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Updated: June 16, 2025
The day ended, and the night seemed a black blank to Lucy. Another sunrise found Creech leading on, sparing neither Lucy nor the horses. He kept on a steady walk or trot, and he picked out ground less likely to leave any tracks. Like an old deer he doubled on his trail. He traveled down stream-beds where the water left no trail. That day the mustangs began to fail. The others were wearing out.
The sick horse was then at its worst; it had lain down, and for a time we believed it was really dead; it was out of the question for it to go further; so, calling one of the villagers, I told him that he might have the horse, and if there was any possibility of curing, it, he should do what might be necessary. From four to seven it was a tiresome climb, largely through stream-beds to Carvajal.
There I left the party and wandered alone into one of those tortuous stream-beds that intersect the plain, searching for a certain kind of crystal which may be found in such places, washed out of the soil by wintry torrents. I specialized in minerals in those days minerals and girls. Dangerous and unprofitable studies!
It was at the termination of one of these dry stream-beds that Mr. Heard set foot on shore. Panting under the relentless heat he wound his way along a path once carefully tended and engineered, but now crumbling to decay. Before him, on a treeless brown eminence, silhouetted against the blue sky, stood the ruin. It was a fanciful woe-begone structure, utterly desolate.
It should, however, be added, that towards the end of this terrible season some relief is afforded to the river supply by the melting of the snow upon the higher Himalayas, which sends down some water into the almost exhausted stream-beds.
The journey, too, is charming, both by the ordinary track that descends from Rossano and skirts the foot of the hills through olives and pebbly stream-beds, ascending, finally, across an odorous tangle of cistus, rosemary and myrtle to the platform on which the convent stands or by the alternative and longer route which I took on the homeward way, and which follows the old water conduit built by the monks into a forest of enormous chestnuts, oaks, hollies and Calabrian pines, emerging out of an ocean of glittering bracken.
Go out on the creeks and see the hills denuded of their timber, the stream-beds punched with innumerable holes, filled up or filling up, the cabins and sluice-boxes rotting into the moss, here and there a broken pick and shovel, here and there a rusting boiler, and take notice that this region has been "developed."
After heavy showers the naked eye can note spangles of the precious metal in the street-roads. You can pan it out of the wall-swish. The little stream-beds, bone-dry throughout the hot season, roll down, during the rains, a quantity of dark arenaceous matter, like that of Taranaki, New Zealand, and the 'black sand' of Australia, which collects near the sea in stripes and patches.
Why, in France, I've seen hill peasants mining their stream-beds for soil as our fathers mined the streams of California for gold. Only our gold's gone, and the peasants' soil remains, turning over and over, doing something, growing something, all the time. Now, I guess I'll hush." "My God!" Billy muttered in awe-stricken tones. "Our folks never done that. No wonder they lost out."
The several stream-beds, about to prove so precious, run chocolate-tinted water over vegetable mire, rich, when stirred, in sulphuretted hydrogen. The only bridges are fallen trunks.
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