CHAPTER III


The world was palpably a triangle, baseless to southward; walled out by
iron, radiant ramparts--a black range, gateless, on the east; a gray
range on the west, broken, spiked, and bristling. At the northern limit
of vision the two ranges closed together to what seemed relatively the
sharp apex of the triangle, the mere intersection of two lines. This
point, this seemingly dimensionless dot, was in reality two score weary
miles of sandhills, shapeless, vague, and low; waterless, colorless,
and forlorn. Southward the central desert was uninhabitable; opinions
differed about the edges.

Still in Arizona, the eye wearied; miles and leagues slid together to
indistinguishable inches. Then came a low line of scattered hills that
roughly marked the Mexican border.

The mirage played whimsical pranks with these outpost hills. They became,
in turn, cones, pyramids, boxes, benches, chimney stacks, hourglasses.
Sometimes they soared high in air, like the kites of a baby god; and,
beneath, the unbroken desert stretched afar, wavering, misty, and dim.

Again, on clear, still days, these hills showed crystalline, thin, icy,
cameo-sharp; beyond, between, faint golden splotches of broad Sonoran
plain faded away to nothingness; and, far beyond that nothingness, hazy
Sonoran peaks of dimmest blue rose from illimitable immensities, like
topmasts of a very large ship on a very small globe; and the earth was
really round, as alleged.