car, illusory forest stands for mile upon mile. Up hill or down
or across the level it is the same--a narrow, winding trail
through dimly seen woods. The most familiar road grows strange;
the miles are longer; you drive through mystery and silence and
the world around you is a formless void.

Dawn and a gorgeous sunrise painted out the woods and revealed
barren hilltops which Casey did not know. Because he did not
know them, he guessed shrewdly that he was on his way to the
wilderness of mountains and sand which lies west of Death Valley.
Small chance he had of hearing the shop whistles blow in Las
Vegas at noon, as he had expected.

He was telling himself that he didn't care where he went, when
the car, laboring more and more reluctantly up a long, sandy
hill, suddenly stopped. In Casey's heart was a thrill at the
sheer luxury of stopping in the middle of the road without having
some thick-necked cop stride toward him bawling insults. That he
was obliged to stop, and that a hill uptilted before him, and the
sand was a foot deep outside the ruts failed to impress him with
foreboding. He gloried in his freedom and thought not at all of
the Ford.

He climbed stiffly out, squinted at the sky line, which was
jagged, and at his immediate surroundings, which were barren and
lonely and soothing to his soul that hungered for these things.
Great, gaunt "Joshua" trees stood in grotesque groups all up and
down the narrow valley, hiding the way he had come from the way
he would go. It was as if the desert had purposely dropped a
curtain before his past and would show him none of his future.