第19章

After that it was not so bad.The thermometer stood from a hundred to a hundred and five or six, to be sure, but we were getting used to it.Discomfort, ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept as the normal environment of man.It is astonishing how soon uniformly uncomfortable conditions, by very lack of contrast, do lose their power to color the habit of mind.I imagine merely physical unhappiness is a matter more of contrasts than of actual circumstances.We swallowed dust; we humped our shoulders philosophically under the beating of the sun, we breathed the debris of high winds; we cooked anyhow, ate anything, spent long idle fly-infested hours waiting for the noon to pass; we slept in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind stables, in hay, anywhere.There was little water, less wood for the cooking.

It is now all confused, an impression of events with out sequence, a mass of little prominent purposeless things like rock conglomerate.I remember leaning my elbows on a low window-ledge and watching a poker game going on in the room of a dive.The light came from a sickly suspended lamp.It fell on five players,--two miners in their shirt-sleeves, a Mexican, a tough youth with side-tilted derby hat, and a fat gorgeously dressed Chinaman.The men held their cards close to their bodies, and wagered in silence.Slowly and regularly the great drops of sweat gathered on their faces.As regularly they raised the backs of their hands to wipe them away.Only the Chinaman, broad-faced, calm, impassive as Buddha, save for a little crafty smile in one corner of his eye, seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool as autumn.

His loose sleeve fell back from his forearm when he moved his hand forward, laying his bets.A jade bracelet slipped back and forth as smoothly as on yellow ivory.

Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea of liquid black, and the sky blazed with stars, we rode by a sheep-herder's camp.The flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark.A tall wagon, a group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely within the circle of illumination.

And outside, in the penumbra of shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness, were the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious thousands into the mass of night.We passed them.They looked up, squinting their eyes against the dazzle of their fire.The night closed about us again.

Or still another: in the glare of broad noon, after a hot and trying day, a little inn kept by a French couple.And there, in the very middle of the Inferno, was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a meal such as one gets in rural France, all complete, with the potage, the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout, the chicken and salad, the cheese and the black coffee, even the vin ordinaire.I have forgotten the name of the place, its location on the map, the name of its people,--one has little to do with detail in the Inferno,--but that dinner never will I forget, any more than the Tenderfoot will forget his first sight of water the day when the Desert "held us up."Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward.We, souls struggling, saw great mountains and the whiteness of eternal snow.That noon we crossed a river, hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its current came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien from the high country.

These things should have been as signs to our jaded spirits that we were nearly at the end of our penance, but discipline had seared over our souls, and we rode on unknowing.

Then we came on a real indication.It did not amount to much.Merely a dry river-bed; but the farther bank, instead of being flat, cut into a low swell of land.We skirted it.Another swell of land, like the sullen after-heave of a storm, lay in our way.

Then we crossed a ravine.It was not much of a ravine; in fact it was more like a slight gouge in the flatness of the country.After that we began to see oak-trees, scattered at rare intervals.So interested were we in them that we did not notice rocks beginning to outcrop through the soil until they had become numerous enough to be a feature of the landscape.The hills, gently, quietly, without abrupt transition, almost as though they feared to awaken our alarm by too abrupt movement of growth, glided from little swells to bigger swells.The oaks gathered closer together.The ravine's brother could almost be called a canon.The character of the country had entirely changed.

And yet, so gradually had this change come about that we did not awaken to a full realization of our escape.To us it was still the plain, a trifle modified by local peculiarity, but presently to resume its wonted aspect.We plodded on dully, anodyned with the desert patience.

But at a little before noon, as we rounded the cheek of a slope, we encountered an errant current of air.

It came up to us curiously, touched us each in turn, and went on.The warm furnace heat drew in on us again.But it had been a cool little current of air, with something of the sweetness of pines and water and snow-banks in it.The Tenderfoot suddenly reined in his horse and looked about him.

"Boys!" he cried, a new ring of joy in his voice, "we're in the foot-hills!"Wes calculated rapidly."It's the eighth day to-day: I guessed right on the time."We stretched our arms and looked about us.They were dry brown hills enough; but they were hills, and they had trees on them, and canons in them, so to our eyes, wearied with flatness, they seemed wonderful.