It has been said there is nothing appertaining to life upon the broad plain.

That is hardly true. Looking down from the Sierra Blanco, one sees a pathway

traced out across the desert, which winds away and is lost in the extreme

distance. It is rutted with wheels and trodden down by the feet of many

adventurers. Here and there there are scattered white objects which glisten in

the sun, and stand out against the dull deposit of alkali. Approach, and examine

them! They are bones: some large and coarse, others smaller and more delicate.

The former have belonged to oxen, and the latter to men. For fifteen hundred

miles one may trace this ghastly caravan route by these scattered remains of

those who had fallen by the wayside.

 

Looking down on this very scene, there stood upon the fourth of May, eighteen

hundred and forty-seven, a solitary traveller. His appearance was such that he

might have been the very genius or demon of the region. An observer would have

found it difficult to say whether he was nearer to forty or to sixty. His face

was lean and haggard, and the brown parchment-like skin was drawn tightly over

the projecting bones; his long, brown hair and beard were all flecked and dashed

with white; his eyes were sunken in his head, and burned with an unnatural

lustre; while the hand which grasped his rifle was hardly more fleshy than that

of a skeleton. As he stood, he leaned upon his weapon for support, and yet his

tall figure and the massive framework of his bones suggested a wiry and vigorous

constitution. His gaunt face, however, and his clothes, which hung so baggily

over his shrivelled limbs, proclaimed what it was that gave him that senile and

decrepit appearance. The man was dying—dying from hunger and from thirst.