The poetry was all in the anticipation—there is none in the reality.
Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes;
imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine
the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a
coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level,
and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by
steam; imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour
after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently; imagine
team, driver, coach and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they
are all one colorless color; imagine ash-drifts roosting above mustaches
and eyebrows like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. This is the
reality of it.
The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity; the
perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but scarcely a
sign of it finds its way to the surface—it is absorbed before it gets
there; there is not the faintest breath of air stirring; there is not a
merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament; there is not a
living creature visible in any direction whither one searches the blank
level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a
sound—not a sigh—not a whisper—not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or
distant pipe of bird—not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless
people that dead air.