Herndon assented, and we parted. The low
fields around us changed, as I went on, to firm, hard, rising ground,
that gradually became sandy and arid. The luxuriant vegetation that
clung around the banks of the river seemed to be dried up little by
little, until only a few dusty bushes and thorn-acacias studded in
clumps a great, sandy, and rocky tract of country, which rolled
monotonously back from the river border with a steadily increasing
elevation. A sandy plain never gives me a sense of real substance; it
always seems as if it must be merely a covering for something,--a sheet
thrown over the bed where a dead man is lying. And especially here did
this broad, trackless, seemingly boundless desert face me with its
blank negation, like the old obstinate "No" which Nature always returns
at first to your eager questioning. It provoked me, this staring
reticence of the scenery, and stimulated me to a sort of dogged
exertion. I think I walked steadily for about three hours over the
jagged rocks and burning sands, interspersed with a few patches of
straggling grass,--all the time up hill, with never a valley to vary
the monotonous climbing,--until the bushes began to thicken in about
the same manner as they had thinned into the desert, the grass and
herbage herded closer together under my feet, and, beating off the
ravenous sand, gradually expelled the last trace of it, a few tall
trees strayed timidly among the lower shrubbery, growing more and more
thickly, till I found myself at the border of an apparently extensive
forest.
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