Under other circumstances, I might have stayed to regard such a scene, though not to admire it. On that interminable waste, there was nought to be admired, not even sublimity; but no spectacle, however sublime, however beautiful, could have won from me a thought at that moment.
The trackers had already ridden far out, and were advancing, half concealed by the cloud of black “stoor” flung up from the heels of their horses.
For some distance, they moved straight on, without looking for the tracks of the steed. Before meeting the fire, they had traced them beyond the edge of the chapparal, and therefore knew the direction.
After a while, I observed them moving more slowly, with their eyes upon the ground as if they had lost it, I had doubts of their being able either to find or follow it now. The shallow hoof-prints would be filled with the débris of the burnt herbage—surely they could no longer be traced?
By myself, they could not, nor by a common man; but it seemed that to the eyes of those keen hunters, the trail was as conspicuous as ever. I saw that, after searching a few seconds, they had taken it up, and were once more moving along, guided by the tracks.
Some slight hollows I could perceive, distributed here and there over the ground, and scarcely distinguishable from the surrounding level. Certainly, without having been told what they were, I should not have known them to be the tracks of a horse.
It proved a wide prairie, and we seemed to be crossing its central part. The fire had spread far.
At one place, nearly midway, where the trail was faint, and difficult to make out, we stopped for a short while to give the trackers time. A momentary curiosity induced me to gaze around. Awful was the scene—awful without sublimity. Even the thorny chapparal no longer relieved the eye; the outline of its low shrubbery had sunk below the horizon; and on all sides stretched the charred plain up to the rim of the leaden canopy, black—black—illimitable. Had I been alone, I might easily have yielded to the fancy, that the world was dead.
Gazing over this vast opacity, I for a moment forgot my companions, and fell into a sort of lethargic stupor. I fancied that I too was dead or dreaming—I fancied that I was in hell—the Avernus of the ancients. In my youth, I had the misfortune to be well schooled in classic lore—to the neglect of studies more useful—and often in life have the poetical absurdities of Greek and Latin mythology intruded themselves upon my spirit—both asleep and awake. I fancied, therefore, that some well-meaning Anchises had introduced me to the regions below; and that the black plain before me was some landscape in the kingdom of Pluto. Reflection—had I been capable of that—would have convinced me of my error. No part of that monarch’s dominions can be so thinly peopled.
I was summoned to reason again by the voices of my followers. The lost trail had been found, and they were moving on.