The Desert of Wheat

CHAPTER I

Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a
tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling,
smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles
of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men
who had conquered over sage and sand.

These simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft gray
and golden billows of land, insignificant dots here and there on distant
hills, so far apart that nature only seemed accountable for those broad
squares of alternate gold and brown, extending on and on to the waving
horizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country, where flowers and fruit
were not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling strings of
dust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay back from
the wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky, heavy with
substance.

A thousand hills lay bare to the sky, and half of every hill was wheat
and half was fallow ground; and all of them, with the shallow valleys
between, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty of them was
austere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green his
home site, as if the immensity of the task had left no time for youth
and freshness. Years, long years, were there in the round-hilled,
many-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old. Here
and there a straight, dusty road stretched from hill to hill, becoming a
thin white line, to disappear in the distance. The sun shone hot, the
wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered 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 wandering
patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and
rolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the
miles. The other half had only a faint golden promise 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, in the endless curving lines on all sides.
The scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; it was sublime
because not a hundred harvests, nor three generations of toiling men,
could ever rob nature of its limitless space and scorching sun and
sweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creep back toward the desert
that it had been.