But gradually our road bears away westward from the hills, leaving cultivation and cottages to follow the line of irrigation along their lower slopes, and while to our right the narrow-gauge line runs northward up into the Cache Valley, the granary of Utah, we trend away to the left. The northern end of the Salt Lake comes in sight, and the track running for a while close to its side gives me a last look at this sheet of wonderful water.
I was sorry to see the last of it, for I was sorry to leave Utah and the kind-hearted, simple, hard-working Mormon people. But the Lake gradually comes to a point, dwindles out into a marsh, and is gone, and as we speed away across levels of dreary alkaline ground, we can only recall its site by the wild duck streaming across to settle for the night in the reeds that grow by its edges.
Away from Mormon industry, the sage-brush flourishes like green bay-trees. To the east, the line of white-walled cottages speaks of a civilization which we are leaving behind us. To the west, the dreary mountains of Nevada already herald a region of barren desolation. And so the sun begins to set, and in the dim moth-time, as the mists begin to blur the outlines of Antelope Island in the Salt Lake, the small round-faced owls come out upon the railway fencing and chuckle to each other, and crossing the Bear River, all ruddy with the sunset, we see the night-hawks skimming the water in chase of the creatures of the twilight.
And so to Corinne, ghastly Corinne, a Gentile failure on the very skirts of Mormon success. It had once a great carrying-trade, for being at the terminus of the Utah Railway, Montana depended upon it for its supplies, and bitterly had Montana cause to regret it, for the Corinne freight-carriers (I wish I could remember their expressive slang name) seemed to think that railway enterprise must always terminate at Corinne, and so they carried just what they chose, at the price they chose, and when they chose. But the railway ran past them one fine day, and so now there is Corinne, stranded high and dry, as discreditable a settlement as ever men put together. Without any plan, treeless and roadless, the scattered hamlet of crazy-looking shanties stands half the year in drifting dust and half the year in sticky mud, and the Mormons point the finger of scorn at the place the Gentiles used to boast of. And Corinne seems to strike the keynote of the succeeding country, for cultivation ceases and habitations are not on the desolate plain we enter. And so to Promontory and then darkness.
We awake to find ourselves still in calamitous Nevada. What heaps of British gold have been sunk in those ugly hills in the hope of getting up American silver!
But here is Halleck, a government post, and soldiers from the barracks are lounging about in uniforms that make them look like butcher-boys, and with a drowsy gait that makes one suspect them to be burthened with the saddening load of yesterday's whisky. Then, after an interval of desert, we cross the Humboldt river, thick with the mud of melting snows, and, snaking across a plain warted over with ant-hills, arrive at Elko.
It is possible that Allah in his mercy may forgive Elko the offal which it put before us for breakfast. For myself, mere humanity forbids me to forgive it. But Elko was otherwise of interest. A waiter, very black, and, in proportion to his nigritude, insolent, had triumphed over my unconcealed disgust with my food. Yet I turned to him civilly and said, "Isn't there a warm spring here which is worth going to see?"
"No," said the negro, "our spring been burned up!"
"Burned up!" I exclaimed in astonishment; "the spring been burned up!"
"Yes," said the abominable one, "burned up. Everybody know dat."