But why?
The thing there--the infinitude of open sand and rock--was beautiful, wonderful, even glorious.

She looked again.
Steep black-cindered slope, with its soft gray patches of grass, sheered down and down, and out in rolling slope to merge upon a cedar-dotted level.

Nothing moved below, but a red-tailed hawk sailed across her vision.

How still--how gray the desert floor as it reached away, losing its black dots, and gaining bronze spots of stone! By plain and prairie it fell away, each inch of gray in her sight magnifying into its league-long roll.

On and on, and down across dark lines that were steppes, and at last blocked and changed by the meandering green thread which was the verdure of a desert river.