The mines themselves were legends later visitors would look for in vain, built out of bits of ore brought out by these desperadoes. It was a strange sojourn, this journey through a landscape where all their hopes of finding mineral wealth were set aside, where wealth meant nothing and water everything, where they were faced with critical decisions about sharing and surviving, where they all faced death and some met it. It was a detour into the essential and the introspective, as the desert often is, and they were lost in it.
