They were then on the borders of the Rio Platte, or Nebraska River, in the country of the Pawnee Indians. They were about to leave behind them the vast, luxuriant prairie, and enter upon what may more properly be called the plains. Guy was not sorry to see the thick grass become thinner and thinner, for he remembered that amid its clustering blades he had nearly lost his life, and therefore looked with much complacency upon the broad, shallow river, along which their course lay; the sandy loam beneath their feet, and the sand hills that arose like great billows of earth, rolling in regular succession over the level surface. George and Gus thought the country most dreary and wretched, and would scarcely believe Guy, when he told them of a desert called Sahara, that had not even a blade of grass upon it, save an occasional oasis, many miles apart, and which were often sought for, by the weary traveler, as he had himself sought the camp, during his terrible night on the prairie.