Next day the party woke to a wonderful sense of lightness and exhilaration
which no one could account for till the conductor told them that the
apparently level plain over which they were speeding was more than four
thousand feet above the sea. It seemed impossible to believe it. Hour by
hour they climbed; but the climb was imperceptible. Now four thousand six
hundred feet of elevation was reported, now four thousand eight hundred,
at last above five thousand; and still there seemed about them nothing
but a vast expanse of flat levels,--the table-lands of Nebraska. There was
little that was beautiful in the landscape, which was principally made up
of wide reaches of sand, dotted with cactus and grease-wood and with the
droll cone-shaped burrows of the prairie-dogs, who could be seen gravely
sitting on the roofs of their houses, or turning sudden somersaults in at
the holes on top as the train whizzed by. They passed and repassed long
links of a broad shallow river which the maps showed to be the Platte, and
which seemed to be made of two-thirds sand to one-third water. Now and
again mounted horsemen appeared in the distance whom Mr. Dayton said were
"cow-boys;" but no cows were visible, and the rapidly moving figures were
neither as picturesque nor as formidable as they had expected them to be.
Flowers were still abundant, and their splendid masses gave the charm of
color to the rather arid landscape.
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