Crossing the silent, trackless prairie felt like being lost at sea without a compass

Evidence

There was a most curious loneliness about the journey up to that time. Except for the huge barrier to the right, the boundless prairies were everywhere, and it was like being at sea without a compass. The wheels made neither sound nor indentation as we drove over the short, dry grass, and there was no cheerful clatter of horses’ hoofs. The sky was cloudy and the air hot and still. In one place we passed the carcass of a mule, and a number of vultures soared up from it, to descend again immediately. Skeletons and bones of animals were often to be seen. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 55

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The image of a buggy crossing grass so dry the wheels leave neither sound nor track is a vivid sensory anchor for any wilderness-crossing scene — a land that swallows all trace of passage.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in landscape narratives — the prairie-as-ocean simile and the silence of dry grass echo the kind of scene-setting memorable in eighteenth/nineteenth-century travel and settler accounts.