I remember that one forenoon I looked forward to the base of the Big Horn
Mountains and selected a most engaging nook for the night's camp. My good
opinion of it was confirmed when we reached it three days later. The
deception in this instance was due to nothing but the marvelous lucidity
of the atmosphere and the absence of objects of known dimensions, and
these sources of error are sometimes sufficient of themselves to produce
the most incredible illusions. When they are in alliance with the mirage
the combination's pranks are bewildering.
One of the most grotesque and least comfortable of my experiences with the
magicians of the air occurred near the forks of the Platte. There had been
a tremendous thunder-storm, lasting all night. In the morning my party set
forward over the soaken prairie under a cloudless sky intensely blue. I
was riding in advance, absorbed in thought, when I was suddenly roused to
a sense of material things by exclamations of astonishment and
apprehension from the men behind. Looking forward, I beheld a truly
terrifying spectacle. Immediately in front, at a distance, apparently, of
not more than a quarter-mile, was a long line of the most formidable
looking monsters that the imagination ever conceived. They were taller
than trees. In them the elements of nature seemed so fantastically and
discordantly confused and blended, compounded, too, with architectural and
mechanical details, that they partook of the triple character of animals,
houses and machines.
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