Explore "The Blunderer of the Wasteland" by Christopher Ward on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Death Valley! Surrounded by ragged, jagged peaks, floored with ashes, borax, sandsoap, dutch-cleanser, watered by arsenic springs, swept by furnace blasts, it was, indeed, an unpleasant place. "The lid of h -- ll," a profane prospector had called it.
Yet there, in a rude shack on the sloping mountain side, overhung by an impending mass of loose rock, from which ever and anon gigantic fragments detached themselves to roll with a booming crash into the valley below, missing the cabin only by inches, dwelt Magdalene Virey and Elliott, her husband.