Desert

“ How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilderness! How “the morning and the evening make up the day” and the purple shadow slips in between with a midnight all stars! And how day by day the interest grows in the long overlooked commonplace things of nature! In a few weeks we are studying bushes, bowlders, stones, sand-drifts—things we never thought of looking at in any other country. And after a time we begin to make mental notes on the changes of light, air, clouds, and blue sky. ”

“ Imagination had pictured the desert for me as a vast, sandy plain, flat and monotonous. Reality showed me desolate mountains gleaming bare in the sun, long lines of red bluffs, white sand dunes, and hills of blue clay, areas of level ground—in all, a many-hued, boundless world in itself, wonderful and beautiful, fading all around into the purple haze of deceiving distance. ”

“ The cast of the desert’s message is epic rather than lyrical. The cloud-mantled mountain and the green valley,—the forest, the stream and the foaming sea teach the poet his sweeter songs. But it is the Prophet of God, the law-giver and the warrior who listen for and learn their stern messages from the tongues of the arid wilderness.
The difference between the desert and the fertile tract is that between the ascetic and the full-fed man. The desert appeals to the intellect; the verdant, rain-nurtured valley to the emotions. ”

“ The desert is not unlike some huge canvas stretched out over vast distances of mesa and foothill, valley and mountain, which takes on mysterious splashes of color during each cycle of the spring, fading then in the heat of summer and fall. ”

“ Desert, like a mirage, like a really painted landscape, glowing in red and orange and pink, an immense city rather than a landscape, with towers and terraces and façades, melting into indistinctness as in a rosy mist, spectral but constant, weltering in a tropic glow and heat, walls and columns and shafts, the wreck of an Oriental capital on a wide violet plain, suffused with brilliant color softened into exquisite shades. All over this region nature has such surprises, that laugh at our inadequate conception of her resources. ”

“ The mountains afar girdle the Desert as a zone of
amethyst ; Pale, translucent walls of opal, Girdling the Desert as Life is girt by Eternity, They lift their heads high above our tribulation Into the azure vault of Time ”

“ In sublimity—the superlative degree of beauty—what land can equal the desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, and its expanding canopy of sky! You shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire at sunrise and sunset; you shall never see elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue distance, the gorges and canyons banked full of purple shadow. ”

“ The conventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand, is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing, kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden, red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows, strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. ”

“ The day dawns with a clear sky and no hint of storm or wind. The desert smiles upon our setting out, and the caravan moves forward cheerfully. Before long a refreshing breeze comes up from nowhere and goes whispering over the sands. Almost imperceptibly it strengthens, but still there is nothing unpleasant in its blowing. Then one looks down at one’s feet, and the surface of the desert is curiously changed. ”

“ I always think of the desert silence as embosoming such song, like the hum of insects in the grass; though it may be rare as a bird’s wing, it is there in the great spaces; the desert, to my imagination, is a song-laden air, like Italy; but the Italian is garden song, the desert is wilderness song; the Italian is human, the desert song seems almost a part of nature, a part of the desert. ”

“ In the universal pean of gladness which the earth at Eastertide raises to the Lord of Life, the wilderness and the solitary place have part, and the desert then does in truth blossom as the rose. And how comforting are the blossoms of the desert when at last they have come! When the sun has sunk behind the rim of the verdure-less range of granite hills that westward bound my view, and the palpitating light of the night's first stars shines out in the tender afterglow, I love to linger on the cooling sands and touch my cheek to the flowers. ”

“ Yet the desert has its aspects, if it has not its moods and contrasts—as singular as they are striking. See, or rather feel it under the fierce and scorching glare of the fiery sun, that almost shrivels you into a mummy; see it also under the softer spell of the silvery orb, when the air is balmy, if not fresh, and you will at once imagine yourself to be in an altogether different and enchanted world. ”

“ But in the desert one may say there is nothing but God. If there is little of earth, there is much of heaven. The glory of 104 the desert is at night, when the full moon rises out of the level plain, as out of the sea, and walks the unclouded firmament. And when she retires, then all the heavenly host come forth. The atmosphere is of such exquisite purity, that the stars shine with all their splendor. No vapor rises from the earth, no exhalation obscures the firmament, which seems all aglow with the celestial fires. ”

“ Outside, there is desert and the sky has melted. All the steel strokes of the sun, beating down, beating up, are melted: heaven has fallen into waves. Villages live in this fierce element. Men and women, donkeys and goats live in this radiant sea.
Over the brow of a despoblado, the sun goes. The desert flattens, like a sea after storm. The sterile hills are farther away, and on the even plain there is grass. The desert becomes a moor. ”

“ On all sides the desert stretches away to the haze of nothingness—a land of the mirage; scenes which the jealous desert steals from arid lands and holds up to the eyes of desert men to lure them on. Cities, rivers, lakes, with cool, nodding palms, rippling brooks, which seem only a few feet away, then fade out to show a waste of dust-gray mesquite, which rattles in the hot winds, Joshua-trees, with their agonized arms—and sand. ”

“ What is it that is borne in on the desert soul, when it wakes in the great silence, the luminosity, the boundless surge of the sands against the sky! Immensity—the feeling of the infinite—nature taking on the cosmic forms of God. The desert is simple. It has few features, but they are all elements of grandeur. It is the mood of the Psalms. Awe is inbred in the desert dweller. ”

“ The desert’s secrets of life and growth and death are not to be read at a glance. The first day’s walk is usually a disappointment. You see little more than a desolate waste. The light of the blue sky, the subtle color of the air, the roll of the valleys, the heave of the mountains do not reveal themselves at once. The vegetation you think looks like a thin covering of dry sticks. And as for the animals, the birds—the living things on the desert—they are not apparent at all. ”

“ The fascination of the desert, that which makes a desert lover, is not in its incidents, voyages, sights; it is in its life. It is the life of nature. I do not mean the picturesqueness of its human traits, the passage of men and animals over a scene with which they are so sympathetically colored as to seem only a part of its flora and fauna, its transitory efflorescence; nor the landscape with its breadths, infinities, hallucinations, hierarchies of color, élans of the soul and poems of the eye, with which they are in conscious contact. ”

“ The dark, the desert lay behind;
The tawny Ishmaelite was gone;
But something sombre as death is ...
Tut, tut! the tale is not of this. 17
A mountaineer, storm-stained and brown,
From farthest desert touched the town,
And, striding through the crowd, held up
Above his head a jewell'd cup. ”

“ The desert smiles, and there is no place on earth worth living in but the desert.
Song and dance take out from the men of the caravan the little vitality that is left after the ravages of the day. Their spirit is exhausted, and they fall asleep. They sleep beneath the beautiful dome of the sky and the stars. Few people in civilization know the pleasure of just sitting down and looking at the stars. ”

“ I am now as it were on the boundaries of a desert; a desert contains much sand, which never ends; much solitude which is never filled; much thirst which is never quenched, and a sky which becomes flattened in the centre as if it were about to fall, and which never falls. ”

“ Silence, ruthlessness, mystery—these are the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; the iron parent is everlasting. ”

“ The burning eastern sun shone down on to vast stretches of desert-land uninhabited by man, great rivers flowed through dreary swamps unrealised, tempestuous waves beat against their shores, and melancholy winds swept over the face of endless ocean solitudes. ”

“ We were now travelling through a very pretty part of the desert, open glades and timber trees, lofty pyramidal hills, partly covered with bush, fine grass, with white feathery tops, no inhabitants; a wild and picturesque region, crossing open plains, then gentle rises with low bush; in the distance, mountains with their lofty peaks fading away into nothing. ”

“ We will visit also other lands where you look out over a glowing pink and mauve desert to seeming infinity, and see reflected in bitter shallow water at your feet the flames of such a sunset glory as you never yet have imagined. Or you can ride out across the same desert lying white as snow beneath a moon far larger and more glistening than any you ever see here. ”

“ Sometimes the desert is like that in certain places and at certain seasons of the year, but the men who know it best forgive the desert its trespasses, and love it for its magnificent distances, always beautiful, always changing their panorama of lights and shadows on uptilted mesas [4] and deep, gray-green valleys. Such men yield to the thrall of desert sorcery that paints wonderful, translucent tints of blue, violet and purple on all the mountains there against the sky. ”

“ Truly the desert is aflame with glory when the prickly pears come forth in bloom! Is it the soul of the Flower trying to find expression in beauty and fragrance, attuned to the soul of the poet and the lover of desert creation, striving to grow in tune with the Universe? ”

“ Why should the lovely things of earth—the grasses, the trees, the lakes, the little hills—appear trivial and insignificant when we come face to face with the sea or the desert or the vastness of the midnight sky? ”

“ The high desert stretched vastly, far, far, far before, behind, on either side, the parched gauntness of its daytime aspect assuaged and evanescent. For the moon, now risen, although on the wane, shed a light sufficient, whitening the rocks and the scattered low shrubs, painting the land with sharp black shadows, and enclosing us about with the mystery of great softly illumined spaces into which silent forms vanished as if tempting us aside. ”

“ You live in a northern zone, in a land of pools and streams and limpid springs. How unlike the denizen of the desert, the voyageur of the prairie sea! Water is his chief care, his ever-present solicitude; water the divinity he worships. Without water, even in the midst of plenty, plenty of food, he must die. In the wild western desert it is the thirst that kills. No wonder I was filled with despair. I believed myself to be about the middle of the Jornada. ”

“ It may seem a welcome change to turn our backs on a wilderness of rocky defiles. But one who has been riding for days through these wild passes, observing the fantastic forms of the cliffs and crags on either side, and their infinite variety of color, cannot without a regret turn away from these dark, sombre mountains. And to come down from all this to the desert, is a change which involves a double descent, a descent from the mountain to the plain, and from the richest colors to the perpetual glare of the naked limestone! ”

“ Here the desert of death simulates a field of cooling snow, green hills lie black in the dazzling light of day, limpid waters run green over arsenic stone, and sunset betricks the fantastic rock with column and capital and dome. ”

“ The desert is an enormous caldron of burning sand, rolling and rising and sinking here and there. But in the spring these arid lands present a striking parade of beautiful flowers—a veritable fashion show! ”

“ After straining over one hundred and fifty miles of silent desert, hearing no sound but the shoes of our mules grating upon hot sand, after the white glare, and that fever-thirst which comes from drinking alkali-water, it was a deep pleasure to lie under the palms and look up at their slow-moving green fans, and hear in those shaded recesses the mild, sweet twittering of our traveller-friends, the birds, who stayed, like ourselves, overcome with the languor of perfect repose. ”

“ Plantations of growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging, peering—the wild, spiny, thorny things of the desert to enter the rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting to take the unfriended sandy spaces. ”

“ For seven weary days did they manfully toil through the blank dreary desert, where Nature had spread wide her plains of barrenness, and where the image of utter desolation was but seldom disturbed by the appearance either of man or of vegetation. ”