The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface--it is absorbed before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound--not a sigh--not a whisper--not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of bird--not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air.And so the occasional sneezing of the resting mules, and the champing of the bits, grate harshly on the grim stillness, not dissipating the spell but accenting it and making one feel more lonesome and forsaken than before.
The mules, under violent swearing, coaxing and whip-cracking, would make at stated intervals a "spurt," and drag the coach a hundred or may be two hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back, enveloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher, and making it seem afloat in a fog.Then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and bit-champing.Then another "spurt" of a hundred yards and another rest at the end of it.All day long we kept this up, without water for the mules and without ever changing the team.At least we kept it up ten hours, which, I take it, is a day, and a pretty honest one, in an alkali desert.
It was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon.And it was so hot! and so close! and our water canteens went dry in the middle of the day and we got so thirsty! It was so stupid and tiresome and dull! and the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with such a cruel deliberation! It was so trying to give one's watch a good long undisturbed spell and then take it out and find that it had been fooling away the time and not trying to get ahead any! The alkali dust cut through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding--and truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality--a thirsty, sweltering, longing, hateful reality!
Two miles and a quarter an hour for ten hours--that was what we accomplished.It was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a snail-pace as that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles an hour.When we reached the station on the farther verge of the desert, we were glad, for the first time, that the dictionary was along, because we never could have found language to tell how glad we were, in any sort of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it.But there could not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three mile pull.To try to give the reader an idea of how thirsty they were, would be to "gild refined gold or paint the lily."Somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit--but no matter, let it stay, anyhow.I think it is a graceful and attractive thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where it would fit, but could not succeed.These efforts have kept my mind distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and disjointed, in places.Under these circumstances it seems to me best to leave it in, as above, since this will afford at least a temporary respite from the wear and tear of trying to "lead up" to this really apt and beautiful quotation.