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Gaining the log-strewn beach, he found himself at the edge of one of those ghostly, fire-blasted tamarack forests which cover great sections of the upper end of Michigan's southern peninsula. At last he had escaped from the hateful bondage of man. Contentedly he fell to cropping the coarse beach-grass which grew at the forest's edge.
To climb the raspberry vines without shaking them, and so alarming the bird, was out of the question; but there was a fire-blasted tree just behind. Kagax climbed it stealthily on the side away from the bird, crept to a branch over the nest, and leaped down.
Painfully, yet without a word of complaint or rebellion, they once more trailed over the fire-blasted hills on the quest of the wrecked Pauillac. Hour by hour they were now forced to pause for rest. Some of the impedimenta had to be discarded. During the forenoon Allan commanded that most of the fishing-gear and part of the cordage should be thrown away.
It was late afternoon when I came over a ridge, following a deer path on my way to the lake, and looked down into a long narrow valley filled with berry bushes, and with a few fire-blasted trees standing here and there to point out the perfect loneliness and desolation of the place. Just below me a deer was feeding hungrily, only her hind quarters showing out of the underbrush.
Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of far mountains.
It was a wilted, shrivelled, heat-flayed, fire-blasted world of arid desolation; trenched by the dry arroyos; sifted by the hot winds fine as flour; with rings and belts and wavering layers of heat heat from the orange sun edged red by the Desert dust of the atmosphere heat from the wind off some white flamed furnace heat from the ochre shifting sands panting to the loom and writhe of the blue-flamed air, and over all a veil, was it blue or lilac or lavender? tinted as of rainbow mists.
Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called "Victory." More died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood.
He pulled down his hat, swung dexterously up on Bat Wings and galloped away down the valley, waving his hand at the barred window as he passed. Long after the clatter of hoofs had ceased Lucy stood in the shade of the ramada, gazing pensively at the fire-blasted buttes and the tender blue mountains beyond.
Beneath its magic the very rocks, harsh bulks of granite, seemed almost afloat; and every branch, spray and leaf, swam liquidly. The rampikes, towering trunks of pine, fire-blasted and time-bleached, lifted lonely spires of silver over the enchanted solitude. Apparently, there was neither sound nor motion over all Ringwaak, or over the wide wilderness spread out below its ken.
A chilly fog covered the country, and little more was to be seen than the jagged outline of the lava-hills, and the boggy sinks and morasses on either side of the trail. The weird, fire-blasted, and flood-scourged wilderness on all sides was as silent as death, save when we approached some dark lagoon, and startled up the flocks of water-fowl that dwelt in its sedgy borders.
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