Came the duration of darkness, and the slow-growing awareness of other things and of another self.  First of all, in this awareness, was dust.  It was in my nostrils, dry and acrid.  It was on my lips.  It coated my face, my hands, and especially was it noticeable on the finger-tips when touched by the ball of my thumb.

Next I was aware of ceaseless movement.  All that was about me lurched and oscillated.  There was jolt and jar, and I heard what I knew as a matter of course to be the grind of wheels on axles and the grate and clash of iron tyres against rock and sand.  And there came to me the jaded voices of men, in curse and snarl of slow-plodding, jaded animals.

I opened my eyes, that were inflamed with dust, and immediately fresh dust bit into them.  On the coarse blankets on which I lay the dust was half an inch thick.  Above me, through sifting dust, I saw an arched roof of lurching, swaying canvas, and myriads of dust motes descended heavily in the shafts of sunshine that entered through holes in the canvas.

I was a child, a boy of eight or nine, and I was weary, as was the woman, dusty-visaged and haggard, who sat up beside me and soothed a crying babe in her arms.  She was my mother; that I knew as a matter of course, just as I knew, when I glanced along the canvas tunnel of the wagon-top, that the shoulders of the man on the driver’s seat were the shoulders of my father.

When I started to crawl along the packed gear with which the wagon was laden my mother said in a tired and querulous voice, “Can’t you ever be still a minute, Jesse?”

That was my name, Jesse.  I did not know my surname, though I heard my mother call my father John.  I have a dim recollection of hearing, at one time or another, the other men address my father as Captain.  I knew that he was the leader of this company, and that his orders were obeyed by all.

I crawled out through the opening in the canvas and sat down beside my father on the seat.  The air was stifling with the dust that rose from the wagons and the many hoofs of the animals.  So thick was the dust that it was like mist or fog in the air, and the low sun shone through it dimly and with a bloody light.

Not alone was the light of this setting sun ominous, but everything about me seemed ominous—­the landscape, my father’s face, the fret of the babe in my mother’s arms that she could not still, the six horses my father drove that had continually to be urged and that were without any sign of colour, so heavily had the dust settled on them.

The landscape was an aching, eye-hurting desolation.  Low hills stretched endlessly away on every hand.  Here and there only on their slopes were occasional scrub growths of heat-parched brush.  For the most part the surface of the hills was naked-dry and composed of sand and rock.  Our way followed the sand-bottoms between the hills.  And the sand-bottoms were bare, save for spots of scrub, with here and there short tufts of dry and withered grass.  Water there was none, nor sign of water, except for washed gullies that told of ancient and torrential rains.