"And think of this big continent ahead of us with those enormous Sierra Madre mountains we saw in the movies, and the jungles all the way down and a whole desert plateau as big as ours and reaching clear down to Guatemala and God knows where, whoo!
What'll we do?
What'll we do?
Let's move!"
We got out and went back to the car.
One last glimpse of America across the hot lights of the Rio Grande bridge, and we turned our back and fender to it and roared off.
Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn't light or a car for fifty miles across the flats.
And just the dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began see the ghostly shapes of yucca cactus and organpipe on all sides.
"What a wild country!" I yelped.
Dean and I were completely awake. In Laredo we'd been half dead.
Stan, who'd been to foreign countries before, just calmly slept in back seat.
Dean and I had the whole of Mexico before us.
"Now, Sal, we're leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things.
All the years and troubles! and kicks – and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven't done before us – they were here, weren't they?
The Mexican war.
Cutting across here with cannon."
"This road," I told him, "is also the route of old American 1 outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you'll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old Tombstone hellcat making lonely exile gallop into the unknown, you'll see further… "
"It's the world," said Dean.
"My God!" he cried, slapping the wheel.
"It's the world!
We can go right on to South America if the road goes.
Think of it!
Son-of-z-bitch!
Gawd-damm!"
We rushed on.
The dawn spread immediately and we began to see the white sand of the desert and occasional huts in the distance off the road.
Dean slowed down to peer at them.
"Real beat huts, man, the kind you only find in Death Valley and much worse.
These people don't bother with appearances."
The first town ahead that had any consequence on the map was called Sabinas Hidalgo.
We looked forward to it -eagerly.
"And the road don't look any different than the American road," cried Dean, "except one mad thing and if vou'll notice, right here, the mileposts are written in kilometers and they click off the distance to Mexico City.
See, it's the only city in the entire land, everything points to it."
There were only 767 more miles to that metropolis; in kilometers the figure was over a thousand.
"Damn!
I gotta go!" cried Dean.
For a while I closed my eyes in utter exhaustion and kept hearing Dean pound the wheel with his fists and say,
"Damn," and
"What kicks!" and
"Oh, what a land!" and
"Yes!"
We arrived at Sabinas Hidalgo, across the desert, at about seven o'clock in the morning.
We slowed down completely to see this. We woke up Stan in the back seat. We sat up straight to dig.
The main street was muddy and full of holes.
On each side were dirty broken-down adobe fronts.
Burros walked in the street with packs.
Barefoot women watched us from dark doorways.
The street was completely crowded with people on foot beginning a new day in the Mexican countryside.
Old men with handlebar mustaches stared at us.
The sight of three bearded, bedraggled American youths instead of the usual well-dressed tourists was of unusual interest to them.