(Buckey O’Neill: San Francisco Chronicle.)
A hot day. The sun directly overhead, glowing with a fire that made the air in the shadeless canyon quiver as if heated in an oven. Not a tree in sight, not a bush--everything brown and barren. Everywhere boulders of lava immense in size and sometimes split in twain, as if in rapid cooling from the intense heat which gave them birth. Here and there between the gray-green of the giant cacti, raising their thorny forms fifty and sixty feet in the air, assuming with their strangely formed limbs the shapes of immense crosses or trunks of trees from which all leaves and smaller branches have been torn. Between the black and brown of the sunburnt lava an occasional tuft of tall, almost colorless grass. Over all a stillness that to one unaccustomed to the land would seem strange and oppressive. Not a bird to break it with its song. Even the lizards sought out what shade they could, making with their green, red and variegated coats, almost the only dash of color to relieve the monotony of the all-prevailing brown and black lava that each moment grew more oppressive to look at under the glow of the fierce heat.
Save these not a living thing was in sight except where off to the west a buzzard floated high in the air, and two men, with a burro lazily following, passing down the canyon.
Opened shirts, showing red, hairy breasts, while their loosely buckled belts, heavy with long, bright cartridges, whose tarnished surfaces, made doubly bright from the rays of the hot sun, seemed strangely out of place in such quietude.
Neither spoke. Each walked along as if alone, looking for the “float” that might indicate the presence of some mineral ledge higher up, more from habit than from hope, as the “formation” gave but little indication of treasure.
How hot the sun. The burro, patient-eyed, forgot his old trick of nipping the tops of the long gaete grass, and contented himself with keeping closely in the trail of the two men, whose worldly possessions of blankets, cooking utensils and tools, capped with an enormous canteen of water, he so patiently bore. Not a breath of air stirring. Only the quivering heat that made the eyes burn and ache. The men shifted their rifles constantly from one hand to another, as if to avoid getting blisters from the places where they touched the highly heated metallic parts of their guns.