Lying there I realized that I had come to love the silence, the loneliness, the serenity, even the tragedy of this valley of shadows.  Death Valley was one place that could never be popular with men.  It had been set apart for the hardy diggers for earthen treasure, and for the wanderers of the wastelands—­men who go forth to seek and to find and to face their souls.  Perhaps most of them found death.  But there was a death in life.  Desert travelers learned the secret that men lived too much in the world—­that in silence and loneliness and desolation there was something infinite, something hidden from the crowd.