The two wanderers seemed to be amid the landscapes of a Christmas drama as they rode between these painted precipices toward a crimson, sunset.
It was a perfect solitude.

There was not a breath of life besides their own in this gorgeous valley of desolation.

The ragged, crumbling battlements, and the loftier points of harder rock, would not have furnished subsistence for a goat or a mouse.

Color was everywhere and life nowhere: it was such a region as one might look for in the moon; it did not seem to belong to an inhabited planet.
Before they had ridden half an hour the sun went down suddenly behind serrated steeps, and almost immediately night hastened in with his obscurities.

Texas Smith, riding hundreds of yards in the rear and concealing himself behind the turning points of the canon, was obliged to diminish his distance in order to keep them under his guard.