Explore "Red Mesa" by Warren H. Miller on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Across a bare and sandy divide wallowed and crunched a weary party of horses, men, and dogs. Bare and desolate mountains surrounded them, and one rose in sheer gray granite, capped by a black stratum of lava, apparently two hundred feet thick. Of even desert vegetation there was not a trace here. The sand buried everything, even the mountain sides. One could hear the faint lisp-lisp of it, moving stealthily along, grain by grain, under the flow of the southwesterly winds rolling up from the Gulf of California.
"Shore this is the country that Gawd jest didn't know _what_ to do with! " ejaculated Big John, mopping his sweating forehead and getting a new bite on the corner of his bandanna with his teeth. "Whar's yore desert gyarden, hyarabouts, Sid?"