Chapter IV: Part 4

After a mile or two they left us, turning off by an ancient signboard pointing vaguely toward the long, red spur of Tucki Mountain with the legend: "Water Eight Miles," and in the opposite direction across the trackless, torn-up waste: "Water Fifteen Miles." What are eight miles or fifteen miles to the modern man accustomed to leap over distance? To the primitive traveler with horses and mules, and until now all travelers throughout the ages have been thus primitive, a mile is a formidable reality. Mojave teaches the truth about it. At the end of those two days, that "Water Eight Miles" was as inaccessible to us as though it had been fifty. Even if we had been full of vigor we probably could not have reached it with the wagon over that rough ground. The cattlemen, however, on their tough little horses, went to it. We did not attempt to leave the two dim streaks that occasionally marked our road, but at dusk stopped and made camp beside them.

That was our first genuine dry camp, though it was the third time we had depended on the water carried from Furnace Creek. Water is the commonest of all commodities, so common that we fail to realize its meaning until we are without it. All the camps thus far had been resting-places, homes. We had come to feel that any spot where we built our fire could be home, for the essentials of home are very simple; a little water, something to eat, a bit of fire, and good friends. In the mess at Keane Wonder, in the forbidding inhospitality of Salt Creek, we had had them all and been at home; but that night, when the Worrier began to unload the wagon in the stark middle of the solitary waste, we were not at home. Nor could we make it home, however brightly we urged up the fire or cheerfully we talked. One of the essentials was missing and the gasoline cans could not take its place. No water, not even bad water, not a drop! That mesa was not a human resting-place; we were aliens in it, transients, one-night-standers. The Worrier laughed at our restless forlornness. On subsequent travels we have learned to make dry camps almost as nonchalantly as he does, but they are never home.

In the hot miles between Furnace Creek Ranch and the mountain-spring we learned the meaning for our little lives of the commonest of commodities. We had never been so thirsty, no amount of water could satisfy us, and the supply was limited. We had enough for all our needs, yet we never could forget that there was an end to it. When the jolting of the wagon slopped some out around one of the corks we could have wept. Using any for cooking or washing dishes, and pouring out ten gallons for Molly and Bill at the dry camp seemed terrible. Until then we had thoughtlessly turned on a faucet, or drawn a bucket from a well, or dipped water out of a stream. Now there was no water. The miles were not only hot, they were dry miles. The diminishing supply of warm, unattractive liquid in the dented gasoline-cans was our most precious possession. We would have parted with everything we had, rather than lose it.

From the camping place the red promontory looked as far away as it had been at noon; we seemed to have made no impression on our goal. Below us the Mesquite Valley spread out, immense and still, with the green thread of Salt Creek crossing it. On the far side rose the Grapevine Range, of which Corkscrew Mountain is the southern end. The evening air was so clear that we could see the spiral cliff and the opening of the canyon that leads to Daylight Pass. It looked very near, yet how many days'-journeys we had come from there! Heat and thirst and weariness lay between. The grimness of Death Valley, cool now in the shadow of the Panamints, was hidden by the buttresses of Tucki. The long line of sultry red rock that had smoldered and smoked all day slowly turned blue in the twilight. It seemed as though you might saunter over there and lay your hands upon it, yet the signboard pointing to the water at its base had read eight miles. We had long lost sight of the cattlemen. Suddenly, in the dusky blueness under the mountain, their camp fire bloomed like a crimson cactus flower.

Evening smoothed the whole mesa into a blue and yellow floor rounding gently the mountains. It was impossible to believe that it was everywhere cut into hills and canyons by washes fifteen or twenty feet deep as it was around our camp. In the bottoms of the declivities large greasewoods and cacti grew, and occasional tufts of dried grass; but the wind-swept ridges were bare and every particle of sand was blown away from among the stones. On one of the beaten-down mosaics near our camp something gleamed dimly. We went to it and found large white stones laid in the form of a cross pointing toward the east. Another traveler, then, had stopped here. Perhaps he had looked at the red promontory and the spiral cliff and lost hope; perhaps he had prayed for water; or perhaps he had made it as a thank-offering for the blessed coming of cool night.

IX

_The Mountain Spring_

The next day's climb was easier, for by the time the sun had asserted its full vigor we were at an altitude where the air was cool, tinglingly crisp, and so clear that it seemed not to exist at all. The earth sparkled with laughter and shouted her joy in the glory of light.

For several hours the red promontory continued to recede, then suddenly we were rounding it, and soon afterwards entered a gorge whose sides steadily became higher and higher. The bottom of the gorge was a wide, sandy wash much cut up by rains, full of boulders and grown over with brush. The vegetation became ever greener and more luxuriant. The wash looked like a wind-tossed green river between crumbly, precipitous mountains of many colors. Some were a dull red, some sage-green, some buff, some dark yellow, while an occasional purple crag gave the canyon a savage appearance. These mountains had the velvet texture which we had seen at Saratoga Springs, especially the sage-green ones. The colors were not an atmospheric illusion for the mountains were actually made of different colored rock. We investigated them with great interest. Though the velvet-textured hills had often been all around us, they were always too far away or the sun was too fiercely hot for us to get near enough to touch them. Now we walked along the edge of the wash picking up the colored rocks while the Worrier led Molly and Bill up the middle. It was so steep that he often had to rest them.

About three o'clock we came unexpectedly upon a little spring. It was in a green cleft between a red and a yellow hill where the water trickled over the rock into a charming basin. Eagerly we dipped in our cups. It was true! Here at last was a real mountain spring, very cold, tasteless, a miraculous gift from Heaven. We drank and drank. The Worrier unhitched Molly and Bill and they broke away from him to rush at the water. They did not stop drinking until the last drop was gone.

This bit of Paradise was a complete surprise. The map did not show the little spring, nor did the Worrier know of its existence. It was so tiny that doubtless it is often dry. Emigrant Springs itself, with a much more plentiful flow of water, was about a mile further on. There the canyon narrowed with steep, high sides broken into some beautifully shaped summits. The spring is only a few miles from a big abandoned mining camp called Skidoo and used to be an important one for desert travelers. Someone once built a shack, and nearby was a cave with a fireplace inside, also a corral, part of whose fence had since been used for firewood. Like all desert watering places the surroundings were littered with tin cans, old shoes and rusty iron. We know now what becomes of all the old shoes in the world; they are spirited away to the desert. An ancient government pamphlet that we had found blowing about in one of the shacks at Keane Wonder and carefully preserved describes very scientifically how to locate water, then throws science to the winds and says that the tin can is the best of all methods. When you find a pile of tin cans stop and search. It is surprising how quickly you cease to see the litter, provided it is sufficiently ancient not to be actively dirty. The desert has no foreground; you soon stop looking much for things near at hand and get the horizon-gazing habit. If a flower or a shining stone is at your feet you see it joyfully, but if it is a tin can it does not exist. There are too many far-off, enchanting things to look at. You are never unaware of the sky, nor the beautiful curves of the mountains; no forests nor roofs conceal them from you, and your eyes pass untroubled over small uglinesses.

We made our camp in the shelter of an immense rock that stood alone in the middle of the wash, and settled down for a long resting space. The desert was exhibiting her variety in monotony. Between the burning sands and this mountain coolness what a difference, and yet what an essential sameness! Here is the same glittering sand, the same colorful rocks, the same plants, the same bare, crumbling hills. The sun blazes with the same brightness, turning every projecting edge of rock and little leaf into a spot of light. The all-enveloping silence is the same. The distances shine with the same illusion.

All around Emigrant Springs are mountains from five to seven thousand feet high. One day was devoted to a stiff climb up to the abandoned mines at Skidoo, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. A trail started up from Emigrant Springs, but it looked very steep, so we went a longer way around intending to come down it. Part of the route lay over high ridges from which we saw the splendid mass of the snowy Panamints, now close at hand. We passed little patches of snow in the shadows of the rocks. The sky was a deep blue all day and the air cold with the mountain sting in it.

The town of Skidoo lay in a high valley shut off from a view by the surrounding hills. They were barren and made of crumbly yellow rock. The long narrow basin itself was covered with sagebrush like a blue carpet. The town had consisted of one wide street along which several buildings were still standing. An incredible number of stoves, broken chairs and cooking utensils were strewn about. The most imposing building had been the saloon, behind which a neatly piled wall of bottles, five feet high and several feet wide, testified to past good cheer. The Worrier said that four thousand people once had lived here. They had brought water twenty-eight miles in a pipe-line from a spring near Telescope Peak. During the war the pipe was taken out and sold to the government, but we could see the trench plainly, perfectly straight, leading off toward Mt. Baldy across high ridges. With the taking out of the water Skidoo died.

The place was littered with paper-covered books and old magazines. In one house we found a pile of copies of a work entitled "Mysterious Scotty, or the Monte Cristo of Death Valley." Needless to say we stole one, which became a treasure to be brought out in idle hours by the camp-fire. "Scotty" was a boon to the Worrier who did not hold much with the sort of literature that we carried around. Early in the expedition he had glanced over our library and preferred meditation. We had a few slim volumes of verse, "Leaves of Grass," some wild tales of Lord Dunsany's and a learned treatise on how to paint. This last helped us to keep up the fiction of artistic greatness.

From Skidoo we traversed the top of a long ridge from the precipitous end of which we had a superb view over Death Valley. We owed this to "Old Johnnie" who had told us to go there, for among the tumbled peaks of the Panamint Range around Skidoo you could wander a long time without getting a commanding view of the valley. The point from which we saw it that day was opposite Furnace Creek Ranch, but even with the glass we could not distinguish the green patch of the ranch, nor could we see the Eagle Borax Works lower down. The bottom looked like a white plain with brown streaks around and across it. Death Valley is always different. That afternoon there was no play of color, no magical mirage. From there, looking straight down seven thousand feet, it was ghastly, utterly unlike anything on the earth as most of us know her. It was like the valleys on the dead, bright moon when you look at them through a powerful telescope.

We stayed too long watching the shadow of the Panamints, as sharp and stark as a shadow on the moon, encroach on the white floor. Twilight had begun by the time we reached Skidoo again to hunt the trail down to Emigrant Springs. We tramped around the rough hills searching for it until darkness made it impossible to distinguish it even if we had found it. There below lay our camp. Could we have gone down a ridge or a canyon to it we would have defied the trail, but it was necessary to go crosswise over several of the ridges that buttress the mountain, and up and down their steep dividing canyons. Even the Worrier hesitated to attempt this in the dark. Getting lost is one of the easiest things you can do in desert mountains for they are very broken, flung down seemingly without plan, cut by deep, often precipitous gorges. The same old, tattered pamphlet that gives advice about tin cans also advises about getting lost. It says that persons not blessed with a good sense of locality had better find some other place than the desert for the "exercise of their talents." Standing on top of a mountain you think you know very well where to go, but when you get into those clefts among those hills that look all alike you find you do not know. Any moment you may meet a barrier to be climbed over with great labor or gone around at the risk of getting involved in little canyons leading off in the wrong direction.

There was nothing to do but skirt around the mountain and try to get back onto the path by which we had come. During the quest we had our reward and were glad. Just as night was closing in a shadow rose like a curtain beyond the mountain-tops that shut Death Valley from us. It was a blue shadow and a rose-colored shadow. It was both those colors and yet they were not merged to a purple. It seemed to rise straight up, a live thing, as though the spirit of the valley were greeting the stars. The beautiful apparition remained less than a minute; always after that we looked toward deep valleys at evening hoping to see it again, but we never saw it, though night made wonderful shadows and blue pools of darkness in them. Death Valley is a thing apart. It is a white terror whose soul is a miracle of rose and blue.

About an hour later we came upon the cabin of "Old Tom Adams," another old-timer guarding his own mine and Skidoo. He came out and made a great fuss about finding "ladies." He had heard of us before. He offered to make coffee, but a deep craving for more substantial food forbade any delay. He talked incessantly and would hardly let us go; no doubt we were the most exciting event for a long time. He described a way to get down the mountain by following the tracks of his burros. He swore we could not miss it, you just "fell down" right into Emigrant Springs. He went a little way with us to be sure we started down the right ridge; after that we "fell down" in about two hours and a half. It was the worst, the rockiest, the steepest series of hills and gullies we ever encountered. Presently the deceitful moon turned the bushes into white ghosts and fooled us about the angle of ledges. From time to time we saw burro tracks in the sand, but we suspect that a herd of wild burros pastures around there. The Worrier's opinion of "the old fool" was unmentionable, nor did it soothe him to suggest that the old man had tried to do his best.

Next day Old Tom appeared at Emigrant Springs wanting to know if we had seen a white burro and a black burro. We had that very morning.

"They're mine," he said, "but I can't keep 'em home."

Hunting burros seemed to be his life work. Two weeks later we heard of him twenty miles away still hunting his burros. The Worrier opined that he had no burros, but our guide was prejudiced.

We learned to appreciate what it meant to hunt burros, for though our burros were horses, the Worrier spent most of the days in camp looking for them. It was amazing how far they could travel with hobbles on. They were clever at hiding, too, but we were assured that they were dull compared to burros. Everybody on the desert seems to have burros somewhere that he expects to use some day. They are all delightfully casual about them:

"Did you happen to see a bunch of burros in the gulch youse come through?"

"No. Have you lost yours?"

"Yes. Gone about a week. I thought maybe they was over there."

The hope seems to be that they will come back for water. Generally they do, but sometimes they go to some other water hole and leave you to guess which one. At Silver Lake the brigand called French Pete had come from thirty miles off looking for his burros.

"You ought to put a bell on them," our hostess had told him.

"I did, but it's no use. You can't find 'em, anyway. They're too smart."

"Do they hide?"

"Hide! The one with the bell gets behind a rock and holds his neck perfectly still while the others bring him food!"

Another day at Emigrant Springs was spent in climbing Pinto Peak, 7,450 feet high. We chose it because it was the highest point anywhere around, and we hoped for a good look at Mt. Baldy and Telescope Peak in order to lay out a route by which to climb them. Pinto Peak is on the west side of Emigrant Pass, overlooking the Panamint Valley and all the region to the foot of Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. The peak is not visible from the spring and we had to guess at a possible way up. We began by ascending a steep ridge leading in the right direction, over and among several little summits. The ridge brought us to a large, high plateau set round with little peaks and cut at the sides by deep canyons. The top of the ridge and the plateau were dotted over with cedar trees, for on the desert, where everything is different, you do not climb above the timber, you climb up to it. Between six and seven thousand feet the trees begin, and sometimes in sheltered corners become twenty or thirty feet high. They are not large nor numerous on Pinto, but there are enough of them to give the ridge a speckled appearance from below. The plateau sloped gradually up toward the west and we selected the furthest little rounded rise as probably Pinto Peak. For two miles we walked toward it over comparatively level ground. From that side Pinto is not especially interesting as a mountain, being only a higher point in a big table-land, but its western side is a precipice falling two thousand feet into a terribly rocky and desolate canyon. Not until we reached the extreme edge of the plateau did the view open. It appeared suddenly, black mass after black mass of harsh mountains leading over to Mt. Whitney, serene and white on the wall of the Sierras. The Sierra Nevada are the barriers of the desert. Beyond that glistening wall lie the lovely and fertile valleys of California. Over there at that season the fruit trees were beginning to bloom, on this side was only bareness, black rocks, and deep pits of sand.

Mt. Whitney is toward the southern end of the high peaks of the Sierras. That day they bit into the sky like jagged white teeth. Southward the range is lower, rising again in Southern California to the peaks of San Bernadino and San Jacinto. We could vaguely see San Bernadino Mountain, mistily white, mixed up with the clouds. Below us lay the Panamint Valley under the western wall of the steep Panamints which separate it from Death Valley. This basin is neither so low nor so large as the famous one east of it, but is of the same character. At its edge, pressed against the mountain, we could make out with the glass the once prosperous mining town of Ballarat, the Ballarat that we had so gayly started to drive to from Johannesburg. With the Worrier's help we traced the route we would have come over. He pointed out the red mountain on which the three mining towns are perched, then came a line of low hills, then an immense dry lake where the Trona Borax Works are located, then a range of ugly-looking black mountains, then a long mesa which he said is almost as rough and difficult as the one we had recently come over, then the Panamint Valley, shimmering hot, glistening white, first cousin to Death Valley itself. It would have been a magnificent drive, but suppose we had undertaken it in the sublime innocence that was ours at the time! We had never crossed a dry lake, never wrestled with a mesa, never in our wildest imaginings pictured such a place as the Panamint Valley,--and at the end we would have found the town deserted!

"You wouldn't have made it," the Worrier teased us, "you would have turned back before you got to Trona."

"We would not!" But in our hearts we knew how we would have been weak from pure fear of the ugly-looking black mountains. The terrifying approach to Silver Lake was nothing compared to them, nor would we have had a friendly little Ford chugging along ahead.

As we had hoped, the top of Pinto commands a fine view of Telescope Peak and Mt. Baldy joined by the beautiful, long ridge which reposes so splendidly above Death Valley. From this side they looked higher and snowier. We studied them carefully with the glass. The great mass of snow was discouraging, but it seemed to be blown off the sharp ridges which showed black. We planned to move the outfit as far as possible up Wild Rose Canyon which branches off from Emigrant Canyon about twenty miles above Emigrant Springs and leads up to the far, high peaks. From there we thought we could climb the rounded summit of Mt. Baldy and walk along the splendid curve to the slender pyramid of Telescope. No lover of mountains could look at those pure, smooth lines as long as we had looked at them and from as many aspects without being filled with the desire to set his feet upon them.

It is not the height of a mountain nor its difficulty which makes it desirable, but something in the mountain's own self. The Panamints are neither very high nor very difficult, but they are dramatic and alone. Besides the contrast of their snow with the burning sands beneath, we wanted the feel of a truly lonely mountain top. The Panamints are truly lonely. They are not objects of solicitude to any mountain club; no tourist keen for adventure, nor boy scout outfit, nor earnest-eyed mountaineer who carves the record of his conquests on his pipe-bowl or his walking-stick, have left their names up there. No trail leads up the Panamints, nor are their summits splashed over with paint like the stately, desecrated summit of Mt. Whitney. We would not be forced to know in letters a foot high that on August 27th, John Doe made the ascent. We do not hate John Doe, but we prefer to meet him under roofs. If he loved the mountain, rather than so disfigure it, he would throw ink at his most cherished possession; and only lovers of mountains have the right to invade their loneliness. The Panamints, with their feet in the burning heat of Death Valley and their heads in the snow, almost unknown to any save a few prospectors, guarded on all sides by the solitudes of the desert, seemed utterly desirable to us.

We sat on a rock studying the map, which was no help at all, and eating the big, sweet, California prunes of which we always carried pockets-full as aids to wayfaring. The Worrier acquiesced in our mountaineering project, though without enthusiasm. He bade us not forget that it would be cold up there. The sight of the snow had already set him shivering. We twitted him with being a "desert rat."

"You may have got along better than we did in Death Valley," we said to him, "but it's our turn now; that's fair."

The Worrier scorned prunes and always looked on with dour superiority during our consumption of them. Soon he left us and went to hunt the "lost mine." There are many legends of lost mines in the desert-mountains and we paid no especial attention to this one, being weary enough to sit still, munching prunes, and looking out over the fearful, majestic landscape. In an hour he came back with a handful of rocks. He laid them solemnly before us. They were pieces of gold ore which he had found in a hole a little way below the summit.

"The lost mine," he said.

"You had better come back and work it," we laughed.

"I'll have them assayed." His manner was serious.

"Why, you don't think----"

"I don't know. But anyways, we'll call it the Prune Stone Mine."

As a matter of fact he did have them assayed and did go back with his partner; but the Prune Stone Mine, like so many mines in the Death Valley Country, failed to fulfill its first promise.

During the week that we camped at Emigrant Springs we saw no wild life except a few little brown birds that made a happy twittering in the mornings. Sometimes in the blue night we heard the distant howling of coyotes, and once an owl mocked us with a cry that sounded ridiculously like "Hoo, Hoo, Skidoo!" He was a native, no doubt, and old in wisdom. In the rambles among the mountains we found our first wild flowers. They were small except one striking crimson-velvet one with a ragged blossom like garden balsam. It grew in clumps about six inches high and made vivid spots of color against the rocks. Later, as the spring advanced, we found a great variety of flowers, but never this one except at high altitudes. Seeing it was always a joyful heart-beat. The graceful greasewood was in bloom, covered with small yellow flowers that looked like little butterflies perched on the slender branches. The nights were still very cold, often freezing the water in the pail, but the days were pleasantly warm. The sun shone with such dazzling brightness that during the middle of the day the shady sides of rocks were the best resting places. A fresh, steady wind blew nearly always up or down the canyon, sometimes piling great white masses of clouds in the sky, always scouring the world incredibly clean. Each night was a blue wonder. The mountains were delicate, luminous shapes in front of a sky infinitely far away. The big stars hung low and burned with a steady, silver shine.

Every day we climbed one or another of the ridges and smaller mountains close to the spring. It was good to lie on their summits in the sun. From any one of them we could look down the canyon and see the whole length of the Mesquite Valley, always the same, yet, like Death Valley, always different. You can look day after day at the deep, hot basins of the desert without ever knowing them. Quickly enough you can see the obvious features of the Mesquite Valley--the continuation of the Panamints on the west, the wine-red Grapevine Mountains on the east, the low blue hills in the north, the level bottom of the valley streaked with white alkali where Salt Creek crosses it and "Old Johnnie's" big sand-dunes are glistening little ant hills--but you must stay all the hours of a long day to find out what she really is, and then you will not know. Listen:

"Behold me! You think that I am an arid valley with a white alkali
streak down the middle of my level-seeming floor. You think that
I am surrounded by red mountains, or perhaps you think they are
blue, or purple--well, not exactly--more rose.

"Come down to me! I am very deep between the mountains. I am very
white. But if you do not like me so I can be a wide, level plain
covered with velvet for you to lie on.

"Come down to me! Rest beside this lake. See how it shines, how
blue it is! I am all in white like a young girl with a turquoise
breastpin. You don't believe that? I am a Witch, I can be
anything. My wardrobe is full of bright dresses. I will put them
on for you one by one.

"See, I know more colors of blue than you ever dreamed of. When
you tire of blue I change to ripe plums. Now I throw gray gauze
over my purple. I look like a nun, but am not. Here is my yellow
gown. You do not like it? See, I have all degrees of red, fire red
and crimson and pink, the color of bride roses. Here is my finest.
It is made of every color, but the tone of it is the gray breast
of a dove. You did not know that the breast of a dove could be
made of all colors, but now I show you.

"Do you not love me? You remember too well that I am hot as a
bake-oven. You think that if any one were fool enough to come down
to me I would steal behind and grip him by the throat.

"What of it? Why do you question me so much? You see how old I am,
how many storms have left their scars on me, and you think I am
wise. But I am only fair. Is it not enough to be old and yet fair?

"Beauty is sitting on my topmost peak making the enchantments that
confirm your dreams. She experiments with many materials; she
makes new combinations forever.

"Behold all the desolate places how they are hers--the lonely
hills, the lonely plains, the lonely green sea, the lonely
sands--she clothes us in gorgeous raiment, she makes us content
with death. Where she is your heart can pasture even to the
emptiness between the stars."

A lifetime is not long enough to listen to the songs of the desolate places. A whole sunny, timeless day is too short to hear the Mesquite Valley. The days and nights of the desert merge into each other. They are like perfectly matched pearls being strung on an endless string. You delight to run your fingers over their smooth surfaces and detect no difference.

"Do we move to-morrow?" Thus the Worrier.

"Why to-morrow?"

"We have been here a week."

That is not possible! How could a week slide into past things so soon?

X

_The High White Peaks_

Wild Rose Canyon has a lovely name, justified by a small clump of bushes that may bear wild roses sometime. The canyon, where it branches east from Emigrant Pass, is very narrow with precipitous sides. Emigrant Canyon itself at this point is walled by high cliffs so close together that the wagon track fills the gorge. A considerable stream, bordered with feathery trees, flows through the lower end of Wild Rose Canyon and down Emigrant Pass toward the Panamint Valley and Ballarat, but dies before it emerges from the cliff-like hills onto the long, stony slope that leads into the valley. Once more we had been deceived. From Pinto Peak the rocky cliffs appeared to rise directly out of the Panamint Valley, but a walk down the western descent of Emigrant Pass revealed the same long, brush-covered slope that we had learned to know so well.

The cattlemen had been there and gone away, leaving the cattle in Wild Rose for their spring range. The young steers huddled together, staring with their expression of fierce innocence. They had tramped the stream-bed into a bog and otherwise made camping at the mouth of the canyon unpleasant. A stone shack with an iron roof was located near the spring. It was rather a magnificent shack with two rooms, the inner one windowless like a cave. For some reason that seems to be the approved way of building sleeping-rooms on the desert. At Keane Wonder veritable black holes were the sleeping-quarters near the boarding-house. The shack had no floor and the uneven ground was littered with rubbish, as indeed were all the surroundings. The mess around the spring at Wild Rose bothered us more than the litter anywhere else. Perhaps it was because we were shut in on all sides by high walls, and there were no vistas nor even any beautifully shaped summits to look at. For once the desert was all foreground, little trees along the stream, little bushes, little stones. A tin can in such a small environment can hardly be ignored.

As soon as possible therefore, we pushed on up the canyon which widened into what looked like a plain surrounded by mountains. In reality it was level nowhere, but rounded down like a giant oval basin about five miles wide and seven or eight miles long. The mountains on the east and south were covered with cedars whose vanguard dotted the edge of the mesa under Mount Baldy, now become a great white mass, very near, led up to by a precipitous ridge broken into jagged peaks. Telescope Peak lay behind Baldy and was not visible. There was more snow than we had supposed in our survey from Pinto Mountain, it lay all along the jagged ridge, coming down in some places almost to the mesa. The northern wall of the canyon was composed of lower mountains. The one furthest east was a big, pointed, red mass, polka-dotted with little trees near its summit. Looking back whence we had come the mountains seemed to close the narrow gorge.

The cattlemen had told us that Wild Rose Canyon was full of water, but after we left the spring we found none. The big wash down the middle was dry--the boy must have seen it on some rare occasion when it had water in it--and the great bowl far too large and too rough to admit of much scouting for springs at the bases of the mountains. We had thought that we would see the deserted charcoal-kilns and thus find the spring which the cattlemen had described, but there was no sign of any kilns. We supposed that they were somewhere along the bottom of the precipitous ridge that led up to Mount Baldy. In that direction the mesa was so terribly cut up that we could not attempt to take the wagon there until we had first explored it, so we made a dry camp in the middle of the basin under the shelter of the eight-foot-high bank of the wash.

The wind had blown harder than usual all day with an icy bite from the snowy heights. During the night a racing cloud deposited snow on the northern hills which before had been bare. A real storm now became our fear, for a little more snow would defeat our project. Moreover Wild Rose Canyon is at an altitude where the cold at that time of year is intense, and we had to depend on the sun's fires to warm us sufficiently during the day to make life possible through the night. The "desert rat" became a bundle of misery. We had not realized the paralyzing effect cold would have on him. He sat and shivered, apparently unable to move or to think, so utterly wretched that Charlotte and I offered to give up the Panamints and "beat it" to a more salubrious climate. We could not bear to see our friend suffer; but he flatly refused, angry with us for even making the suggestion, saying that when he started to do a thing be generally did it.

The next morning was as cold as ever. Still the Worrier refused to consider moving out, and when the sun had warmed the great windy bowl a little, he went back to fetch more water from the spring by the old shack. We explored the base of the long ridge under Mount Baldy as well as we could, but failed to find the charcoal-kilns. However, it was possible to get the wagon over there, so in the afternoon we moved the whole outfit up to the first cedar trees. There the mesa became so steep that Molly and Bill could no longer pull the load. The Worrier had brought ten gallons of water, enough for several days, and the "desert-proof" horses were turned loose to find their way back to the spring at the mouth of the canyon. What either they or the cattle ate at Wild Rose remained a profound mystery to us. The mesa was covered with low, dry brush, interspersed occasionally with bunches of yellow grass. We could see the dark backs of the steers like spots moving through it, but it looked like anything rather than a spring feeding-ground.

Camp-in-the-Cedars was charming. A real tree had become a wonderful object. For once there was plenty of wood and the Worrier kept himself warm chopping and carrying. After the feeble little fires of roots and twigs to which we had been accustomed, that blazing, crackling camp-fire was a rich luxury. Dinner was a banquet. Our bed was laid under a big piñon tree through whose tufts of fine needles the enormous stars looked down. We had a glimpse through the far-off mouth of the canyon of distant peaks, vague in the starlight. The wind rose and fell softly through the pines and cedars, like the breathing of the great white mountain beneath whose side we slept.

The white dawn of a clear day filtered through the blue darkness. Before the sun had climbed over the ridge we were started on our long anticipated adventure. It began with a stiff scramble up the first buttressing ridge, then a long pull to the crest of the barrier that walls the southern side of Wild Rose Canyon. The steep inclines of gravelly rock were varied with ledges. Soon we reached the snow, so hard that steps had to be dug in it with much scuffling of hobnailed shoes. The green trees growing out of the white snow were very lovely, and also useful to hold on to. When they were far apart we had some exciting moments when we zigzagged over the smooth, white crust, which was as steep as a shingled roof. In about two hours we reached the top of the ridge. Until then we had faced the white slope, working too hard to look back very often at the basin that was falling away below us. Suddenly we stood on top. The world opened beyond into an immense white amphitheater shut in by snowy peaks with the pyramid of Telescope, visible once more, at the far side. After the hot, dry sands, how miraculous seemed this glittering winter!

We pressed on toward Baldy along the ridge, which proved to be much steeper than it had looked. It was covered with trees, and great patches of snow grown soft now in the sun. However, by keeping a little below the crest on the southern side most of the snow could be avoided. There the ground fell so precipitously from the ridge to the canyon below that only an occasional tree grew on it, and we had an unimpeded view of the two white summits and the magnificent sweep of snow between them.

Noon brought us to a little saddle north of Baldy, which connects it with another rounded summit of the same name. Here were no trees and the snow was blown off clean. With what eagerness we panted up the last few yards! The mountain climber has his great reward when he "looks over." That is his own peculiar joy. He toils for hours with the ground rising before him to a ridge that seems to cut the sky, only to find a higher one beyond. He surmounts that, and another and another, until at last he gains the highest and the mountains yield their secret. Breathlessly we stood on the little saddle. We looked down into Death Valley from the still height to which we had looked up so long. The white floor shimmered through layers of heated air, 10,000 feet below. Again the valley was different. That day it was full of sky, as the Imperial Valley had been when we first saw it. Nothing was distinguishable down there, it was a well of clear blue. The Funeral Mountains looked like hills. Behind them the jagged ranges of desert mountains spread back with one tall, snowy peak in their midst, Mount Charleston, sixty miles away on the border of Nevada.

Southward on the saddle the mound of Baldy's summit presented its snowy side. For the most part the snow was hard enough for us to walk over the crust, but sometimes we floundered in nearly to the waist. That was hard work. By one o'clock we reached the top where the snow was blown off, leaving bare black rocks. It was a quiet day for the desert and especially for the mountains. A slight wind came from the south; the sky was cloudless, a deep, still blue. Mount Baldy overlooks all the country in a complete panorama, save where the beautiful pyramid of Telescope Peak cuts into the view. The horizon was bounded on three sides by snow mountains, Mount Charleston, the San Bernadinos and the wonderful Sierra Nevada. Between these white barriers spread the desert, deep white valleys, yellow dry lakes, ranges of rose and blue and dark-violet mountains, all shining in the incomparable brightness of the sun.

Now, at last, we saw the famous "H. and L." of which we had heard so much. "You see the highest and the lowest points in the United States at the same time," everybody had told us. From the top of the Panamints we could see Mount Whitney towering in the west, while in the east the mountain sides fall precipitously into Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level. There must be some more accessible viewpoint which commands this dramatic spectacle, for it is not likely that our informants expected us to climb Mount Baldy.

From the summit of Baldy the long curving arête that had looked so beautiful from Death Valley on one side and from Pinto Peak on the other led over to Telescope Peak. It was no disappointment. Sloping sharply down from Baldy, level for a ways, then rising again toward the white pyramid, it extended for about three miles, precipitous on both sides, often not more than ten feet wide on top. The exhilaration of walking thus in the clear air high above the spread-out world is always a boundless joy; on this shining wall in the middle of the desert the joy was almost unbearable. The great plain of the world was clear cut, no veiling haze softened its distances, it flashed and sparkled, full of strong, austere lines and strong, satisfying contrasts. Like a victorious lover, you walk the heights of your conquest; everything to the great circle of the horizon is yours; by right of patience and love you possess it.

If we could only be like the three old cedars that have withstood the hurricanes on the ridge and gaze with them until sunset, through the night and the wonder of morning! They are so gnarled and old, and so calm. Watchers, they stand on the summit of the world, and they might tell us, if we could stay, why the mountain-tops are joyful. Instead, we must drag around these aching bodies clamoring to be kept warm and to be fed, never letting us listen long enough. Already the sun was descending toward the west, and we had to hasten on if we wanted to reach Telescope Peak and get back to fire and food before the cold of night.

When the arête began to rise it became rapidly very steep. The snow became harder and harder until it turned to ice. The lovely pyramid, now directly overhead, shone blindingly in the slanting sun. The only possible way to its peak was up a sharp knife-edge, from which both sides fell sheer for thousands of feet. Was it all solid ice? The conviction that it was had been hinting defeat to each of us for the last half hour of the climb, but no one cared to speak of that possibility until we were within four hundred feet of the top, clinging to trees and slipping badly. The peak rose at a possible, but terrific angle; the trees for the remainder of the way were much too far apart to hold on to; the ice was perfectly smooth, and glistened like a skating rink set on edge. No amount of kicking with hobnailed shoes could make a foothold on it, and one slip on that knife-edge either way meant a slide down the ice-sheet to almost sure destruction. You cannot climb such an ice wall without either an ax or a rope; with either one we would have tried it. We could have cut steps with an ax, or we might have been able to lasso the trees above with a long rope, and pull ourselves up by it. So lately come from the furnace of Death Valley, how should we suppose that we would need the implements of an Alpine mountain-climber? Down, down, more than 11,000 feet, lay that white pit veiled with the smoke of iridescent haze.

The Worrier, who professed deep scorn of all mountains for their own sakes, looked longingly at the smooth peak. It fascinated us all like a hard, glittering jewel. He said he "hated to be beat." So did we all "hate to be beat," but we would have been ungrateful indeed for the joy of that day had we not been able to turn back and remain thankful. There was no sense of defeat in the going-down.

The descent was easy except for the heartbreaking pull up Mount Baldy again. His sides were far too straight up and down to admit of any going around him. On the summit we made a concession to aching bodies by taking a long rest and eating what was left of the bread and cheese and the everlasting prunes. The Worrier had long since dubbed our route "The Prune Stone Trail." We jested light-heartedly about building cairns along it with a prune stone carved on the top of each, and insisted that we owned a half interest in the Prune Stone Mine, as he would never have found it had we not dragged him up Pinto. Mountain-hater as he was and heat-loving "desert-rat," he genially admitted that, snow or no snow, the top of Baldy was "fine." As we sat there Death Valley turned a dark, deep, luminous blue. We could see the Avawatz Mountains by Silver Lake and the notch in the hills where the blue pool of Saratoga cherishes its little darting fish. The slanting sunlight was resplendent on the arête and the west slopes of Telescope Peak. The Worrier called him an old rascal; but we were glad to leave him so, with his white robes unsullied by scrambling feet. His image would remain always to the inward eye in dull days and difficult days, a reminder of how beauty watches around the world.

When the sun stood just above the wall of the Sierras we began the long descent down the rounded, snowy side of Baldy to the little saddle, and down the long, steep slope and the little, buttress slope where the cedar trees had been so lovely in the snow. Night came while we were still going down, and the basin of Wild Rose Canyon was a violet lake.

XI

_Snowstorm and Sandstorm_

Breakfast was late next morning like Sunday breakfasts in houses. Charlotte asked if it was Sunday. No one knew what day it was in the far-off world, but we proclaimed it Sunday at Wild Rose. It was a true Sunday, a day of rest after hard exertion, a still day washed clean by the mighty sun. Immense and still. The great bowl curved tranquilly to the tranquil hills, the cedars and piñons along its edge glistened like little bright fingers pointing at the sky.

During the middle of the day the sun was hot, in the morning and the evening the big fire blazed. Camp-in-the-Cedars was lovely enough to stay in forever, but shortly after noon the Worrier announced that he must find the charcoal-kilns, he could not "be beat" by them. The little trees were so beguiling, the tranquil brightness of the mesa so inviting, that we followed him, buoyed up by the cold, clear air. We wandered along the base of Baldy to where a small, purple mountain jutted into the great basin. Around that we went, leisurely picking our way over the rough ground until at the extreme northern end of the bowl we found an attenuated wraith of a road leading up into a heavily wooded canyon. A road must once have been the way to somewhere, and we followed it, climbing steeply for nearly a mile. It brought us to a small, level spot where, made of rocks like the mountains and indistinguishable until we were right on them, stood seven immense charcoal-kilns like a row of giant beehives. They were so big that we could walk upright through their doorways, that looked like arched openings in their sides. Old Tom Adams had said that they were used in the seventies to make fuel of the cedars and piñons, to be hauled thirty miles to the smelter at a lead mine. They had been deserted so long that the camp rubbish had disappeared from around them and they merged into their background, become again a part of Nature herself.

What strenuous endeavor they denoted! Everywhere men have left their footprints on the Mojave, sojourners always, never inhabitants. The seven kilns were the most impressive testimony of brief possession that we saw, more impressive even than the twenty-eight-mile-long trench that brought the water to Skidoo. We had seen it from there crossing high ridges; in the great bowl of Wild Rose it was clearly marked, going from side to side and vanishing up the first ridge which we had climbed to Baldy. The cost and labor of making it must have been immense. Mojave was already breaking down the edges preparing to brush it away, but it will be a long time before she can obliterate those kilns. They will still be eloquent in that remote fastness long after Keane Wonder and Ryolite are gone.

Behind the kilns a dim path climbed the mountain-side to a little, secret spring, an oval rock basin not more than five feet long and so deftly hidden that we wondered what prospector first had the joy of finding it. From the elevation of the spring we could look along the length of Wild Rose Canyon, where the sagebrush smoothed to a blue and green and purple sea, and through its narrow opening to the white serenity of Mount Whitney. Thus framed the white peak seemed to float in the blue sky. Very swiftly Mojave brushes men off, but always with a fine gesture. From the midst of her most obliterating desolations she never fails to point at some far-off shining.