nto a flat basin, surrounded by the
weird hills--a grotesque, wind-carved amphitheater, admirably suited for
a witches' orgy. Some bleached bison heads with horns lay scattered
about the place, and a cluster of soapweeds grew there--God knows how!
They thrust their sere yellow sword-blades skyward with the pitiful
defiance of desperate things. It seemed natural enough that something
should be dead in this sepulcher; but the living weeds, fighting
bitterly for life, seemed out of place.

I looked about and thought of Poe. Surely just beyond those summits
where the melancholy sky touched the melancholy hills, one would come
upon the "dank tarn of Auber" and the "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

We gathered a quantity of the dry sword-bladed soapweeds, and with one
of the blankets made a lean-to shelter against the steep hillside. The
place was becoming eerie in the gray evening that spread slowly over the
dead land. The mist driven by the moaning wind became a melancholy
drizzle. We dragged the soapweeds under cover and lit a fire with
difficulty. It was a half-hearted, smudgy, cheerless fire.

And then the night fell--tremendous, overpowering night! The Kid and I,
huddled close in one blanket, thrust our heads out from under the
shelter and watched the ghastly world leap by fits out of the dark, when
the sheet lightning flared through the drizzle. It gave one an odd
shivery feeling. It was as though one groped about a strange dark room
and saw, for a brief moment in the spurting glow of a wind-blown
sulphur match, the staring face of a dead man. Over us the great wind
groaned. Water dripped through the blanket--like tears. We scraped the
last damp ends of the weeds together that the fire might live a little
longer. Byron's poem came back to me with a new force; and lying on my
stomach in the cheerless drip before a drowning fire, I chanted snatches
of it aloud to the Kid and to that sinister personality that was the
Night.

I had a dream which was not all a dream;
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in eternal space,
Rayless and pathless; and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.

Low thunder shook the ink-sopped night--I thought of it as the Spirit of
Byron applauding his own terrific lines.

A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling