FAR AND NEAR 



Mr. Hamman had telegraphed ahead to have 

 means of transportation in readiness to take us to 

 the falls, twenty-five miles to the south across the 

 sagebrush plains. Hence when we awoke at Sho- 

 shone in the early morning, we found a nondescript 

 collection of horses and vehicles awaiting us, — 

 buggies, buckboards, market wagons, and one old 

 Concord four-horse stage, besides a group of saddle- 

 horses for those who were equal to this mode of 

 travel. The day was clear and cool, and the spirits 

 of the party ran high. That ride over the vast sage- 

 brush plain in the exhilarating air, under the novel 

 conditions and in the early honeymoon of our 

 journey, — who of us can ever forget it ? My seat 

 happened to be beside the driver on top of the old 

 stage-coach, and we went swinging and rocking over 

 the plain in the style in which I made my first 

 journey amid the Catskills in my youth. But how 

 tame were the Catskills of memory in comparison 

 with the snow-capped ranges that bounded our hori- 

 zon fifty or a hundred miles away : to the north 

 the Saw Tooth Range and " Old Soldier," white as 

 a snow-bank ; to the southeast the Goose Creek 

 Range; and to the south the Humboldts, far away 

 in Nevada. Our course lay across what was once a 

 sea of molten lava. Our geologists said that some 

 time in the remote past the crust of the earth here 

 had probably cracked over a wide area, allowing 

 the molten lava to fiow up through it, like water 

 10 



