mountains, black and banded and water-channeled,
rose up in solid walls on both sides and, down through the middle as far
as the eye could see, there stretched a white ribbon, set in green. It
swung back and forth across a wide, level expanse, narrow and gleaming
with water at the north and blending in the south with gray sands. The
writhing white band was Death Valley Sink, where the waters from
countless desert ranges drained down and were sucked up by the sun. Far
from the north it came, when the season was right and the cloudbursts
swept the Grape-Vines and the White mountains; the Panamints to the west
gave down water from winter snows that gathered on Telescope Peak; and
every ravine of the somber Funeral Range was gutted by the rush of
forgotten waters.

The Valley was dry, bone-dry and desiccated, and yet every hill, every
gulch and wash and canyon, showed the action of torrential waters. The
chocolate-brown flanks of the towering mountain walls were creased, and
ripped out and worn; and from the mouth of every canyon a great spit of
sand and boulders had been spewed out and washed down towards the Sink.
On the surface of this wash, rising up through thousands of feet, the
tips of buried mountains peeped out like tiny hill-tops, yet black, and
sharp and grim. The great ranges themselves, sweeping up from the
profundity till they seemed to cut off the world, looked like molded
cakes of chocolate which had been rained on and half melted down. They
were washed-down, melted, stripped of earth and vegetation; and down
from their flanks in a steep, even slope, lay the debris and scourings
of centuries.

The westering sun caught the glint of water in the poisonous,
salt-marshes of the Sink; but, far to the south, the great ultimate
Sink of Sinks was a-gleam with borax and salt. It was there where the
white band widened out to a lake-bed, that men came in winter to do
their assessment work and scrape up the cotton-ball borax. But if any
were there now they would know him for a fugitive and he took the road
to the west. It ran over boulders, ground smooth by rolling floods and
burned deep brown by the sun, and as he twisted and turned, throwing
his weight against the wheels, Wiley felt the growing heat. His shirt
clung to his back, the sweat ran down his face and into his stinging
eyes and as he stopped for a drink he noticed that the water no longer
quenched his thirst. It was warm and flat and after each fresh drink