Valley of Death

“ Death Valley was one place that could never be popular with men. It had been set apart for the hardy diggers for earthen treasure, and for the wanderers of the wastelands—men who go forth to seek and to find and to face their souls. Perhaps most of them found death. But there was a death in life. Desert travelers learned the secret that men lived too much in the world—that in silence and loneliness and desolation there was something infinite, something hidden from the crowd. ”

“ Death Valley was only a ragged rent of the old earth, where men wandered wild, brooding, lost, or where others sought with folly and passion to dig forth golden treasure. The mysterious lights changed. A long pale radiance appeared over the western range and lengthened along its bold horizon. The only red color left was way to the south, and that shone dim. The air held a solemn stillness.
“Magdalene Virey,” said Adam, “what you see there resembles death—it may be death—but it is peace. Does it not rest your troubled soul? A woman must be herself here.” ”

“ Lonely, melancholy, nameless graves upon the windy desert slope!
By this time the long shadows had begun to fall. Sunset over Death Valley! A golden flare burned over the Panamints—long tapering notched mountains with all their rugged conformation showing. Above floated gold and gray and silver-edged clouds—below shone a whorl of dusky, ruddy bronze haze, gradually thickening. Dim veils of heat still rose from the pale desert valley. As I watched all before me seemed to change and be shrouded in purple. How bold and desolate a scene! ”

“ There is gasping struggle, glaring failure—maniac despair. For over my Valley rolls The Shadow, a giant thing, moving with the weight of mountains. And you stare at it, you feel it; you scream, you pray, you weep; you hold up your hands to your God, you grow mad; but the Shadow moves like Time, like the sun, and the planets in the sky. It rolls over you, and it rolls on; and then you cry out no more.
It is that way in my Valley. The Shadow is the Shadow of Death. ”

“ In that silent land where the skeletons of dead mountain ranges lie strewn among the graves of seas that died in ages past, they held their eyes on the one sign of life that rose into the clear sky beyond, the peak whose promise kept them moving on into the west. ”

“ During a series of fatal years, many villages, many towns, many cities, many great countries, have seen, like this valley, their hearths deserted and cold—have seen, like this valley, mourning take the place of joy, and the death-knell substituted for the noise of festival—have wept in the same day for their many dead, and buried them at night by the lurid glare of torches. ”

“ Green covers the lower parts of the hills, but it seems the green of the grave, its sounds are in league with silence, its light is the ally of darkness. The feeling, however, finally produced is not so much terror as pensiveness, and if the valley be, as it has been called, the valley of the Shadow of Death, it is death without his sting—the everlasting slumber there ”

“ Alas for those who creep to their dens, like the wild beasts when the sun arises, because the light has shaken them out of the world. All the horrid phantasms of the Valley of the Shadow of Death that had risen from the pit with the vaporous night had sunk to escape the arrows of the sun, once more into its bottomless depth. ”

“ None but madmen ever tackle Death Valley in July, in the middle of the day. I’ve seen the mercury go to one hundred and forty degrees. I’ve seen it one hundred and twenty-five at midnight, an’, friend, when them furnace winds blow down the valley at night sleep or rest is impossible. You just gasp for life.... But strange to say, Wansfell, the fascination of the desert is stronger in Death Valley than at any other place.”
“Yes, I can appreciate that,” replied Adam, thoughtfully. “It must be the sublimity of death and desolation—the terrible loneliness and awfulness of the naked earth. ”

“ There is a grim connection between the fossil district in which the bones of so many extinct animals have been found so plentifully, and Death Valley, in which the remains of existent creatures attest the continued destructive result of the ice-flood. Truly, the ways of Providence are ways of mystery; and the more we contemplate them to satisfy the ambition of curiosity, the more we realize the incomprehensibility of the infinite, and that every advance step is an interrogation point in our lives. ”

“ Command now that all the women and the old men, taking with them such cattle and food as are in the town, depart at once into the Valley of Death and collect in the open space that lies beyond the Tree of Doom, near the spring of water that is there. The valley is narrow and the cliffs are steep, and it may chance that by the help of Heaven we shall be able to hold it till the army returns to relieve us, to seek which messengers must be sent at once with these tidings. ”

“ Although they had recently passed through some very arduous experiences these were only looked on as vague reminiscences by these energetic chums. The future beckoned with rosy fingers and that level plain looked very attractive in their eyes, after such a long and painful trip across the burning deserts and through that terrible Death Valley, where so many venturesome prospectors, gold-mad, have left their bones as a monument to their folly. ”

“ In the great weird wastes which make up the Mojave Desert, Death is king. He sits enthroned in the terrible region known as Death Valley, and from that fiery pit he stretches forth his fleshless fingers over all the desert region, and exacts a fearful toll from the desert-dwellers and from those who travel through his domain. ”

“ When you travel through the desolation of Death Valley along the Funeral Range, you may find it difficult to believe that several thousand feet above the top of your car was once a cool, inviting land with rivers and forests and lakes, and that hundreds of feet below you are the dry beds of seas that washed its shores. ”

“ The result, after undetermined ages, is today’s Death Valley. A shorter explanation was that of my companion on my first trip to Black Mountain—a noted desert character—Jackass Slim. There we found a scientist who wished to enlighten us. ”

“ This valley is hot the marvelous region of fiction, where human skulls lie grin- ning by the cold but poisoned waters of the desert-well; where the verdant oasis lets forth its mysterious monsters to devour the wanderer, or where the fabled "Octopus-vine," so vividly described by imaginative journalists, reaches out its vampire tentacles to grasp and hold the passing prospector in the clutch of death, while the fragrance of its soporific flowers soothes him to unconscious slumber. ”

“ Many have spoke of it, but none can tell what the Valley of the Shadow of Death should mean, until they come in it themselves. 'The heart knows its own bitterness; and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy.' To be here is a fearful thing. ”

“ Although Death Valley is the most formidable spot in all the desert region, it is not wanting in beauty. Color effects such as artist never dreamed of are here to be seen. It is not the coloring given by vegetation, however, for verdure is lacking. There are no velvety green meadows, neither are there fields of blooming flowers. ”

“ Though death stared them in the face they never forgot their fellow men. As they slowly crawled along many would wander here and there beside the trail and fall behind, especially the weaker ones, and many were the predictions that such and such a one would never come up again, or reach the camp. Then it was that these noble souls, tired almost beyond recovery themselves, would take water and go back to seek the wandering ones and give them drink and help them on. ”

“ Otherwise the place remains unchanged, a patch of mesquite in a burning plain where heat devils dance all day long from year's end to year's end. The plain reaches on and on between black mountain walls, and even the mirage which springs from its surface under that hot sun throws off the guise of a cool lake almost on the moment of its assumption to become a repellant specter that leaps and twists like a flame. ”

“ Children became exhausted, and had to be carried by people so tired that they could scarcely walk themselves. There was nobody in the line who had not lost some beloved one on that fatal river bank, killed in battle, or tortured to death. As they slowly ascended the green slope of the mountain that inclosed a side of the valley, they looked back upon ruin and desolation. ”

“ The famous ‘Valley of Death,’ or Poison Valley, in the Island of Java, is nothing more than a funnel-shaped hollow, measuring about 100 feet in diameter at the top, and with a bare space in its centre fifteen feet broad and long, which is frequently covered with a stratum of carbonic acid gas. The sides of the hollow, and even the bottom, with the exception of the above-mentioned naked spot, are everywhere clothed with shrubbery, or even with forest trees. ”

“ The natives of Java told the Europeans of a wonderful valley that they called the Valley of Death, because the air was so poisoned with the noxious vapors of the Upas trees that no animal ever went through the valley. ”

“ One eye-witness of the effects of the deluge declares that he saw five hundred dead bodies. Hundreds were counted by others. It will take many a day to make up the death roll. It will take many a day to make up the reckoning of the material loss.
If any pen could describe the scenes of terror, anguish and destruction which have taken place in Conemaugh Valley it could write an epic greater than the "Iliad." The accounts that come tell of hairbreadth escapes, heartrending tragedies and deeds of heroism almost without number. ”

“ To wives and parents it was the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where their husbands and sons fought a never-ending fight with the Powers of Darkness, and never gave ground, yet never gained the victory. ”

“ After one has lived but a few days in the desert, either he loves it passionately or he loathes it. There is nothing in between.
On the right there lies the great "Death Valley" that stretches a hundred miles to the north between the Armagosa and the Paramint Mountains. Its name is suggestive of the many people who have miserably perished of thirst in its clutches. It is the remains of a long-since dried-up inland lake and parts of it are 150 feet below the level of the sea. There is nothing in it save bare rock and shifting alkali sand, with here and there a cactus or a little sage. ”

“ Very little rest for some of us, but we must make the best of the cool morning while the snow is hard, and so move on as soon as we can see the way. As it gets lighter and the sun comes up red and hot out of the desert we have a grand view of the great spread of the country to south and of the great snow mountain to the north and east, the peak standing over the place where we left our wagons nineteen days before, on the edge of Death Valley. The glare of the snow on the sun makes us nearly blind, but we hurry on to try to cross it before it becomes so soft as to slump under our feet. ”

“ It was a dreary trail at best, and these evidences of death did not help to brighten it in the least. We wondered often where it led to and what new things would be our experience. After walking fast all day we came to quite an elevation, where we could stand and look in all directions. The low black range where we left the Jayhawkers was in sight, and this spur of the great snowy mountains extended a long way to the south, and seemed to get lower and lower, finally ending in low rocky buttes, a hundred miles away. ”

“ One was killed here, and the meat, poor as it was, gave the men new strength. They all guessed it to be at least fifty miles to the base of the great snow mountain before them, and what there was between no one could tell, for there were hills and valleys between. Leaving the little spring their course led first up a small cañon, and when they reached the summit of the ridge a small valley covered with sage brush was before them, the most fertile spot they had seen for a long time. ”

“ Are you acquainted with the country beyond the wall—I mean Uti?”
“Uti, yes. Only sixteen changes of the moon ago I accompanied an exploring party there much against my will. It is a terrible place with death staring one in the face at every step.”
“Then you know the caves in the mountain-sides?”
“Each one of them. We searched them all. It was like a hideous nightmare. In some were the remains of men, rows upon rows of them. In others we found the bones of monstrous beasts or demons that invaded the valley many years ago and killed the people by hundreds. ”

“ No living creature can dwell here. 'T is the region of death only.'
A blast of the desert struck us at the moment, and well nigh buried us in its rushing whirlwind of sand. We stood still, closed our eyes, and buried our faces in the folds of our garments.
'Horrible and out of nature!' I cried--'the sun blazing without a cloud as big as a locust to dim his ray, and yet these gusts, like the raging of a tempest. The winds surely rise. Providence be our guide out of this valley of fire and death!'
'There is no providence here,' said the slave, 'nor any where ”

“ One of the pitiable features of death on the desert is that bodies are found with fingers worn to the bone from frantic digging and often beneath the cadaver is water at two feet.
There is also legendary weather for outside consumption. Told to see Joe Ryan as a source of dependable information, a tourist approached Joe and asked what kind of temperature one would encounter in the valley.
“Heat is always exaggerated,” said Joe. ”

“ We have mentioned four of the train who had perished beside the trail and it will be remembered that one party of eleven started out on foot before the wagons were abandoned by the rest of the party. Nothing was heard of these for seven years, but long afterward nine skeletons were found at the remains of a camp, and the other two were afterward seen in the gold fields. When spoken to about this party, they burst into tears and could not talk of it. So it is known that at least thirteen men perished in the country which has well been named Death Valley. ”