about
noon
The wagons moved as ships tossed on a stormy sea , chuck ! chuck ! from boulder to boulder , without intermittence . We found delicious spring water about noon and passed a most remarkable place later in the day . This must have been the pit of a volcano . A few steps aside from the road you might lean over the precipice and look straight down into a great , round crater , so deep that it made a person dizzy . At the bottom there was a ranch house , a small lake and a cultivated field , the whole being apparently ten acres in area .