Occasionally, however, this savage scenery decidedly changed its
character. Now, a lovely glen would smile before our travellers,
traversed by tinkling streams, waving with sweet grasses, dotted with
little groves, alive with hares, antelopes, and even elks, but
apparently never yet trodden by the foot of man. Now, our Club men felt
like travelling on clouds, as they careered along the great plateau
west of the Black Hills, fully 8,000 feet above the level of the sea,
though even there the grass was as green and fresh as if it grew in some
sequestered valley of Pennsylvania. Again,
"In this untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever as they moved,"
they would find themselves in an immense, tawny, treeless plain,
outlined by mountains so distant as to resemble fantastic cloud piles.
Here for days they would have to skirt the coasts of a Lake, vast,
unruffled, unrippled, apparently of metallic consistency, from whose
sapphire depths rose pyramidal islands to a height of fully three
thousand feet above the surface.
In a few days all would change. No more sand wastes, salt water flats,
or clouds of blinding alkali dust. The travellers' road, at the foot of
black precipitous cliffs, would wind along the brink of a roaring
torrent, whose devious course would lead them into the heart of the
Sierras, where misty peaks solemnly sentinelled the nestling vales still
smiling in genial summer verdure.
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