CHAPTER III.
Concluding the Route to the Great Salt Lake City.
I arose "between two days," a little before 4 A.M., and watched the dawn, and found in its beauties a soothing influence, which acted upon stiff limbs and discontented spirit as if it had been a spell.
The stars of the Great Bear—the prairie night-clock—first began to pale without any seeming cause, till presently a faint streak of pale light—dum i gurg, or the wolf's tail, as it is called by the Persian—began to shimmer upon the eastern verge of heaven. It grew and grew through the dark blue air: one unaccustomed to the study of the "gray-eyed morn" would have expected it to usher in the day, when, gradually as it had struggled into existence, it faded, and a deeper darkness than before once more invaded the infinitude above. But now the unrisen sun is more rapidly climbing the gloomy walls of Koh i Kaf—the mountain rim which encircles the world, and through whose lower gap the false dawn had found its way—preceded by a warm flush of light, which chases the shades till, though loth to depart, they find neither on earth nor in the firmament a place where they can linger. Warmer and warmer waxes the heavenly radiance, gliding up to the keystone of the vault above; fainter and fainter grows the darkness, till the last stain disappears behind the Black Hills to the west, and the stars one by one, like glow-worms, "pale their ineffectual fires"—the "Pointers" are the longest to resist—retreat backward, as it were, and fade away into endless space. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the marvelous hues of "glorious morn," here truly a fresh "birth of heaven and earth," all gold and sapphire, acquire depth and distinctness, till at last a fiery flush ushers from beneath the horizon the source of all these splendors,
"Robed in flames and amber light;"
and another day, with its little life of joys and sorrows, of hopes and fears, is born to the world.
Though we all rose up early, packed, and were ready to proceed, there was an unusual vis inertiæ on the part of the driver: Indians were about; the mules, of course, had bolted; but that did not suffice as explanation. Presently the "wonder leaked out:" our companions were transferred from their comfortable vehicle to a real "shandridan," a Rocky-Mountain bone-setter. They were civil enough to the exceedingly drunken youth—a runaway New Yorker—who did us the honor of driving us; for
