And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit
up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains
and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard
boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately
in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets.
Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham
and eggs, and after these a pipe—an old,
rank, delicious pipe—ham and eggs and scenery,
a “down grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant
pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness.
It is what all the ages have struggled for.
CHAPTER XVIII.
At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and
ruin of what had been the important military station
of “Camp Floyd,” some forty-five or fifty
miles from Salt Lake City. At four P.M. we had
doubled our distance and were ninety or a hundred
miles from Salt Lake. And now we entered upon
one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness
shames the diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara—an
“alkali” desert. For sixty-eight
miles there was but one break in it. I do not
remember that this was really a break; indeed it seems
to me that it was nothing but a watering depot in
the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles.
If my memory serves me, there was no well or spring
at this place, but the water was hauled there by mule
and ox teams from the further side of the desert.
There was a stage station there. It was forty-five
miles from the beginning of the desert, and twenty-three
from the end of it.
We plowed and dragged and groped along, the whole
live-long night, and at the end of this uncomfortable
twelve hours we finished the forty-five-mile part
of the desert and got to the stage station where the
imported water was. The sun was just rising.
It was easy enough to cross a desert in the night
while we were asleep; and it was pleasant to reflect,
in the morning, that we in actual person had encountered
an absolute desert and could always speak knowingly
of deserts in presence of the ignorant thenceforward.
And it was pleasant also to reflect that this was
not an obscure, back country desert, but a very celebrated
one, the metropolis itself, as you may say.
All this was very well and very comfortable and satisfactory—but
now we were to cross a desert in daylight. This
was fine—novel—romantic—dramatically
adventurous —this, indeed, was worth living
for, worth traveling for! We would write home
all about it.
This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure,
wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last
above one hour. One poor little hour—and
then we were ashamed that we had “gushed”
so. The poetry was all in the anticipation—there
is none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless
ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this
solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine
the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such
a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through
Copyrights
Roughing It from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
