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202 mountains broke the outline of the horizon. Farther northward, Mount San Jacinto lifted his rugged form in a black mass against the sky; and northward, still the desert, in pulseless waves of ashes, minute sea-shells and yellow sand, stretched away for a hundred miles, like a stagnant, tideless sea, to where Mount San Gorgonio and Mount San Bernardino towered aloft in awful majesty—twin giants, grim and grand—at the gateway of this strange, wild, weird, mysterious land. Upon their sides, far above the yellow sands of the desert, belts of dark-hued piñon forests stretched upward to their crowns of white, disintegrated granite, which gleamed like snow-fields in the clear moonlight, contrasting like frosted silver against the sapphire sky, and seeming to be cut off and detached from the earth below—floating like aerial icebergs through the starlit sea of the heavens. In vain I looked and listened; sight or sound of life, save my own, there was none; the eternal silence of the desert rested like a pall on the scene. This stillness is something awful, beyond the power of words to describe. In the absence of all other sounds, save that of my own hushed breathing, the ticking of the watch in my pocket was so distinctly audible as to become painful to hear. The world in ruins lay around me, and though in it, I seemed not of it. "Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death," cried the Psalmist: lo, the Valley of the Shadow stretched out before my feet!

As the grey light, creeping sluggishly over the glacier mountains, announced the coming dawn, I limped