As he walked up it and the prospect widened
on his sight, its message came, clearer with every mounting step. Thus
forever would he look out on a blasted world uncheered by sound or
color. The stillness that lapped him round was as the stillness of his
own dead heart. The mirage quivered brilliant in the distance, and he
paused, a solitary shape against the exhausted sky, to think that his
dream of love had had no more reality. Beautiful and alluring it had
floated in his mind, an illusion without truth or substance.
He reached the higher elevation, barren and iron hard, the stone hot to
his feet. On three sides the desert swept out to the horizon, held in
its awful silence. Across it, a white seam, the Emigrant Trail wound,
splindling away into the west, a line of tortuous curves, a loop, a
straight streak, and then a tiny thread always pressing on to that
wonderful land which he had once seen as a glowing rim on the world's
remotest verge. It typified the dauntless effort of man, never
flagging, never broken, persisting to its goal. He had not been able
to thus persist, the spirit had not reached far enough to know its aim
and grasp it.
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