Chapter Seventy.
A Burnt Prairie.
The earth offers no aspect more drear and desolate than that of a burnt prairie. The ocean when its waves are grey—a blighted heath—a flat fenny country under a rapid thaw—all these impress the beholder with a feeling of chill monotony; but the water has motion, the heath, colour, and the half-thawed flat exhibits variety in its mottling of white and ground.
Not so the steppe that has been fired and burned. In this, the eye perceives neither colour, nor form, nor motion. It roams over the limitless level in search of one or other, but in vain; and in the absence of all three, it tires, and the heart grows cheerless and sick. Even the sky scarcely offers relief. It, too, by refraction from the black surface beneath, wears a dull livid aspect; or perhaps the eye, jaundiced by the reflection of the earth, beholds not the brightness of the heavens.
A prairie, when green, does not always glad the eye,—not even when enamelled with fairest flowers. I have crossed such plains, verdant or blooming to the utmost verge of vision, and longed for something to appear in sight—a rock, tree, a living creature—anything to relieve the universal sameness; just as the voyager on the ample ocean longs for ships, for cetaceae, or the sight of land, and is delighted with a nautilus, polypi, phosphorescence, or a floating weed.
Colour alone does not satisfy the sense. What hue more charming than the fresh verdure of the grassy plain? what more exquisite than the deep blue of the ocean? and yet the eye grows aweary of both! Even the “flower-prairie,” with its thousands of gay corollas of every tint and shade—with its golden helianthus, its white argemone, its purple cleome, its pink malvaceae, its blue lupin—its poppy worts of red and orange—even these fair tints grow tiresome to the sight, and the eye yearns for form and motion.
If so, what must be the prairie when divested of all these verdant and flowery charms—when burned to black ashes? It is difficult to conceive the aspect of dreary monotony it then presents—more difficult to describe it. Words will not paint such a scene.
And such presented itself to our eyes as we rode out from the chapparal. The fire was past—even the smoke had ceased to ascend—except in spots where the damp earth still reeked under the heat—but right and left, and far ahead, on to the very hem of the horizon, the surface was of one uniform hue, as if covered with a vast crape. There was nought of form to be seen, living or lifeless; there was neither life nor motion, even in the elements; all sounds had ceased: an awful stillness reigned above and around—the world seemed dead and shrouded in a vast sable pall!