An hour's easy ride would carry him to a region as barren and apparently as irreclaimable as that through which Childe Roland journeyed in quest of the Dark Tower; lying, too, in a temperature so fiery that it coagulated the blood in the veins, and stopped the beating of the heart.

Underfoot were fine dust, and whitened bones; the air was prismatic and magical, ever conjuring up phantom pictures, whose characteristic was that they were at the farthest remove from any possible reality.

The azure sky descended and became a lake; the pulsations of the atmosphere translated themselves into the rhythmic lapse of waves; spikes of sage-brush and blades of cactus became sylvan glades, and hamlets cheerful with inhabitants.

Only, all was silent; and as you drew near, the scene trembled, altered, and was gone! Hideous black lizards and horned toads crawl and hop amid this desolation; and the deadly little sidewinder rattlesnake lies basking in the blaze of sunshine, which it distils into venom.

Sometimes the level plain is broken up into savage ridges and awful canons, along whose arid bottoms no water streams.