Memory, prophecy and fantasy the past, the future and the dreaming moment between are all in one country, living one immortal day.

to know that is Wisdom. to use it is the Art.

It was hope undid them. Hope, and the city that Providence had made them suffer enough for their dreams. They'd lost so much already along the-children, healers, leaders, all taken-surely, they reasoned, God would preserve them from further loss, and reward their griefs and hardships with deliverance into a place of plenty.

When the first signs of the blizzard had appeared clouds that had dwarfed the thunderheads of Wyoming rising behind the peaks ahead, slivers of ice in the wind-they had said to each other. This is the final test. If we turn back now, intimidated by cloud and ice, then all those we buried along the way will have died for nothing; their suffering and ours will have been for nothing. We must go on. Now more than ever we must have faith in the dream of the West. After all, they told each other, it's only the first week of October. Maybe we'll see a flurry or two as we climb, but by the time the winter sets in we'll be over the mountains and down the other side, in the midst of sweet meadows. On then; on, for the sake of the dream.

Now it was too late to turn back. Even if the snows that had descended in the last week had not sealed the pass behind the pioneers, the horses were too malnourished and too weakened by the climb to haul the wagons back through the mountains. The travelers had no choice but to go forward, ugh they had long since lost any sense of their whereabouts and were journeying blind in a whiteness as utter as y black midnight.

Sometimes the wind would shred the clouds for a moment, but there was no sign of sky or sun. Only another pitiless peak rising between them and the promised land, snow driven from its summit in a slow plume, then drooping, and descending upon the slopes where they would have to venture if they were to survive.