.
Plain opened out of plain in endless rotation, rings of sun-scorched
earth brushed up about the horizon in a low ridge like the raised rim on
a plate. In the distance the thin skein of a water course drew an
intricate pattern that made them think of the thread of slime left by a
wandering snail. In depressions where the soil was webbed with cracks, a
livid scurf broke out as if the face of the earth were scarred with the
traces of inextinguishable foulness. An even subdual of tint marked it
all. White had been mixed on the palette whence the colors were drawn.
The sky was opaque with it; it had thickened the red-browns and yellows
to ocher and pale shades of putty. Nothing moved and there were no
sounds, only the wheeling sun changed the course of the shadows. In the
morning they slanted from the hills behind, eagerly stretching after the
train, straining to overtake and hold it, a living plaything in this
abandoned land. At midday a blot of black lay at the root of every sage
brush. At evening each filigreed ridge, each solitary cone rising
detached in the sealike circle of its loneliness, showed a slant of
amethyst at its base, growing longer and finer, tapering prodigiously,
and turning purple as the earth turned orange.

There was little speech in the moving caravan. With each day their words
grew fewer, their laughter and light talk dwindled. Gradual changes had
crept into the spirit of the party. Accumulations of habit and custom
that had collected upon them in the dense life of towns were dropping
away. As the surface refinements of language were dying, so their faces
had lost a certain facile play of expression. Delicate nuances of
feeling no longer showed, for they no longer existed. Smiles had grown
rarer, and harder characteristics were molding their features into
sterner lines. The acquired deceptiveness of the world of men was
leaving them. Ugly things that they once would have hidden cropped out
unchecked by pride or fear of censure. They did not care. There was no
standard, there was no public opinion. Life was resolving itself into a
few great needs that drove out all lesser and more delicate desires.
Beings of a ruder make were usurping their bodies. The primitive man in
them was rising to meet the primitive world.

In the young girl the process of elimination was as rapid if not as
radical as in the case of the men. She was unconsciously ridding herself
of all that hampered and