In one place the earth humped into long, wavelike swells each crest
topped with a fringe of brush, fine and feathery as petrified spray.
At mid-day there was no water in sight. Courant, standing on his
saddle, saw no promise of it, nothing but the level distance streaked
with white mountain rims, and far to the south a patch of yellow--bare
sand, he said, as he pointed a horny finger to where it lay.
They camped in the glare and opened the casks. After the meal they
tried to rest, but the sun was merciless. The girl crawled under the
wagon and lay there on the dust, sleeping with one arm thrown across
her face. The two men sat near by, their hats drawn low over their
brows. There was not a sound. The silence seemed transmuted to a
slowly thickening essence solidifying round them. It pressed upon them
till speech was as impossible as it would be under water. A broken
group in the landscape's immensity, they were like a new expression of
its somber vitality, motionless yet full of life, in consonance with
its bare and brutal verity.
Courant left them to reconnoiter, and at mid afternoon came back to
announce that farther on the trail bent to an outcropping of red rock
where he thought there might be water.
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