Across a bare and sandy divide wallowed and crunched a weary party of horses, men, and dogs. Bare and desolate mountains surrounded them, and one rose in sheer gray granite, capped by a black stratum of lava, apparently two hundred feet thick. Of even desert vegetation there was not a trace here. The sand buried everything, even the mountain sides. One could hear the faint lisp-lisp of it, moving stealthily along, grain by grain, under the flow of the southwesterly winds rolling up from the Gulf of California. “Shore this is the country that Gawd jest didn’t know _what_ to do with!” ejaculated Big John, mopping his sweating forehead and getting a new bite on the corner of his bandanna with his teeth. “Whar’s yore desert gyarden, hyarabouts, Sid?” “We’ll come to it, just over the ridge--according to the map made by the Hornaday expedition,” replied Sid cheerily. For perhaps the twentieth time since they had left Represa Tank early that morning, that little book-page map was taken out and scanned by the whole party. Big John always liked to convince himself, by standing on the map as it were, that they were really following it. In these endless dunes it would be easy to take the wrong gap and miss MacDougal Pass altogether. “See?” said Sid, pointing out the landmarks, “that range ahead of us they named the Hornaday mountains. They abut on the Pass in a right angle. I’d give a lot to know what’s in that angle behind them! _No_ one knows. There’s a little piece of the earth for you, Scotty, as unexplored as the North Pole!” Scotty said nothing. He had not yet recovered from the disappointment of finding Red Mesa apparently a myth. The whole business looked worse than ever now. Even assuming that the Papagoes might have been confused in translating east and west and so have given Fra Pedro the wrong compass bearing, twenty-one miles north_west_ of Pinacate would be _right here_, where they were now riding--and there was no such thing as a mesa in sight anywhere! The mountains here were all of rugged gray granite, tumbled and saw-toothed, with faint tinges of green showing where some hardy desert vegetation had got a roothold. Mesa! This was volcanic country, all cones or jagged outcroppings of granite! thought Scotty, disconsolately. He rode on dejectedly after Niltci and the dogs, who were scouring the sand for game tracks. A short way from here the first tracks of sheep had been seen by the Hornaday party, and further south antelope had been shot by John Phillips in the craters of the extinct volcanoes which dotted this country.