It was necessary to pass over it as rapidly as possible, day and night almost without resting.
In accomplishing one of these arduous journeys across a desert almost as bare as that of Sahara, the party set out one afternoon at three o'clock.
One of the travellers writes: "I shall never forget the impression which that night's journey left upon my mind.

Sometimes the trail led us over large basins of deep sand, where the trampling of the mules' feet gave forth no sound.

This, added to the almost terrible silence which ever reigns in the solitude of the desert, rendered our transit more like the passage of some airy spectacle where the actors were shadows instead of men.

Nor is this comparison a strained one, for our way-worn voyagers, with their tangled locks and unshorn beards, rendered white as snow by the fine sand with which the air in these regions is often filled, had a weird and ghost-like look, which the gloomy scene around, with its frowning rocks and moonlit sands, tended to enhance and heighten." It is said, as illustrative of Kit's promptness of action, that one night an inexperienced guard shouted "Indians." In an instant Kit was on his feet, pistol in hand.

A dark object was approaching him.