The Tiger-Slayer by Gustave Aimard — Read

The great desert del Norte is the American Sahara -- more extensive, more to be feared, than the African Sahara; for it contains no laughing oases, sheltered by fine trees, and refreshed by sparkling fountains. Beneath a coppery sky extend immense plains, covered with a dirty-greyish sand; in every direction horizons succeed horizons; sand, ever sand, fine impalpable sand, bearing a closer resemblance with human dust, which the wind carries aloft in long whirlwinds, whose desolating aspect varies incessantly at the will of the tempest, which hollows out valleys and throws up hills each time the fearful _cordonazo_ howls across this desolate soil.

Greyish rocks, covered with patches of parched lichen, at times lift up their stunted crests in the midst of this chaos, which has not changed its appearance since the creation. The buffalo, the ashata, the swift-footed antelope, shun this desert, where their feet would only rest on a shifting soil; flocks of blear-eyed and ill-omened vultures alone soar over these regions in search of extremely rare prey for the desert is so horrible that the Indians themselves enter on it with a tremour, and cross it with express speed when they return to their villages after a foray on the Mexican territory. And yet, however rapid their journey may be, their passage is marked in an indelible manner by the skeletons of mules and horses which they are compelled to abandon, and whose bones blanch in the desert, until the hurricane, again unchained, covers all with a cerecloth of sand.