dust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay back from
the wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky, heavy with
substance.

A thousand hills lay bare to the sky, and half of every hill was wheat
and half was fallow ground; and all of them, with the shallow valleys
between, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty of them was
austere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green his
home site, as if the immensity of the task had left no time for youth
and freshness. Years, long years, were there in the round-hilled,
many-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old. Here
and there a straight, dusty road stretched from hill to hill, becoming a
thin white line, to disappear in the distance. The sun shone hot, the
wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered a
shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not
physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of
wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay
and death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this wandering
patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and
rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the
miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest;
and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun.
A singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long, slowly rising
slopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving lines on all sides.
The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; it was sublime
because not a hundred harvests, nor three generations of toiling men,
could ever rob nature of its limitless space and scorching sun and
sweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creep back toward the desert
that it had been.