oppressive. If Jones had not begun to give a respectable
imitation of the exhaust pipe on a steamboat, I should have been
compelled to shout aloud, or get up; but this snoring would have
dispelled anything. The morning came gray and cheerless. I got up
stiff and sore, with a tongue like a rope.

All day long we ran the gauntlet of the hot, flying sand. Night
came again, a cold, windy night. I slept well until a mule
stepped on my bed, which was conducive to restlessness. At dawn,
cold, gray clouds tried to blot out the rosy east. I could hardly
get up. My lips were cracked; my tongue swollen to twice its
natural size; my eyes smarted and burned. The barrels and kegs of
water were exhausted. Holes that had been dug in the dry sand of
a dry streambed the night before in the morning yielded a scant
supply of muddy alkali water, which went to the horses.

Only twice that day did I rouse to anything resembling
enthusiasm. We came to a stretch of country showing the wonderful
diversity of the desert land. A long range of beautifully rounded
clay stones bordered the trail. So symmetrical were they that I
imagined them works of sculptors. Light blue, dark blue, clay
blue, marine blue, cobalt blue--every shade of blue was there,
but no other color. The other time that I awoke to sensations
from without was when we came to the top of a ridge. We had been
passing through red-lands. Jones called the place a strong,
specific word which really was illustrative of the heat amid
those scaling red ridges. We came out where the red changed
abruptly to gray. I seemed always to see things first, and I
cried out: "Look! here are a red lake and trees!"