A Terrible Experience [pp. 16-26]

A Terrible Experience.
There was little to mark the day's advance.
We descended the mountains, and entered
upon a great desert, grayish white in appear ance, throwing up an unbearable glare to the
unprotected eye. The only growth was sage brush, hardly different in tint from the alkali
dust, the tract extendingunbrokenly for miles,
inhabited by no living creature.
Our provisions were ample for our jour ney, but for water we depended upon a well,
situated in a little oasis which we reached at
the end of our second day's travel over the
desert.
About this time my enthusiasm concern ing our mining enterprise had begun to wane;
the strain of the ride over the desert, unac customed as I was to the saddle, the terrible
solitude of the place, its distance from civil ization, all combined to destroy the rosy hue
with which I had surveyed my prospects. A
visible change had also come over my friend;
his talkativeness and brilliancy had faded
away. He was a changed man; he appeared
older, sterner, even a little morose.
The fifth night out, we camped near the
well, surrounded by a patch of greenish grass,
and here, in the death-like stillness which
pervaded the place, my friend, following his
curious and persistent habit, cooked his din ner fifteen yards away from minre.
The aspect of the country had changed
somewhat-still a desert, but a curious one.
Not far to the left of us extended a range of
mountains so peculiar and weird in their construction, that their memory will haunt me
to my dying day. Of the same chalky appearance as their surroundings, they were
twisted, wrinkled, seamed as if in some terrible convulsion of Nature. Conical in shape,
they reared their snowy heads up into the
clear blue cloudless sky, standing like ghastly
monuments of one knew not what-suggesting the burnt-out mountains with their extinct
craters, so graphically represented in the
maps of the moon.
In the distance my companion pointed to
a far-away bluish range, which were the
"Spanish Peaks," our destination, the home
of our mines. After a day and a half of
steady traveling we reached them.
My friend had long ceased to hold any
conversation with me. Handsome, courtly
as ever in his manners, he never addressed
me one word; and when I spoke to him in
sheer desperation, answered me in monosyl lables. My surprise changed to wonder,
wonder to indignation, indignation to suspic ion. What was the matter with him? I
talked to my animal, to hear the sound of
my own voice in those awful solitudes. To
my consternation, my companion began talk ing to himself- at first, unintelligibly, then
in plainer accents. Mines, mines, mines, it
was always mines-prospecting them, tun neling them, opening them, but always the
same subject. Sometimes his voice rose
loud and clear, then calmer again; then an gry, again subdued. A terrible suspicion
was creeping into my brain; no, it could
not be. I would not believe it. I would
have proposed returning to Roseta, and
abandoning our project altogether, if we had
not been so near our journey's end.
As I was about to sound him on the sub ject, however, his face lengthened percepti bly. "The highest peak of our destination,"
he remarked, "is only half a day's jaunt on ward."
Here the face of the country changed
again; it was more wooded. The last few
hours of that last day's travel-I shall never
forget it. It was a terrible climb; when we
had apparently almost reached the summit,
we came suddenly upon an awful precipice
and chasm, which looked as if the mountain
had fallen away, or caved in at this point.
The slide was covered with a dense growth
of underbrush, and was wholly impassable.
My companion and I exchanged glances..
"My friend," I said, looking at him firmly,
let us abandon this hazardous journey, and
return to Roseta; believe-"
"Return," exclaimed he scornfully, "'on
the very point of our destination, man?
What are you thinking of? I have simply
made a mistake in the trail, and breasted the
mountain on the wrong side. We shall retrace our steps, and make the ascent just
opposite to where we are now stopped short
by this precipice."
[July,