Locked in this bedlam of crazed strata, unable to see or guess a way out of it, the wanderers fell asleep.  There was no setting of guards; they trusted to the desert as a sentinel.

At daylight the blind and wearisome climbing recommenced.  Occasionally they found patches of thin turf and clumps of dwarf cedars struggling with the rocky waste.  These bits of greenery were not the harbingers of a new empire of vegetation, but the remnants of one whose glory had vanished ages ago, swept away by a vandalism of waters.  Gradually the canon dwindled to a ravine, narrow, sinuous, walled in by stony steeps or slopes, and interlocking continually with other similar chasms.  A creek, which followed the chasm, appeared and disappeared at intervals of a mile or so, as if horrified at the face of nature and anxious to hide from it in subterranean recesses.

The travellers stumbled on until the ravine became a gully and the gully a fissure.  They stepped out of it; they were on the rolling surface of the tableland; they were half a mile above the Colorado.

Here they halted, gave three cheers, and then looked back upon the northern desert as men look who have escaped an enemy.  A gigantic panorama of the country which they had traversed was unrolled to their vision.  In the foreground stretched declining tablelands, intersected by numberless ravines, and beyond these a lofty line of bluffs marked the edge of the Great Canon of the Colorado.  Through one wide gap in these heights came a vision of endless plateaux, their terraces towering one above another until they were thousands of feet in the air, the horizontal azure bands extending hundreds of miles northward, until the deep blue faded into a lighter blue, and that into the sapphire of the heavens.

“It looks a darned sight finer than it is,” observed Glover.

“Bedad, ye may say that,” added Sweeny.  “It’s a big hippycrit av a counthry.  Ye’d think, to luk at it, ye could ate it wid a spoon.”

Now came a rolling region, covered with blue grass and dotted with groves of cedars, the earth generally hard and smooth and the marching easy.  Striking southward, they reached a point where the plateau culminated in a low ridge, and saw before them a long gentle slope of ten miles, then a system of rounded hills, and then mountains.

“Halt here,” said Thurstane.  “We must study our topography and fix on our line of march.”

“You’ll hev to figger it,” replied Glover.  “I don’t know nothin’ in this part o’ the world.”

“Ye ain’t called on to know,” put in Sweeny.  “The liftinant’ll tell ye.”

“I think,” hesitated Thurstane, “that we are about fifty miles north of Cactus Pass, where we want to strike the trail.”

“And I’m putty nigh played out,” groaned Glover.

“Och! you howld up yer crazy head,” exhorted Sweeny.  “It’ll do ye iver so much good.”

“It’s easy talkin’,” sighed the jaded and rheumatic skipper.