Now for the fierce onset. Like blasts of a blizzard, the shrapnel of the desert is hurled into eyes, face, ears, and nostrils; little rivers pour down the back and fill every discoverable wrinkle and cranny of the clothing with their gritty load. If in summer, buttoning the clothing is suffocation, and the perspiration soon makes one a mass of grime; if in winter, it is not so unbearable, for a comfortable fencing can be made against the sand and the cold. The whole landscape is obliterated by and by, and the trails are so often drift-filled that unless one is himself accustomed to such methods of travel or has an experienced plainsman as his driver and guide, there is danger of becoming lost, or so out of the way that night may overtake him and compel a waterless camp for himself and team. TWILIGHT AND DAWN But to see the morning slip off its night clothes and step out into daylight, or watch day don her night-wraps and snuggle down into twilight on the quiet sand-ocean! In summer it is a scene of splendor, often coming after a day or an evening of sandy wrath. At early dawn, lining the eastern horizon, are the soft pencils of bashful day over-topping the jagged sawteeth of the yet sleeping mountains, fifty or more miles away. A faint hinting of the lightening of the sky only deepens the blackness of the snow-streaked peaks. The cowardly coyote's yelp comes more and more faintly, the burrowing owl's "to-whit, to-whoo" falls dying on the moveless air, and the white sparrow of the sagebrush starts up as if to catch the early worm he is almost sure not to find. The loping jack rabbit slips softly to his greasewood shelter and the prairie dog bounces barking from his snake-infested haunt, noisily preparing for his day's digging and foraging. The stubborn mountains begin to let the sun's forerunning rays glide between them; the sky, now old gold, is fast transforming into kaleidoscopic crimsons and other reds, while the swift arms of the day-painter are reaching from between the peaks of the precipitous crags and dyeing the scales of the mackerel sky with hues and tints the rainbow would covet. In the opposite direction a morning mirage inverts an image of a stretch of trees along the far-away river and blends them top to top till they seem greenish-black columns supporting the dun clouds of the west, while the belated moon peers through the half-unreal corridors. SUNSET