Zane Grey

The Desert of Wheat Zane Grey

A thousand hills lay bare to the sky, and half of every hill was wheat and half was fallow ground; andall of them, with the shallow valleys between, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty ofthem was austere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green his home site, as ifthe immensity of the task had left no time for youth and freshness. Years, long years, were there inthe round-hilled, many-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old. Here and therea straight, dusty road stretched from hill to hill, becoming a thin white line, to disappear in thedistance. The sun shone hot, the wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expansehovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay and death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this wanderingpatchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and combed andharrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the miles. The other half had only a faint goldenpromise of mellow harvest; and at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun. A singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long, slowly rising slopes, in the rounded hills, inthe endless curving lines on all sides. The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; itwas sublime because not a hundred harvests, nor three generations of toiling men, could ever robnature of its limitless space and scorching sun and sweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creepback toward the desert that it had bee