{"product_id":"2940013417953","title":"The Desert of Wheat","description":"CHAPTER I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLate in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a\u003cbr\u003etinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling,\u003cbr\u003esmooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles\u003cbr\u003eof waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men\u003cbr\u003ewho had conquered over sage and sand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft gray\u003cbr\u003eand golden billows of land, insignificant dots here and there on distant\u003cbr\u003ehills, so far apart that nature only seemed accountable for those broad\u003cbr\u003esquares of alternate gold and brown, extending on and on to the waving\u003cbr\u003ehorizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country, where flowers and fruit\u003cbr\u003ewere not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling strings of\u003cbr\u003edust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay back from\u003cbr\u003ethe wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky, heavy with\u003cbr\u003esubstance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA thousand hills lay bare to the sky, and half of every hill was wheat\u003cbr\u003eand half was fallow ground; and all of them, with the shallow valleys\u003cbr\u003ebetween, seemed big and strange and isolated. The beauty of them was\u003cbr\u003eaustere, as if the hand of man had been held back from making green his\u003cbr\u003ehome site, as if the immensity of the task had left no time for youth\u003cbr\u003eand freshness. Years, long years, were there in the round-hilled,\u003cbr\u003emany-furrowed gray old earth. And the wheat looked a century old. Here\u003cbr\u003eand there a straight, dusty road stretched from hill to hill, becoming a\u003cbr\u003ethin white line, to disappear in the distance. The sun shone hot, the\u003cbr\u003ewind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered a\u003cbr\u003eshadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not\u003cbr\u003ephysical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of\u003cbr\u003ewastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay\u003cbr\u003eand death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this wandering\u003cbr\u003epatchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and\u003cbr\u003erolled and combed and harrowed, with not a tiny leaf of green in all the\u003cbr\u003emiles. The other half had only a faint golden promise of mellow harvest;\u003cbr\u003eand at long distance it seemed to shimmer and retreat under the hot sun.\u003cbr\u003eA singularly beautiful effect of harmony lay in the long, slowly rising\u003cbr\u003eslopes, in the rounded hills, in the endless curving lines on all sides.\u003cbr\u003eThe scene was heroic because of the labor of horny hands; it was sublime\u003cbr\u003ebecause not a hundred harvests, nor three generations of toiling men,\u003cbr\u003ecould ever rob nature of its limitless space and scorching sun and\u003cbr\u003esweeping dust, of its resistless age-long creep back toward the desert\u003cbr\u003ethat it had been.","brand":"SAP","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47172363649264,"sku":"2940013417953","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013417953_p0.jpg?v=1763580650","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013417953","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}