Mercedes must ride; but the others must walk.
The Indian led off into one of the gray notches between the tumbled
streams of lava. These streams were about thirty feet high, a
rotting mass of splintered lava, rougher than any other kind of
roughness in the world. At the apex of the notch, where two streams
met, a narrow gully wound and ascended. Gale caught sight of the
dim, pale shadow of a one-time trail. Near at hand it was
invisible; he had to look far ahead to catch the faint tracery.
Yaqui led Diablo into it, and then began the most laborious and
vexatious and painful of all slow travel.
Once up on top of that lava bed, Gale saw stretching away, breaking
into millions of crests and ruts, a vast, red-black field sweeping
onward and upward, with ragged, low ridges and mounds and spurs
leading higher and higher to a great, split escarpment wall, above
which dim peaks shone hazily blue in the distance.
He looked no more in that direction. To keep his foothold, to save
his horse, cost him all energy and attention. The course was marked
out for him in the tracks of the other horses. He had only to
follow. But nothing could have been more difficult. The
disintegrating surface of a lava bed was at once the roughest, the
hardest, the meanest, the cruelest, the most deceitful kind of
ground to travel.
It was rotten, yet it had corners as hard and sharp as pikes.
It was rough, yet as slippery as ice. If there was a foot
of level surface, that space would be one to break through
under a horse's hoofs.
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