There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soil had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the ponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there was in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there! Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie, whispering with the high wind,--and no life but ours shut in among the group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of Childe Roland's Tower,--
"those two hills on the right Couched,"--
and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me. That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of life, an arrival, an end.
The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to which we drove,--a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone on that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and hardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of the abandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be, by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and she shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. I have often thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some image of other solitudes--and men and women in them--as expansive, as alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows dehumanized, and dies.