three miles an hour of the pack-train drove
us frantic. There were times when it seemed that unless we shifted our
gait, unless we stepped outside the slow strain of patience to which
the Inferno held us relentlessly, we should lose our minds and run
round and round in circles--as people often do, in the desert.

And when the last and most formidable hundred yards had slunk sullenly
behind us to insignificance, and we had dared let our minds relax from
the insistent need of self-control--then, beyond the cotton-woods, or
creek-bed, or group of buildings, whichever it might be, we made out
another, remote as paradise, to which we must gain by sunset. So again
the wagon-trail, with its white choking dust, its staggering sun, its
miles made up of monotonous inches, each clutching for a man's sanity.

We sang everything we knew; we told stories; we rode cross-saddle,
sidewise, erect, slouching; we walked and led our horses; we shook the
powder of years from old worn jokes, conundrums, and puzzles,--and at
the end, in spite of our best efforts, we fell to morose silence and
the red-eyed vindictive contemplation of the objective point that would
not seem to come nearer.

For now we lost accurate sense of time. At first it had been merely a
question of going in at one side of eight days, pressing through them,
and coming out on the other side. Then the eight days would be behind
us. But once we had entered that enchanted period, we found ourselves
more deeply involved. The seemingly limited area spread with startling
swiftness to the very horizon. Abruptly it was borne in on us that
this was never going to end; just as now for the first time we realized
that it had begun infinite ages ago. We were caught in the
entanglement of days. The Coast Ranges were the experiences of a past
incarnation: the Mountains were a myth.

Nothing was real but this; and this would endure forever. We plodded
on because somehow it was part of the great plan that we should do so.
Not that it did any good:--we had long since given up such ideas. The
illusion was very real; perhaps it was the anodyne mercifully
administered to those who pass through the Inferno.

Most of the time we got on well enough. One day, only, the Desert
showed her power. That day, at five of the afternoon, it was one
hundred and twenty degrees in the shade. And we, through necessity of
reaching the next water, journeyed over the alkali at noon. Then the
Dese