foreground, mere accessories, irrelevant details. Beyond the
fine line of the horizons, over the curve of the globe, the
shoulder of the earth, were other ranches, equally vast, and
beyond these, others, and beyond these, still others, the
immensities multiplying, lengthening out vaster and vaster. The
whole gigantic sweep of the San Joaquin expanded, Titanic, before
the eye of the mind, flagellated with heat, quivering and
shimmering under the sun's red eye. At long intervals, a faint
breath of wind out of the south passed slowly over the levels of
the baked and empty earth, accentuating the silence, marking off
the stillness. It seemed to exhale from the land itself, a
prolonged sigh as of deep fatigue. It was the season after the
harvest, and the great earth, the mother, after its period of
reproduction, its pains of labour, delivered of the fruit of its
loins, slept the sleep of exhaustion, the infinite repose of the
colossus, benignant, eternal, strong, the nourisher of nations,
the feeder of an entire world.
Ha! there it was, his epic, his inspiration, his West, his
thundering progression of hexameters. A sudden uplift, a sense
of exhilaration, of physical exaltation appeared abruptly to
sweep Presley from his feet. As from a point high above the
world, he seemed to dominate a universe, a whole order of things.
He was dizzied, stunned, stupefied, his morbid supersensitive
mind reeling, drunk with the intoxication of mere immensity.
Stupendous ideas for which there were no names drove headlong
through his brain. Terrible, formless shapes, vague figures,
gigantic, monstrous, distorted, whirled at a gallop through his
imagination.

He started homeward, still in his dream, descending from the