Beadle's Dime Novels No. 316: Hurricane Bill — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AN UNINVITING SCENE. 98 CHAPTER XI. IN THE “ EVIL LAND.” SuNRISE in the Evil Land! The golden rays streamed over a wild, weird scene, strange and fantastic as one of Doré’s conceptions. Here it was a perfect wilderness of sierra; there, a dense chaparral thickly covered with mezquites and nopals, with clumps of cacti and “tiger-thorn.” Here the high rank grass brushed the sides of the fugitives’ horses. Such is the circle that surrounds the volcanic region, A sharper contrast could scarcely be imagined. "All at once this dense vegetation ceases, leaving, scattered far apart, bunches of. cacti, a dwarf oak, or per- chance two or three cocoa trees, growing out of the cracks in the lava. The ground rumbles and seems t? shake beneath ‘the horses’ tread, until one can not belp fancying that only a thin crust separates .bim from some borrible subterranean abyss. The flow of molten lava can easily be traced, undu- lating, winding in serpentine coils, forming a gigantic mo- saic, ‘Here rises a smooth, polished cone, there another with mini- ature turrets, not unlike an ant-hill. ‘Some of them are broken ; all are hollow, the shell varying from six to twenty inches in thickness. Peering into one, the eye can see noth- ing save a dense, impenetrable darkness; Drop a stone into the hole, it rebounds here and there, until the sound is lost in the distance. How far does it descend? One can only conjecture. Yet these black pits are inhabited ; by the huge, bloated serpents that may occasionally be seen lazily gliding over the lava-beds. But there are still other inhabitants of the Evil Land. From the shade of yonder dwarf oak, slinks away a gaunt gray wolf—a “ lobos ;’ a species that is known Only in Mexico and some portions of Texas—pausing when at a safe 7 ’ connicloooks.com