Chapter XIV

A Picture

A hundred miles west from the shack,
stretching away from it in an almost unbroken
expanse, was a desert within the desert.
Amole and sagebrush and cactus vied with each
other to relieve the dead, flat, monotonous brown.
Without movement anywhere, save for the heatwaves
ascending, this expanse presented an unutterably
drear and lonesome aspect. It terminated,
or partly terminated -- swerving off into the
south beyond -- in a long sand-dune running northeast
and southwest. This mighty roll lay brooding,
as did the world-old expanse fringing it, in
the silence of late morning. Overhead a turquoise
sky, low, spotless, likewise brooding, dipped down
gracefully to the horizon around -- a horizon like
an immense girdle, a girdle which, as one journeyed
along, seemed to accompany him, rapidly
if he moved rapidly, slowly if he moved slowly -- ?
an immense circle of which he was the center.
The sun was glaring, and revealed here and there
out of the drifts a bleached skeleton, mutely proclaiming
the sun as overlord, while over all,
around and about and within this throbbing furnace,
there seemed to lurk a voice, a voice of but
a softly lisped word -- solitude.

[[172]]

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