RECLAIMING THE EARTH 



One day, when the boy had become a man, 

 he did make the journey. Hour by hour, in- 

 deed, day by day, he traveled across this mighty 

 waste, not on the rocking camel, but behind 

 a powerful engine speeding westward by night 

 and by day through glorious sunrises and sun- 

 sets prodigal in their wealth of lavender and 

 orange and amethyst and ruby, past distant 

 mountains splashed with yellow and red and 

 purple with here and there a lofty peak, white 

 with eternal snows. But below was naught but 

 sand, the white heaped-up sand of the Great 

 American Desert of boyhood, drifted here and 

 there into huge dunes, etched up their dazzling 

 sides in serried layers where the winds had 

 blown as they blow the snows of winter, here 

 and there spread out like some vast palace 

 floor, white and dazzling, to the line where the 

 blue dome of the palace shuts down unpillared 

 to the earth. The sands were there and the 

 oases, too, but not the camels, nor the caravans. 

 The oases, indeed ; for one day there appeared 

 in the far west a faint green line stretching, in 

 the ghostly twilight, like an emerald thread 

 across the purple sky, at the base of a huge 

 mountain towering where the snows rest. Lit- 



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