Around the World in 100 Days by Gary Blackwood
Author:Gary Blackwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-11T22:00:00+00:00
TWENTY-TWO In which
A TRAVELER AND A DAY ARE LOST
The following morning they left Ogden behind at last, but Harry continued to cling close to the railroad. According to the owner of the livery stable, the land that lay between here and San Francisco was mostly desert, with nothing resembling a real town, only a few gold-mining camps. If they ran into trouble, the railroad would be their only lifeline.
They had loaded the motorcar down with extra cans of kerosene and water. Though they were within sight of the Great Salt Lake for most of the day, they couldn’t draw water from it; the high concentration of salt would have played havoc with the boiler and the pipes.
The land was almost completely barren. They passed at least a dozen bleached skeletons of horses and mules and oxen that had perished trying to haul some gold seeker’s wagon to California or Nevada. To block the sun, they raised the leather rain hood of the Flash, but it turned the interior of the car into an oven.
Harry handed the wheel over to Johnny and caught a few hours of fitful, sweaty sleep. Around dusk, he took over and drove through the night, stopping only once to take on water from a railroad storage tank. Late the next day, they reached the Humboldt River. It wasn’t much compared with the broad Platte, which they had followed through Nebraska; still, after three hundred miles of parched land it was a welcome sight. Since they were nearly out of kerosene, they filled the storage box with birch and juniper twigs for fuel.
Harry considered driving through the night again, but the carbide for the lamps was running low, too; so was his energy. With only four days left before the ship sailed for Hong Kong, he couldn’t afford to fall sick again. They camped by the Humboldt and in the morning followed the river westward. After another night spent in the wild, they reached Reno, a busy mining town at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. The mountains promised to be a bit of a struggle, but after that it should be a quick and easy run to San Francisco. According to Harry’s reckoning they still had two days to get there.
They had their first decent meal in days, and Elizabeth filed her first dispatch since leaving Ogden, then they climbed aboard the Flash again. As in the Appalachians and the Rockies, the only practical route over the Sierras was the one laid out by the railroad. They passed through a landscape of such rugged, breath-stopping beauty that Elizabeth exclaimed, “Oh, look!” at least once every ten minutes. Harry couldn’t look for long, lest he drive off the railroad ties.
Trains were scarcer out here than in the Eastern states—luckily, since the roadbed was seldom wide enough to accommodate both a motorcar and a train. They spent most of their time either bumping along over insubstantial-looking trestles that spanned sickeningly deep gorges or else creeping through incredibly long, dark tunnels carved from solid rock.
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