Barlow, compass in hand, got his bearings.

The devil's own he had named this country from afar; the devil's own it
extended itself, naked and dry and desolate before their questing eyes,
a weary land, sun-smitten, broken, looking deserted of God and man. As
far as they could see there were no trees, little growth of any kind,
no birds, no grazing beasts. Just swell after swell of arid lands,
here and there cut by ancient gorges, tumbled over by heaps of black
rocks, swept clean of dust on the high places by racing winds, piled
high with sand and small stones in the depressions. Where growing
things thrust up their heads, they were the harsh, fanged and envenomed
growth of desert places. The place had an air of unholiness in the
light of the new day. A thorn, as Barlow turned carelessly, tore the
skin on the back of his hand painfully. The parent stem had an evil
look and he cursed it as though it had been a conscious malign agent,
and struck at it with his clubbed rifle. From the place where the
branch was wrenched away exuded a slow red sticky ooze like coagulating
blood.

"There's our course," announced Barlow, pointing, "with half a dozen
hours of damned unpleasant walking, according to poor old Juarez. See
those three peaks, standing up together? We bear a little off to the
south for a spell and then straight toward 'em. And never a spring
until we get there! Look out you don't poke a hole in your canteen."

"Ready," said Jim. "Let's go."

They went on. Now that a new phase had come into their quest, with the
days of distant speculation giving place to action on the ground, a
certain difference of character was manifest in the two men. A growing
taciturnity, accompanied by deep frowning thoughtfulness, locked
Barlow's lips, while Kendric, to whom any such experience was always
primarily a lark, expanded and mounted steadily to fresh stages of
lightheartedness. It mattered less to him than to his companion what
might lie at the end of their journey; the journey itself was with Jim
Kendric the golden thing. He felt alive, jubilant, keenly in sympathy
with the lure and zest of the expedition. He felt like singing, would
no doubt have sung out in some wild border ballad or bit of deep sea
melody with a piratical swing to it, had he not been half the time
fairly breathless from the pace they maintained over the broken country.

In a couple of hours they left behind them the worst of the gorges and