Even my own body or my own
head seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling
the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in
the experience of others. Day and night, above the roar of the
train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of
grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and
watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land.
To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration
in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery
of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line
of the horizon. Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness
of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of
oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that
unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily
fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to
overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for
repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead
green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. But the
eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the
worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil.
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