The journey, he suspected, had been a disappointment in other
ways,--had failed in impressiveness, in personal significance; had fallen
at times below the level of the occasion, at others had overpowered it and
swept it out of sight. Thane could have told him that it must be so. There
was room for too many mourners in that primeval waste. Whose small special
grief could make itself heard in that vast arid silence, the voice of which
was God? God in nature, awful, inscrutable, alone, had gained a new meaning
for Mr. Withers. Miles of desert, days of desert, like waves of brute
oblivion had swept over him. Never before had he felt the oppression of
purely natural causes, the force of the physical in conflict with the
spiritual law. And now he was to submit to a final illustration of it,
perhaps the simplest and most natural one of all.
Daphne was seated at a little distance on her camp-stool, making a drawing
of the desert cross-roads with the twin sign-posts pointing separate
ways, as an appropriate finish to her Snake River sketch-book. The sun
was tremendous, the usual Snake River zephyr was blowing forty miles an
hour, and the flinty ground refused to take the brass-shod point of her
umbrella-staff.
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