Our route lay over the same road back through Brigham, a beautiful drive that far, then it turned northwest, over the northern part of the Great Salt Lake desert, ninety miles to Snowville. The sand was so deep that we crawled most of the way. The sun scorched our skin and eyes until they felt dry as ashes. We had left the railroad and telegraph poles and had but a single-file path through the sand, with chuck-holes every few feet. When the wind blew it felt as if an oven-door had been opened in your face, and the snow-white sand covered everything, including the tracks in the road, which was not pleasant. Nothing was to be seen except the endless sand, dry sagebrush, cactus, and an occasional prairie-dog. We met but two cars that day. I can conceive of nothing more utterly desolate and God-forsaken than the desert. There is a silence of deathlike stillness that gets on the nerves, and the sameness is wearisome. We were glad to see Snowville, although Snowville was not much to see. It consisted of one street, with possibly twenty houses, a garage, two stores, and a few trees. The people who owned the grocery-store rented rooms. They were kind and hospitable, and made us comfortable as they could. One cannot pick and choose in the desert. You are glad and thankful to find anything that looks like a bed and water. The woman told us that the two stalwart young men were her sons, just returned from service; one was a major. They were running the garage and helping in the store. The whole family were educated, intelligent people, except the old man, whose vocabulary was limited to “You bet!” and “By heck!” What they could find in life in such surroundings, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to commend the place, was hard to conceive. And yet the mother told me that the women in the village had done more Red Cross work during the war than those of any town of its size in the state, and they had oversubscribed their quota in the Liberty Loans! “The war did not seem very real to us ’way out here,” she said. “What we read in the papers seemed like a novel. But when my boys went it brought it nearer home to _me_. We were so far from the busy world our lives were too limited to realize what was going on across the seas.” I could understand that, for one day of the desert made me feel an isolation that I never had felt in the middle of the Atlantic. They had a bathroom; but if the water was being used in the garage or kitchen, it would not run upstairs. Someone had driven miles away to get some meat for supper; so it was quite late before we had anything to eat. Fried meat, fried eggs, fried potatoes--all soaked in grease; no milk or butter, and the coffee and tea we could not drink.