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Updated: June 22, 2025
The Yankee laughed at the heavy straight shafts and the mule that drew the volante, as the gig was called, and the vehicle creaked and cried as it rolled along over the road, which was like a dry river-bed.
A dead river is a channel formerly occupied by a running stream, but now filled up with earthy or rocky matter, and is not to be confounded with a channel that is open and remains dry during the greater part of the year because of a lack of water, or that has been abandoned by the stream for a deeper channel elsewhere. A dry river-bed is not a dead river.
She looked back. There stood a high, familiar peak, but so were the outlines of these mountains jumbled and changed that she could not tell if Prosper's cañon lay north or south of Pierre's homestead. The former was high up on the foothills, and Pierre's was well down, above the river. From where she stood, there was no river-bed in sight.
When carriers' carts were established, the time occupied by them on the road will now appear almost incredible. Thus the common carrier between Selkirk and Edinburgh, a distance of only thirty-eight miles, took about a fortnight to perform the double journey. Part of the road lay along Gala Water, and in summer time, when the river-bed was dry, the carrier used it as a road.
Beyond this strange, lonely river-bed, the cottonwoods began, and, above them, the pine forests massed themselves and strode up the foothills of the gigantic range, that range of iron rocks, sharp, thin, and brittle where they scraped the sky. At the top of the hill, Pierre put out his hand and pulled Joan's rein, drawing her to a stop beside him. "Over yonder's my ranch," said he. Joan looked.
"All hands," said the mate, in answer; and setting the example, he helped to drag the boat round, so that her bows pointed at the narrow opening in the bushes up to which she was run, and then, with the prau continuing her fire, the gig was with great labour forced through to the open ground beyond, and placed behind some rocks in the river-bed.
The sun set behind the lofty mountains at 3 p.m., and in the morning a thick, wet, white, dripping fog settled in the bottom of the valley, and extended to 800 or 1000 feet above the river-bed; this was probably caused by the descent of cold currents into the humid gorge: it was dissipated soon after sunrise, but formed again at sunset for a few minutes, giving place to clear starlight nights.
Less than half an hour later the pack was scrambling and sliding down the high banks of a river-bed, in the centre of which, surrounded upon both sides by a quarter of a mile and more of shingle and hard-baked mud, there was still a disconnected chain of small, yellow pools of water.
Their elephant was descending into the river-bed, and the walls and towers of Adamkot were dominating in dusky red the landscape to their right, when Gerrard uttered an exclamation, and pointed out a small body of mounted men surrounding an elephant, who were approaching their camp from the opposite side. "From Agpur!" he said. "Who can be coming? A woman's howdah, too!
Another reason that made it more easy for Erewhon to remain unknown, was the fact that the more mountainous districts, though repeatedly prospected for gold, had been pronounced non-auriferous, and as there was no sheep or cattle country, save a few river-bed flats above the upper gorges of any of the rivers, and no game to tempt the sportsman, there was nothing to induce people to penetrate into the fastnesses of the great snowy range.
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