And now my argument becomes plain.  The spirit is the reality that endures.  I am spirit, and I endure.  I, Darrell Standing, the tenant of many fleshly tenements, shall write a few more lines of these memoirs and then pass on my way.  The form of me that is my body will fall apart when it has been sufficiently hanged by the neck, and of it naught will remain in all the world of matter.  In the world of spirit the memory of it will remain.  Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on its forms perishes with the forms.

One word more ere I return to my narrative.  In all my journeys through the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never been able to guide any journey to a particular destination.  Thus many new experiences of old lives were mine before ever I chanced to return to the boy Jesse at Nephi.  Possibly, all told, I have lived over Jesse’s experiences a score of times, sometimes taking up his career when he was quite small in the Arkansas settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at Nephi.  It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so, without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as I relived them.

CHAPTER XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir.  The cattle were driven out to water and pasture.  While the men unchained the wheels and drew the wagons apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked forty breakfasts over forty fires.  The children, in the chill of dawn, clustered about the fires, sharing places, here and there, with the last relief of the night-watch waiting sleepily for coffee.

It requires time to get a large train such as ours under way, for its speed is the speed of the slowest.  So the sun was an hour high and the day was already uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of Nephi and on into the sandy barrens.  No inhabitant of the place saw us off.  All chose to remain indoors, thus making our departure as ominous as they had made our arrival the night before.

Again it was long hours of parching heat and biting dust, sage-brush and sand, and a land accursed.  No dwellings of men, neither cattle nor fences, nor any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that day; and at night we made our wagon-circle beside an empty stream, in the damp sand of which we dug many holes that filled slowly with water seepage.

Our subsequent journey is always a broken experience to me.  We made camp so many times, always with the wagons drawn in circle, that to my child mind a weary long time passed after Nephi.  But always, strong upon all of us, was that sense of drifting to an impending and certain doom.

We averaged about fifteen miles a day.  I know, for my father had said it was sixty miles to Fillmore, the next Mormon settlement, and we made three camps on the way.  This meant four days of travel.  From Nephi to the last camp of which I have any memory we must have taken two weeks or a little less.