Towards noon he struck into a rude road--evidently the thoroughfare of the locality--and was surprised to find that it, as well as the adjacent soil wherever disturbed, was a deep Indian red.
Everywhere, along its sides, powdering the banks and boles of trees with its ruddy stain, in mounds and hillocks of piled dirt on the road, or in liquid paint-like pools, when a trickling stream had formed a gutter across it, there was always the same deep sanguinary color.

Once or twice it became more vivid in contrast with the white teeth of quartz that peeped through it from the hillside or crossed the road in crumbled strata.

One of those pieces Clarence picked up with a quickening pulse.
It was veined and streaked with shining mica and tiny glittering cubes of mineral that LOOKED like gold! The road now began to descend towards a winding stream, shrunken by drought and ditching, that glared dazzingly in the sunlight from its white bars of sand, or glistened in shining sheets and channels.

Along its banks, and even encroaching upon its bed, were scattered a few mud cabins, strange-looking wooden troughs and gutters, and here and there, glancing through the leaves, the white canvas of tents.

The stumps of felled trees and blackened spaces, as of recent fires, marked the stream on either side.