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All through the month of August they travelled, the Boy looking upon the land he had been so eager to see with eyes that saw nothing but his own disappointment, and the barrenness of his future. The hot sun beat down upon the shadeless prairies with the intensity of a living flame.
It was infinitely, it was nobly "quaint," but, as the trees stand at wide intervals and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest itself was only the more characteristic of its clime and country for being perfectly shadeless.
So far there had mostly been trees dotted here and there by the wayside, but on Monday morning the way grew wilder and rougher, they were getting out in the back country, and all round there was nothing to be seen save rolling downs and broad sheep paddocks, while the road stretched shadeless and glaring for miles on miles before them, and every step stirred blinding clouds of dust.
The fluted, leafless stems of these high-towering cactus candelabras bristled with fierce thorns, yet each was crowned with the glory of a gorgeous foot-wide blossom. Over the loose hot sand, amidst this shadeless mockery of a forest, Carmena swung steadily along at her graceful stride. Her movements seemed as lacking in effort as the lope of a coyote or the bound of a cat.
A shadeless electric lamp hung from the ceiling. Excepting the cane-seated chair in which he had been deposited and a certain amount of nondescript lumber, the attic was unfurnished. Dan rapidly considered what his father would have done in the circumstances. "Make sure that the door is locked," he muttered. He tried it, and it was locked beyond any shadow of doubt. "The window."
He came into a blazing-hot, glaring white street jammed with all sorts of vehicles, the drivers of which seemed perpetually upon the point of riot. Before him stretched a shadeless brick pavement, with a railroad track on one side, and on the other a line of naked frame buildings hideous in their sameness. The sun beat down fiercely.
What further reliance he placed on Ignacio's story is not known; but, in commemoration of a worthy Californian custom, the place was called "La Canada de la Tentacion del Pio Muletero," or "The Glen of the Temptation of the Pious Muleteer," a name which it retains to this day. The next morning the party, issuing from a narrow gorge, came upon a long valley, sear and burnt with the shadeless heat.
To watch them and to walk up and down the shadeless aisles of shrubbery, to sit on the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme cases to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, seemed to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea Park could do.
Shadeless and colourless, to the limit of vision, it rose and fell in long billowing waves; as if some wizard, in the morning of the world, had smitten a living ocean to lifeless sand, where nothing flourished but the camel thorn and the ak plant and gaunt cactus bushes their limbs petrified in weird gesticulation.
One-half of it, roughly, was covered with giant forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals with opulence upon their backs. One-half was covered with vegetation, varying from the luxuriant prairie grass to the sage-brush of the shadeless plains, plains roamed by beasts clothed with valuable robes.
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