Only, close under the hills, lay, unobtrusive, a
narrow streak of grey. And in a few hours he had reached the
streak of grey, and ridden out into it to find himself the centre
of a limitless alkali plain, so that again it seemed the valley
could contain nothing else of importance.
Looking back, Senor Johnson could discern a tenuous ribbon of
orange--the poppies. And perhaps ahead a little shadow blotted
the face of the alkali, which, being reached and entered, spread
like fire until it, too, filled the whole plain, until it, too,
arrogated to itself the right of typifying Soda Springs Valley as
a shimmering prairie of mesquite. Flowered upland, dead lowland,
brush, cactus, volcanic rock, sand, each of these for the time
being occupied the whole space, broad as the sea. In the circlet
of the mountains was room for many infinities.
Among the foothills Senor Johnson, for the first time,
appreciated colour. Hundreds of acres of flowers filled the
velvet creases of the little hills and washed over the smooth,
rounded slopes so accurately in the placing and manner of tinted
shadows that the mind had difficulty in believing the colour not
to have been shaded in actually by free sweeps of some gigantic
brush.
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