The band broke camp at once, to push on through the rugged mountain-paths as long as there might be daylight enough to go by. That was why the darkness, when it came, found them scattered all along the bottom of a tremendous gorge, walled in by vast perpendicular faces of quartz and granite rock. Even Ping thought it wonderful, when the straggling camp-fires were kindled, that their light did not stream half-way up those walls, and left the rest in shadow until the moon rose high enough to show them.
On the morning of the second day after Ping and Tah-nu-nu and the blankets proved to be too much "bad medicine" for one poor cougar, the sun arose hotly over one of the dreariest bits of scenery in southern New Mexico. It was the gravel desert described to Cal Evans by Sam Herrick. No mountains were visible on the south or east, and the ranges of tall peaks westerly and northerly were a very long day's journey from the most interesting spot in that entire plain. Everywhere else even the cactus-plants and scrubby mesquit-trees and stiff-fingered sage-brushes were scarce, as if they did not care to struggle for a living in so mean a country. Here, on the contrary, there was a dense chaparral of every kind of growth, excepting tall trees, that is common to that climate, and spreading for miles and miles. In many places the chaparral was so high and so thick that a man on horseback could have been hidden in it from another man at a short distance.
If any man had ridden into it, however, perhaps his first declaration might have been, "All this thorn and famine shrubbery was laid out by a lot of crazy spiders."
Innumerable paths led through it, crossing or running into each other in a manner to have perplexed a carpet-weaver or a military map-maker, and everybody knows what tangled patterns they can make. The spiders had not done it, but the larger kinds of four-footed wild animals. They had worked at those paths for ages, treading them down all the while, and preventing any vegetable growth from choking them up.
There was really no tangle, at least none that could perplex the clear mind of a bison or an antelope, and all the threads of that spider-web had more or less reference to a common centre towards which the main lines tended.