Death Valley!  Far down and far away still, yet confounding at first sight!  I gazed spellbound.  It oppressed my heart.  Nielsen stood like a statue, silent, absorbed for a moment, then he strode on.  I followed, and every second saw more and different aspects, that could not, however, change the first stunning impression.  Immense, unreal, weird!  I went on down the widening canyon, looking into that changing void.  How full of color!  It smoked.  The traceries of streams or shining white washes brightened the floor of the long dark pit.  Patches and plains of white, borax flats or alkali, showed up like snow.  A red haze, sinister and sombre, hung over the eastern ramparts of this valley, and over the western drooped gray veils of rain, like thinnest lacy clouds, through which gleams of the sun shone.

Nielsen plodded on, mindful of our mules.  But I lingered, and at last checked my reluctant steps at an open high point with commanding and magnificent view.  As I did not attempt the impossible—­to write down thoughts and sensations—­afterward I could remember only a few.  How desolate and grand!  The far-away, lonely and terrible places of the earth were the most beautiful and elevating.  Life’s little day seemed so easy to understand, so pitiful.  As the sun began to set and the storm-clouds moved across it this wondrous scene darkened, changed every moment, brightened, grew full of luminous red light and then streaked by golden gleams.  The tips of the Panamint Mountains came out silver above the purple clouds.  At sunset the moment was glorious—­dark, forbidding, dim, weird, dismal, yet still tinged with gold.  Not like any other scene!  Dante’s Inferno!  Valley of Shadows!  Canyon of Purple Veils!

When the sun had set and all that upheaved and furrowed world of rock had received a mantle of gray, and a slumberous sulphurous ruddy haze slowly darkened to purple and black, then I realized more fully that I was looking down into Death Valley.

Twilight was stealing down when I caught up with Nielsen.  He had selected for our camp a protected nook near where the canyon floor bore some patches of sage, the stalks and roots of which would serve for firewood.  We unpacked, fed the mules some grain, pitched our little tent and made our bed all in short order.  But it was dark long before we had supper.  During the meal we talked a little, but afterward, when the chores were done, and the mules had become quiet, and the strange thick silence had settled down upon us, we did not talk at all.

The night was black, with sky mostly obscured by clouds.  A pale haze marked the west where the after glow had faded; in the south one radiant star crowned a mountain peak.  I strolled away in the darkness and sat down upon a stone.  How intense the silence!  Dead, vast, sepulchre-like, dreaming, waiting, a silence of ages, burdened with the history of the past, awful!  I strained my ears for sound of insect or rustle of sage or drop of weathered rock.  The soft cool desert wind was soundless.  This silence had something terrifying in it, making me a man alone on the earth.  The great spaces, the wild places as they had been millions of years before!  I seemed to divine how through them man might develop from savage to a god, and how alas! he might go back again.