Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/104

 t least, was as a glimpse of Eden to the damned; yet its stalk was dry and pithy, and gave no moisture to their lips.

The serpents, which had unwontedly found their way from the distant circum- ference of the valley, crawled wearily at its roots, as if anxious for the faint, almost invisible shadow which its plume mercifully spread on the alkalescent sands. A chuca-walla lay panting among the spines; and near it lay the green-striped lizard known as the "four-legged snake,'^ whose black-forked tongue curled as if in thirst from its baneful mouth. These, and the desert -rattler, are the formidable monarchs of the Great Death Valley.

This valley is hot the marvelous region of fiction, where human skulls lie grin- ning by the cold but poisoned waters of the desert-well; where the verdant oasis lets forth its mysterious monsters to devour the wanderer, or where the fabled "Octopus-vine," so vividly described by imaginative journalists, reaches out its vampire tentacles to grasp and hold the passing prospector in the clutch of death, while the fragrance of its soporific flowers soothes him to unconscious slumber. But at the time of which I speak, when the borax caravan had cut no road through the awful vastness of the valley; when the whip of the teamster and the curse of the swamper had never penetrated the oppressive stillness of the void; when only the reptiles and the sun, the sand and the silence, were holding their doomful sway in the Valley of Death, it was an arid hell more terrible in truth than the fancy of a Verne, or the^morbid imagination of a Poe, could in their wildest flights con- ceive or contemplate.

This afternoon, in the igneous glare of an August welkin, not even the swelter- ing breath of the red simoom, or the seething gyrations of the fierce sirocco, relieved the stinging, intolerable monotony of the heat and silence. To the west, where the valley broadened out into a sea of burning sand, the heat-waves rendered the at- mosphere almost impenetrable beyond a brief distance; but out of this veil of in- candescence two men could be seen slowly plodding their way in the direction of the Spanish Bayonet.

One of them — a tall, middle-aged man carrying two canteens and a heavy knapsack, and clad in a blue denim "jumper" with faded blue overalls — walked considerably in advance of his companion; and by his steady, measured walk and easy demeanor evinced that he was more accustomed to his surroundings — perhaps an old denizen of the American Sahara. He glanced neither to the right nor left, but trudged steadily, straightly for the shaft of yucca.

The man behind him, who was much younger, heavier, but not so tall, though similarly attired, seemed terribly fatigued, and dragged, rather than lifted, his feet through the deep, hot sand. It seemed that each step would be his last, and a rest- less, hunted, almost insane expression gleamed forth from his rolling, bloodshot eyes. He was quite stooped, but a rifle, strapped to his shoulder, and a belt of cartridges, were his only burdens. Anon, as he heaped some malignant oath upon his companion for thus forcing him to hurry, there was a metallic ring of hatred in his voice; yet his tongue and lips had now become so parched and swollen that he spoke with difficulty.

They were two prospectors — George Donaldson and James McNully, respect- ively — who less than a month before had started from Oro Grande in quest of a fabulously rich mine which a dying Mexican had claimed to have discovered in the central section of Death Valley. Before breathing his last the old Mexican had given them a map of the valley, on which was diagramed the location of the rich bonanza. And so, procuring four good mules and a load of water and provisions, they bLarted in search of the mine — two life-long friends, who from childhood up had shared each other's joys and sorrows. They had not anticipated the treach- erous difficulties of desert life, and the second week out, while slowly winding their way through the mouth of the fatal valley, a terrific sandstorm forced them to seek protection beneath the wagon.

Five days they remained helpless beneath the invincible attack of sand and wind, and when the storm was over three of their mules were dead, and one was