Sometimes, in an island of higher ground, the white-columned house of a sugar-planter gleamed, and near it rose mammoth live oaks, huge tumuli of green, the underbranches swaying with grizzled moss. In the open country, such trees crouched low above stealthy creeks, or blotted widening lagoons.
While in the city, they had read and heard of recent heavy rains to the West, flooding a wide agricultural district. On the borderland of Texas, they knew they had reached the threatened fields. Cypress, magnolia, sweet gum, and bay trees stood knee deep in a sea of dull chrome, churned from roads of clay. It seemed a lake of yellow onyx. Between the trunks writhed a tropical disorder of vines, palmetto, and undergrowth. In wide, clear spaces, drifting fence rails or half-submerged buildings told of ruin already accomplished. Now the whole unstable sea was covered by a carpet of the floating "water-hyacinth," which, in later months, was to turn the bayous and lagoons into veins of amethyst. It seemed incredible to the little party, staring solemnly from train windows, that they were in temperate America at all. Every floating spar of wood became an alligator's head, every springing tuft of white swamp flower a meditative stork.
Night fell swiftly upon the watery forest, sucked down into it as to a familiar lair. With the next morning, the world had changed to a dry desert, above which arched an unrelated sky.
"Can we really be on the same planet?" asked Gwendolen; "or in the night, did this little measuring-worm of a train reach up and pull itself to Mars?"
Before, behind, everywhere, stretched spaces of exhausted gray sand, rising now and again into nerveless hills. For vegetation were set innumerable rosettes of the spiked yucca, with small heaps of the prickly pear, a cactus bush built up of fleshy bulbs, leaf out of leaf, like inflated green coral. On some of the thorny ridges perched star-like, yellow blooms. On others were stuck thick, purple fingers, known politely by the name of "figs." Dodge remarked sententiously that it was a very interesting plant; though, by raisers of cattle, not considered desirable. "Stock won't eat it a little bit," he explained cherubically. "Get stickers into their noses."
"Do you call that thing a plant?" cried Gwendolen, pointing. "It may grow, but it is no more a plant than a canary is a crab."
Dodge smiled again, the irritating smile of the well-informed. "Wait till to-morrow in Arizona, if you want to know how it feels to be struck dumb."
Gwendolen tossed her head. Her tendency during these initial days was to overact indifference.
"I rather think I shall not undergo the humiliation of incapacity to speak! Life heretofore has brought no crises in which I could not command a fairly adequate linguistic expression of my visual experiences."
"Whew,—how did you remember it all?" said Dodge under his breath. Yuki turned her intense face from the window. At sight of the absorbed, half-dazed expression, Gwendolen gave a little laugh, crying, "Here is one already nearing the borders of silence! That is Yuki's way. When she begins to feel things, she draws back in her shell, and puts sealing-wax on the door. What is it now, Yuki,—lack of English,—that keeps you so dumb?"