or with no orders at all. They rode on across the
desert within the desert, presenting three-quarter
profile, then, with an hour passing, full profile,
then, with another hour passing, quarter profile,
and now, with yet another hour passing, five
agreeable backs -- broad, most of them, all topped
with sombreros, and all motionless save for the
movement of their mounts. On and on they rode
into the south, underneath a blistering sun at
full zenith. They became mere dots again upon
the pulsating horizon, mere specks, and disappeared
in the shimmering haze.

Solitude, the voice of solitude, the death-stillness,
throbbing silence, reigned once more. Not
an animal, not an insect, not a tree, struck the
eye. The arid and level floor was again clean of
movement. The sun glared, revealing here and
there out of the drifts a bleached skeleton, in this
speechless thing mutely proclaiming its own sway.
Beneath the sun the horizon, an immense girdle,
swept round in unbroken line, pulsating. The
turquoise sky hung low, spotless and shimmering,
brooding, dipping smoothly down to the horizon
and to the long sand-dune running to northeast
and southwest. Skirting this dune, reaching to
it out of the east, then swerving off to the south
beyond, lay the almost unbroken expanse, the
desert within the desert, its dead, flat, monotonous
brown relieved here and there with alternating
sagebrush and cactus and amole, stretching back
a distance of a hundred miles to the shack.

[[174]]

p173 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p174w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p175

v?