BLYTHE TO COACHELLA VALLEY 355 



desert travel. I struck a match and eagerly ex- 

 amined the sign. Good luck! I had figured rightly. 

 Five miles to the southwest was Shafer's Well. 



Before turning the shoulder of the mountain I 

 stopped and looked back to the east, Down a long 

 gallery whose walls rose dark and high on either 

 hand, a splendid planet, Jupiter himself 



"... with new-spangled ore 



Flamed in the forehead of the morning sky." 



The firmament about him was silvering to the dawn. 

 Toward me stretched a purple ribbon of sky glitter- 

 ing with a myriad points of gold. The dawn wind 

 came as cool and pure as if it were the first breath 

 of Creation. The stillness was superb, the silence so 

 absolute as to be startling. Could the central calm 

 of the universe be holier, more inviolable, than this? 

 The thought of war, with its ruin, chaos, and fury, 

 was an impossibility, one could not realize so vile a 

 blasphemy against the vast peace of Nature. But 

 the wild forms of the mountains showed that here 

 too war had been waged against the old forces 

 of repression, forever too stupid to know that to 

 oppose freedom is to be blown sky-high. 



As I turned to move on, the moon was sinking 

 behind the western mountain. I watched the soft 

 light leave the plain, then pass up the shadowy 

 wall like the rising of a silver mist. In these great 

 silent actions of Nature, never so impressive as in 

 desert solitude, one feels both the majesty and the 

 beneficence of natural law, and realizes by such 

 tranquillity how trustworthy the universe must be. 



