one o'clock
But the reckless chauffeur hit the sand with the exultant fierceness of a bull fighter . And at every lunge Bob clung to the iron bar overhead and devoutly prayed that the machine would live through it . It did . At one o'clock they swung round the headlands into the main desert -- the worst of its size on the continent , the desert of the Lower Colorado . As far as the eye could see stretched the dead waste , so dead that not a mesquite bush , not a cactus , not a living thing grew or crawled or flew . And upon it smote the sun so hot it seemed a flame , and over it boiled a wind like the breath of a volcano . It staggered even the four men , used as they were to the heat of the valley .