Valley of the Shadow of Death

“ When we faint in the valley of the shadow of death, let us feel the assuring pressure of the nail-pierced hand. When the heavens are flaming above and the earth is dissolving beneath, "be thou our strong rock, for a house of defence to save us"! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bunyan, who portrayed the Hill Difficulty up which the soul must toil, also painted the Dark Valley of the Shadow of Death through which it must pass; here it meets not demons to be conquered, but riving sorrows to be borne. ”

“ The sum of what we knew at death is the measure of what we know afterward of all that went before. Of this existence we know many things, but no new light falls upon any page of that; in memory is written all of it that we can read. Here are no heights of truth overlooking the confused landscape of that dubitable domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow, lurk in its desolate places, peering from brambles and thickets at its mad, malign inhabitants. ”

“ In him are lunacies seventy-and-two.18 He hath bound a myriad victims in his fetters, wounded a myriad wise men with his arrow. Know that every redness in the world is from his anger, and every paleness in men’s cheeks is from his poison. He yieldeth no remedy but death, he walketh not save in the valley of the shadow; yet sweeter than honey is his venom on the lover’s lips, and fairer his destruction in the seeker’s eyes than a hundred thousand lives. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the shadows of death are to be thrown in deepest darkness on the valley, when we are passing along it to glory, may it be ours to die like that saint, beside whose bed wife and children once stood, weeping over the wreck of faded faculties, and a blank, departed memory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a view of death taken from the earthly entrance of the valley, not the heavenly view of it as that valley opens on the bright plains of immortality. The gay flowers and emerald sod which carpet the grave are poor mockeries to the bereft spirit, shrouding, as they do, nobler withered blossoms which the foot of the destroyer has trampled into dust, and which no earthly beauty can again clothe, or earthly spring reanimate. They are to be pitied who have no higher solace, no better remedy for their grief, than thus to water with unavailing tears the trophies of death ”

“ In darkness and silence they floated on and on until the roar of the inflowing water became fainter and fainter. Then it died out entirely and all was intensely quiet.
The darkness was grateful to their stricken hearts. They wanted time to realize the awful misfortune that had fallen so suddenly and heavily upon them.
It was impossible to grasp the truth in a moment, especially when that truth meant utter hopelessness and a terrible death. So they drifted in silence under the great vault of the cavern, living-dead in a living tomb. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Many weird tales, most of which are true, come from the vast wastes of desert jungles. How little we actually know of Death Valley—the lowest spot on earth and the hottest! With its shifting sand-dunes, sun-baked hills, saline formations and mysterious atmospheres, the Valley of Death has long been the subject of mysteries for fiction and fact. In truth, it is the one spot on the North American Continent that has not been thoroughly explored either by desert rat or scientist. ”

“ Thus, as night fell, the valley of Brand lay deserted quite, and no sound brake the pervading quiet save the wind that moaned feebly through those dark and solitary woods wherein Death lay hid, so very silent—so very patient, but Death in grim and awful shape. ”

“ DEATH VALLEY To most of us Death Valley is thought of only as a mysterious region somewhere in the Southwest, a place which we are accustomed to picture to ourselves as being the embodiment of everything that is desolate and lifeless,—a region where there is no water, where there are no living things, simply bare rocks and sand upon which the sun beats pitilessly and over which the scorching winds blow in clouds of dust. ”

“ But that is not all, for the sad picture is sketched again with blacker shadows in the next clause, which substitutes for 'darkness' the still more tragic words, 'the region and shadow of death.' The realm of darkness is the region of death. ”

“ I seem to
"walk through a deep valley, far from the light of
"day, alone and comfortless! The damps of death
"fall thick upon me! Horrors stare me in the face!
"I look behind, there is no returning; Death follows
"after me; I walk in regions of Death, where no
"tree is; without a lantern to direct my steps,
"without a staff to support me."—Thus he laments
through the still evening, till the curtains of darkness
were drawn! Like the sound of a broken
pipe, the aged woman raised her voice. ”

“ No mournful ghost who met his death in darkness could ever bask in the celestial light of endless Summer-time; he was doomed to become a phantom living in perpetual night. That is the reason none but forced battles were fought after dark; the bravest of the braves feared the curse of everlasting shadow. They believed, too, that no warrior who lost his scalp could enter the fields of the glorious; hence the taking of an enemy's scalp at once killed and damned him. ”

“ In the grave there is none. Hovering as we now are, between life and death, with the conquest of the soul over the impulses of the body, we may catch a glimpse of the Unknown. Therefore, let us go down and search for light at the Shrine of Darkness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I did; but his face would become very grave and he would shake his head. 'It is bad enough that one of us should have been in its shadow,' he said. 'Please God it shall never fall upon you! It was some real valley in which he had lived and in which something terrible had occurred to him, of that I am certain ”

“ Dead and gray and bare are the nearby hills, glorious the snow-covered peaks far off, but incredible is this endless rolling, changing pillar of cloud, always there, yet always different—and that country covered with great lakes, waterless, glittering, great lava beds of refuse stretching away in every direction down the mountain sides into the valleys, swallowing up every vestige of life, yet beautiful with the beauty of death—a death, a plague which day by day spreads farther and farther over the land—silently overwhelming, all-devouring—a silent place of smoke and fire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now of a sudden above the hiss of flame, from the valley of Brand a cry went up—a shout—a roar of fear and amaze and thereafter rose a wild clamour; a babel inarticulate, split, ever and anon, by frantic trumpet-blast. But ever the dreadful hubbub waxed and grew, shrieks and cries and the screaming of maddened horses with the awful, rolling thunder of their fierce-galloping hooves!
Within that valley of doom Death was abroad already, Death in many dire shapes. ”

“ In this mood Fate had led him to solemn old oaks standing huge among shadows; and the grandeur of their grey grip on the earth that had been theirs for centuries was akin to the grandeur of the high hopes he had had, and his despair was somehow soothed by the shadows. ”

“ 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. ”