Page:A La California.djvu/249

Rh There is nothing more picturesque than a caravan on the desert—when seen in a picture, when you sit comfortably at home in a civilized country. Believe me, beloved of my heart, 'tis indeed distance lends enchantment to the view. That expression is, I believe, not wholly original. I have a dim recollection of having-heard or read something similar once or twice before—but it is very neat and very appropriate, and I crib it accordingly.

Higher and higher climbed the sun into the un-clouded, copper-hued sky, and hotter and hotter grew the motionless desert air, until the point where breathing would become an impossibility, and the whole apparatus must catch fire and burn up, seemed almost reached. The treeless mountains which shut in this desert basin on all sides, keep out at this season every breath of life-giving breeze, and the sun pouring into it, as into an old-fashioned tin bake-oven, makes everything fairly hiss with the all-consuming heat. Mile after mile I plodded on, leaving Noble and his exhausted horse far behind, the heat and thirst becoming more nearly intolerable at every step.

And now in the distance, along the western edge of the valley, arose great pillars of smoke—thin, and straight, and slender—to a vast height; then spreading outward into the semblance of wide-limbed trees, whose roots were firmly planted in the earth, whose giant trunks rose in the middle air, and whose branches filled all the heavens above. Toward these pillars of smoke I bent my weary steps; and at last, just as it seemed that my bleeding feet would bear me no further,