The first part of the journey was dull enough, spinning through the everlasting monotony of prairie, with glimpses of antelopes and wrathful prairie dogs. We turned into bed rather early and next day found ourselves in the midst of the lovely wild scenery of the Rocky Mountains, great crags towering over the line with terrifying threats, as if the shaking of the train must bring them down upon us. In places great falls of snow had been tunnelled through, and the gorges were spanned by crazy wooden bridges that rocked under the long chain of cars. The line was high up among the snows, laid at giddy heights some eight thousand feet above sea-level. It was an Indian country, so there was a good deal of what Prairie Bill would have called “poison” about. The curious-looking creatures, wrapped in their shoddy blankets, hung about the railway stations, impassive, unnoticing, impenetrable, as little moved as if they had been corpses by all that was going on around them. Had they any feelings? Perhaps, but they never showed them. At Ogden we changed into the Salt Lake train. CHAPTER XXXIII THE MORMONS AND BRIGHAM YOUNG I had long wished to see the capital of the Mormons. Their story was so utterly unlike the nineteenth century, that in spite of much that was vulgar and contemptible it seemed to have a flavour of medieval romance. The visions of Joe Smith, the farmer’s boy; the golden plates containing the book of Mormon, revealed by an angel in 1823, and deciphered with the help of the Urim and Thummim; the persecutions and tortures endured by the Saints with the heroism of martyrs; their flights, hounded from place to place; the murder of the Prophet and his brother, Hyrum Smith, after an audacious bid for the Presidentship of the United States; the Nauvoo Massacre; the crossing of the Mississippi to Council Bluffs; Brigham Young succeeding to the mantle of the Prophet, and, like a second Moses, leading the Saints over the trackless desert and the terrors of the Rocky Mountains, until on the 24th of July, 1847, decimated by all the horrors of extreme heat and cold, fatigue, hunger, thirst and disease, they reached their Pisgah! That much of all this, and more yet to come, should have taken place within the memory of living men was indeed strange. And when the Mormons looked down upon the plain below the Wahsatch Mountains, and saw the great Salt Lake gleaming like a jewel in the sun, there arose from them a great cry recalling the “Thalatta! Thalatta!” of Xenophon’s ten thousand, and with one voice they shouted: “The Land of Promise! The Land of Promise, held in reserve by the hand of God for the resting-place of His Saints!”