Sometimes, in a daze, Dear Reader, I confess, I do not know I am alive. Sometimes, I gaze upon the Sweetwater's River's shore in a dream, I know, I know I did not make it. I know this—was but a dream. And, in life, the noose has slipped around my neck and the trap door has opened somewhere over the mountains, in the desert, just beyond an oasis, a mirage. For what else can California be? Or Charlotte? Or the fate that—that they—that some of my very own readers—met?

[The fiddler reprises "Loop #9, Strange Land." Hastings continues slowly:]

† July 18, 1846

The next geographical feature the pioneer finds is Devil's Gate, a steep rock formation cleft into the earth as though by a strike of the Good Lord's axe. The ridges on either side rise to heights of nearly 400 feet—yet the path through which one must pass is only 50 feet wide. It is hardly the needle's eye, but the emigrant gets the sense something is vetted in this narrow, gloomy passage through which the Sweetwater River threads—once mighty enough to have torn this gap into a formidable rock wall. The Sweetwater is a river considerably less pliant and pleasing than her name. Allow me to tell you of a little ditty written of an 18-year-old who had climbed up the cliff just to see it from the top, much as I once had when I was not much older:

Here lies the body of Caroline Todd
Whose soul has lately gone to God;
Ere redemption was too late,
She was redeemed at Devil's Gate.

Through the gate, the mountains reveal themselves to the traveler, crowding the space between the dirt and infinity. That wideness opens a sense to whose possession the traveler was hitherto ignorant. Such ignorance that attends the rigors of civilization slips away along the banks of rivers that wander against the direction he travels, against all that he knows.

The body loses time; the mind loses the clock that so bound it back East until the march of days is sublimated by a march of miles that are themselves subordinate to the procession of landmarks every pioneer knows, and the wild rivers and the canyons they lash through solid rock beyond.

Next up was the Continental Divide, to be traversed at the Great South Pass. Here, the Good Lord has parted the Rockies as he once did the Red Sea. Indeed the Promised Land lies beyond the Continental Divide. And, God, acting as his very own Moses, has provided you, Dear Reader, with the Great South Pass, found at the 42nd parallel, where the mountains' shoulders slope low enough for even a wagon wheel—granted at an elevation of 8,000 feet. Upon this mountain plain, among the sagebrush, the Sweetwater flow dwindles to a trickle on the East side, as the Pacific Creek rises to the West.

How strange it seems to refer to the Continental Divide as an East-West matter! Surely, that dates my story some 20 years! And, here is another anecdote that might do the same:

When Charlotte and I lived in the Montezuma House—the little, adobe cottage I built—as I mentioned, we entertained a number of guests passing through, nearly acting as a de facto inn for those en route to the Gold Rush underway at Sutter's fort.