For the next hour we climbed steadily up, the roads growing narrow and rocky and full of chuck-holes. Everything that is rough and bad going in the Far West is “chucky,” and we were soon to get acquainted with _real_ chuck-holes. Presently we came out on a plateau, and before us lay the Bad Lands of North Dakota. You may read of them, see pictures of them, or see them from a train, but you have never really seen their wonder, their grotesquely beautiful grandeur, until you stand in their midst as we did. High cliffs, deep canyons, queer formations of stone and earth that look like great castles or human heads. Again they resemble mushrooms of mammoth size, in all colors--gray, pink, orange, black, greens of a dull hue (not from the verdure, for there is none to speak of), yellows, and even purplish and chalky white. Here again you can see the outline of some giant creature, as if it had been carved in a prehistoric age. We are told that the sea once covered these lands. You can plainly see the ridges, like a rock on the ocean shore where the water has receded. I suppose they are called the Bad Lands because they are arid and nothing will grow. They are the wonderlands of this country--geological wonders, left from some glacial period before the foot of man trod the earth. No pen can adequately describe that scene; no brush could do justice to its weird beauty. The stillness of death reigned. Not a bird or a living creature did we see. The way winds around these strange cliffs, now up a steep incline, where you look down at the road below, again in the bottom of a ravine or chuck-hole, and you wonder how you could drive the car either down or up again. “Did you ever see anything like this, anywhere?” “No, but it looks like what I imagine the bottom of hell must look like.” All that day we drove in and out, with an ever-changing panorama of fantastic shapes and colors. We were awed, thrilled to our very marrow, and even now, weeks later, as I write of it, I realize that my hands are cold. Believe me, my friends, this is the acid test of driving. If you qualified, well and good; but if you lost your nerve or your head--a long good-night, and a perfectly good funeral! Glendive, Montana, and the comfortable Jordan Annex looked human and mighty good to us that night. We all admitted that we were scared half to death. But, oh, the wonder and majesty of that sight! We blessed our good car, we blessed our Maker, and we slept as if we had been drugged. X THE DUST OF MONTANA