When they reached the crest of the hill and looked out beyond it, not a man spoke for a moment, though at the first glance a few uttered ejaculations of astonishment or dismay and then became silent. Before them in the brilliant sunlight and lengthening shadows of late afternoon spread a scene of such weird and desolate grandeur as has few parallels in the world. Six hundred feet below lay the bottom of a vast basin, apparently twenty-five or thirty miles in diameter. From rim to rim it was piled with cones and pyramids of volcanic rock or baked clay and other hills of every imaginable fantastic shape, some of the peaks rising to a level with the surrounding country and some lower, but all glowing with confused and varied color, from gray and yellow to blue and brick red. Over all this huge, extinct oven of what had doubtless been, sometime in ages gone, a great coal bed which had burned out, hardly a sign of vegetation was visible save here and there a few small, straggling cedars or bushes on the barren hillsides. The place resembled strongly the ruins of some mighty, prehistoric city, but more strongly still it reminded the beholder of some of Dante's vivid descriptions of the infernal regions. They bivouacked that night on the prairie and early next morning marched down into the forbidding basin, knowing not whether they would ever emerge from it alive. All day long in suffocating heat and under the glare of an almost intolerable sun they toiled forward, winding in and out through gorges with high, perpendicular walls and yawning ravines so narrow that only one wagon could pass at a time. No water could be found save a little which was bitter with alkali. A large pioneer party was in advance, grading along hillsides and filling gullies so that the wagons might pass; by nightfall the army had succeeded in covering twelve miles and found itself on the bank of the Little Missouri, where at least water and grass were abundant. But the expedition was literally buried in the Bad Lands, which, on the western side of the stream, still stretched before them in a wilderness of mountains and gorges even more forbidding than those they had already passed. Fortunately no Indians had yet opposed them, and many of the men, especially those in the advance and on the flanks, had found some pleasure mixed with their labor in viewing the strange and beautiful rock formations through which they passed. Here were many petrified stumps and fallen trunks of trees on the tops and sides of the hills. Some of them were of immense size and wonderfully preserved, showing the bark, the stumps of branches, and the age rings of the interior wood. At one place was seen what the men called a "petrified sawmill", consisting of what appeared like a pile of lumber and slabs under the edge of a hill and, close by it, a large tree, cut up into logs of exact length, such as might be found around any sawmill, but all of stone as hard as granite. In addition to the