is to be in the desert without this necessary element. Ha! I know it; and I give you my word for it, it is a fearful thing.
Our young hunters had but a faint idea of its terrors. Hitherto their route had been through a well-watered region—scarcely ever running ten or a dozen miles without crossing some stream with timber upon it, which they could see a long way off, and thus guide themselves to the water; but they little understood the nature of the country that was now before them. They knew not that they were entering upon the desert plains—those vast arid steppes that slope up to the foots of the Rocky Mountains—the Cordilleras of the Northern Andes.