Chapter V: Part 5

Too late we learned that the little spring at the head of the canyon would have been the place for our camp. Not only would we have had the delight of its cold, pure water, but the ascent of Mount Baldy looked shorter and easier from there. Perhaps we each cherished the hope of moving up next day and trying once more to scale the glittering ice-wall with the help of our wood-chopper's ax and the rope from the wagon; but we never discussed the idea for that night the dreaded storm crept over the mountains. It came stealthily on padded feet, putting out the stars. At dawn big wet snowflakes gently sifting through the still air awoke us.

During the day the storm increased. The wind arose and blew in gusts seemingly from every direction. Fortunately the trees afforded plenty of big wood, so we were able to keep a roaring fire, though the heavily-falling, wet snow sometimes threatened to put it out. It snowed so fast that we were shut in by white walls not more than twenty feet away. We pitched our tent with the opening toward the fire and tried to get some shelter in it while the Worrier hunted the horses. The tent was the only serious mistake in the outfit. It was a light, waterproof silk tent with a pole up the middle. We had expected to use it as a shelter from the wind and had tried once before at Emigrant Springs. On that occasion its light-weight material had flapped and rattled in the blast until we were glad to creep outside and sleep under the edge of a rock. Before morning it blew down. The only practical tent for the desert is a very low one, like a pup-tent, made of heavy canvas, with extra long pegs that must be driven deep and buried in the sand. During the eternity of snowstorm in which Charlotte and I waited for Molly and Bill, we alternated between holding up the pole in the gusts of wind and rushing out between them to drive in the pegs with the ax. This, and the necessity of constantly building up the fire, kept us wet and cold all day, for the snow was not the dry, whirling snow of really cold climates, but was as wet as a heavy rain. It clung so we could not shake it off and melted on our clothes. The Worrier did not retrieve Molly and Bill until four o'clock. It was late to move, but the storm showed no sign of abatement and we remembered with growing affection the shack at the entrance to the canyon. Hastily packing in the white downpour that hissed through the air, we left Camp-in-the-Cedars.

As soon as we had descended a little way into the basin the snow ceased, but a white cloud continued to hang over the place where our charming camp had been. During the remainder of the day and throughout the night heavy clouds veiled all the mountains, occasionally dropping flurries of snow around us. An icy wind rushed down the canyon. When we reached the shack it seemed palatial. We cleared out the rubbish by throwing it down the hill in front of the door, the approved way of cleaning up on the desert. When there are too many cans you throw them behind the bushes, and we had learned to do it with great vigor and accuracy of aim. Much to the Worrier's amusement we scrubbed the table and tried to wipe off the cracked, rusty stove set up on three empty gasoline tins. That stove was a marvel in the art of consuming much fuel without emitting any heat. We took turns huddling close to it. The walls sheltered us from the wind, but as far as the stove was concerned we might almost as well have been outdoors.

After supper we had to reckon with the dungeon that was the bedroom. The Worrier recommended it highly, but we viewed it with a certain awful apprehension. We had a devil's choice between that and the frigid outdoors that kept beating on the shack with gusts of wind. We made the mistake of choosing the dungeon. When the candle was blown out fear crouched in the blackness. All the tales we had ever read of prisoners in damp cellars assailed us--horrors, tortures, black holes. The terrors of these man-made fears in this shut-in, man-made place were far worse than the wild outdoors. Presently little scratchings and gnawings apprised us that we were not alone. Unbearable then was the walled darkness. We gathered up the bed and went outside, stepping carefully over the Worrier who, forever faithful, was sleeping across the door.

The clean outdoors! Let it snow, let it hail, let the water run down the mountain and seep through the bed, let the wind tear at the ponchos! It was nothing compared to being shut up in a dark place. About midnight we were suddenly struck awake by a terrific din. After the first tense moment we recognized it as coyotes howling in the canyon. That was nothing either compared to vague little scratchings and gnawings in an eight-by-ten shack.

Next day the storm continued, with clear intervals during which we rushed out to spread our clothes and blankets in the sun that thirstily drank up the snow at the bases of the mountains. "Scotty" beguiled the hours and the weird tales of Lord Dunsany, read aloud beside the cracked stove, never had a more appropriate setting. All around the mountains were white except where some insistently black rock heaved out. Clouds hurried across the sky like Indians galloping on the war-path, the wind screaming around the rocks was their war-whoop. In the moments of peace between their raids huge giants of cloud shook their fists at us over the walls. The silence of Mojave was torn to tatters. Yet, somehow, we still felt it. Just as the wild tales we read intimated a stillness behind, so the tumult was a ripple on indomitable peace. You have seen a little whirlwind plow a furrow through the water of some glassy lake, making quite a bit of a tumult, but leaving undisturbed the tranquillity of the surface beyond its narrow path. Though between the walls of the canyon where we camped we could not see the still surfaces, we sensed them. The storm was an incident. Mojave took it and made a strong song.

Wild Rose Canyon was the furthest point of our journey; from the old shack the going home began. The sun rose brilliantly on the following morning and deceived us into starting back to Emigrant Springs. As soon as we had left the narrow canyon and could once more see the expanse of the sky, we knew that the storm was by no means over. We even debated returning to our palace, cracked stove, black hole, and all; but when you have broken camp, found the horses, packed up, and started, a two-hour-long process, you will risk almost anything rather than turn back. There were compensations, too, even for the wind which shortly came to life again and thrust its knife to our hearts. The sky was a magnificent spectacle. It was not gray, nor overcast, nor brooding, but full of torn-up, piled-up, tumultuous clouds, a fitting canopy for the country beneath it. The top of Emigrant Pass is a big mesa surrounded by all kinds of mountains from the broken, battered buttresses and steep snow-peaks of the Panamints to smooth, bare, rounded hills folded over each other and dimpled like upholstered sofas. In bursts of sunshine the shadows of the clouds raced over them all, snatching at each other and getting mixed up in the canyons. Sometimes a cloud spilled out its contents and for a while obliterated one of them. Toward noon the clouds made a concerted attack on the sun, calling up new cohorts until at last they succeeded in covering him entirely and keeping him covered. Then a great change fell upon Mojave. She became forlorn, her bright colors faded into gray. The brush shivered in the wind and made a cold, crackling sound. A few immense Joshua palms scattered over the mesa waved their grotesque arms like monsters in pain. The wind whistled through their stiff, spiky leaves. They were in bloom with a heavy mass of waxy white flowers on the end of each branch. The sun had polished the flowers, tipping every branch with a silver ball; now they stuck up into the lead-colored sky, dull, lead-colored things.

All the familiar places that had been drenched with sunshine, brilliant with color, almost as magical sometimes as the burning sands themselves, now appeared in this sad, gray mood. After leaving the top of the pass we crossed a large, high plateau known as the Harrisburg Flat. On the way over to Wild Rose it had been still and hot, the openings between the mountains had hinted at the illusions of Death Valley behind them; now a cloud full of wind and snow rolled up out of the narrow opening of Emigrant Canyon. Storms were all around us, but until that moment we had hoped that we might escape. There was no escape. The Harrisburg Flat became a white, whirling fury. The wind that smote us was like a solid, moving wall. The cloud was not made of snow, but of ice, a fine hail that cut our faces. It was so dense that we could not see ten feet in front of the wagon. We had some difficulty in making Molly and Bill face it, but it was necessary to go on. All day the icy wind had been pressing upon us, now it was so cold that we felt we could not withstand it long. Fortunately the sheltering walls of the canyon were not far, but the half hour during which we struggled toward them seemed an eternity. The Worrier shouted at the laboring horses and for the first time when he knew that we could hear him, he cursed.

By the time we reached the canyon the hail had stopped but the terrible wind continued. It seemed as though it would rip the bushes out of the ground. In place of the ice, fine particles of sand assailed us--had the wash not been thoroughly wet we would have had more of it. It must have rained violently in the canyon, or else in the dusk we missed the particular route among the rocks by which we had come up, for the way was so washed out that the Worrier could hardly pilot the load.

Every bit of energy we had was centered on reaching the ruined shack at Emigrant Springs. When we were able to say anything at all we speculated about how dirty it might be and whether or not there was a stove in it. The dirt was a certainty, but nobody could remember about the stove, as we had avoided the shack when we were there before. After a freezing eternity we came around the last bend of the canyon. Home was in sight, and our hope perished for smoke was coming out of the chimney! Not only was there a stove, but there was a man snugly camping beside it, an unknown man, a usurper, a robber! We were full of angry, helpless indignation.

"If it's Tom Adams," the Worrier snapped, "we'll throw him out."

But it was not Tom Adams. It was another old-timer, an old man, who wandered ceaselessly to and fro over the desert. He was a gentle soul, but we were in no mood to appreciate that then. Of course he offered to move out of the shack when he saw "ladies" coming on such a bitter night, and equally of course we could not allow it. If Charlotte and I chose to invade the wilderness we must take the chances of the wilderness as other people did. Our pride was involved, but we had to refuse very summarily, even rudely, before the old man would accept our objection. Then he retired into the shack with hurt dignity, while we pulled down some more of the corral fence to make a blazing fire. We solaced ourselves with the belief that the outdoors was better than the shack anyway, as it had been better than the black hole. In the course of time we were warm again and managed to keep warm through the night.

In the morning the innocent usurper sent us, via the Worrier, a pan of hot biscuits, a most welcome and delicious gift. Charlotte and I called on him later to thank him and make amends if we could. He entertained us for two hours with the story of his travels, but he would not accept our invitation to dinner, saying that he wasn't used to "dining with ladies." We sincerely hope it was not a sarcasm. The question which the possession of the shack raised is rather a difficult one. Was our pride worth more than the true chivalry of a kindly soul? To us it was, to him it was not.

The wind continued to blow with violence for several days, though we had no more rain nor snow. It is easy to see how the desert has been torn to its rough harshness. That steady-blowing wind alone could wear the mountains to their jagged outlines, crumbling the softer rock down to fill the valleys. It picks up the sand and uses it to grind the mountains smooth. It piles it against the cliffs to make new foothills and hollows it out to make new canyons. It drives the rain against the mountains to rush down, rolling rocks along the gorges and digging the deep trenches across the mesas. Where no network of roots holds a surface soil wind and rain work rapidly. On the homeward journey from Wild Rose we understood the cut-up mesas and the gouged-out canyons better.

Down in the Mesquite Valley, where we took the sandy road along the edge of the marsh instead of the rocky one by which we had come because Bill had lost a shoe, we saw what the wind can do with sand. In the afternoon we reached the foot of the mesa that leads from Emigrant Canyon to the bottom of the valley and were at the beginning of "Old Johnnie's" sand-dunes. It had been a sparkling day with a clear sky, but the wind was still blowing. The Mesquite Valley was as hot as we remembered it, but, after the ice-cloud on the Harrisburg Flat only two days before, it seemed a delicious hotness. With the assurance of seasoned travelers able to make a dry camp anywhere, Charlotte and I insisted on stopping there for the night. Molly and Bill would take four hours to make the nine miles of deep sand to Salt Creek, and we always hated to make camp in the dark. The Worrier wanted to go on. He said he had a hunch that we ought to, but he allowed himself to be persuaded. We should have heeded that hunch of an old-timer.

Hardly had we unpacked the wagon and made a fireplace before we noticed that the wind was increasing. Little whirligigs of sand began to run across the valley. Soon they were charging at us down the mesa. First they came singly, then merged into a cloud of sand that rattled against the pots and the wagon. Luckily for us the wind was blowing from the mountains over the mesa where there was comparatively little sand to pick up, for had it been coming across the dunes we would have been buried alive. Of course it was impossible to cook; in a very few minutes it was impossible to do anything but crouch in the lea of the sand-heap around the roots of the biggest mesquite. The Worrier seemed to shrink up and draw in his head like a turtle. He shouted something at us, of which we could only hear the word "hunch." The air was full of a rushing, hissing sound.

Charlotte and I covered ourselves with the ponchos, drawing them over our heads when the sand came hurtling through the top of the Mesquite. Molly and Bill huddled close together about fifty feet away with their backs to the blast, and much of the time the sand was so dense that we could not see them. The Worrier also was lost in the yellow cloud. The sand was very fine and, in spite of the ponchos, sifted into our hair and ears and clothes. It gritted in our teeth so we felt as though we were eating it. We could see it piling up around the next mesquite, and could imagine it whirling through the valley over the tops of "Old Johnnie's" dunes.

Often the wind goes down at sunset, but that day the sun sank invisibly and the fury increased. We felt a queer excitement not unmixed with fear. Thus, only a hundred times worse, must the sand blow over the vast Sahara Desert while the Arabs cover their heads, calling on Allah. When the solid ground itself arises there is no help but Allah.

After sunset the Worrier emerged again from the flying yellow mass. His shirt was blown tight to him and the loose sleeves whipped in the wind. He leaned against it bending forward. He shouted that we might possibly get some shelter by continuing along the road toward Salt Creek, where it winds further around the side of Sheep Mountain. He advised us to move, because if the storm continued he could not keep Molly and Bill.

"Tie them up!" we yelled.

"Can't. Go crazy." Then, as we did not move, his voice rose peremptorily:

"Come on! If it gets worse we can't go."

We had disregarded his first hunch; now, if he had another, far be it from us to raise difficulties, though we could hardly see how it was possible to travel even then. Charlotte and I staggered up from the mesquite and all three of us packed as speedily as we could. It was a disorderly packing, as we could scarcely stand before the wind, and were almost blinded by the sand. Molly and Bill were wild with excitement. I remember vividly bracing myself against the wall of wind, holding on to Molly, who objected to backing around to the wagon-pole, unable to open my eyes and hardly able to breathe.

We all piled into the wagon. The excited horses were willing to travel with their backs to the wind. There was a track to follow, but its edges were already rounding full of sand. If the storm should continue long enough it would be smoothed out.

The Worrier's hope was justified, for at the end of three or four miles the wind seemed much less furious. We were among the dunes and found a fairly quiet little gully full of deep sand as fine and soft as the sand on a beach. Something in the set of the wind through the mountains left this oasis of peace. We were even able to cook the long-delayed dinner. We did it by moonlight, slowly and carefully handling things and keeping them covered as much as possible, like having a picnic on a windy seashore.

The Worrier suggested that we climb to the top of the dune which partially sheltered us, if we wanted to see what a sandstorm looked like. We did so. From that vantage point of comparative calm we saw the whole Mesquite Valley filled with a dense yellow cloud that completely shut out the surrounding mountains, rising higher than they, swirling at the top like smoke ascending into the dark night sky.

In the morning we climbed the dune again and looked across over the others. The blowing sand was less dense and we could see them all. "Old Johnnie" had been right, they were a hundred feet high. Their shapes were very beautiful, with knife-edge tops ridged in pure, clean lines from which fringes of fine sand blew up like the wind-tossed manes of white horses. The masses and outlines of the dunes suggested Egyptian architecture; the pyramids and the crouching sphinx were there. Sand dunes must have been familiar to the Egyptians dwelling beside the Sahara. What is the huge sphinx, brooding and massive, gazing with strong eyes across the emptiness, but an interpretation of the desert carved in stone?

We reached Salt Creek early and spent the rest of the day there. The wind continued to blow, the sand still swirled off the dunes, and the yellow dust-cloud still obscured the mountains; but we were in the shelter of Tucki and the ground was so stony that we were not much troubled by the migrating sand. Once more Charlotte and I climbed the ridge from which we had watched the Worrier's remarkable hunting. The whole big basin of Death Valley between its high walls of rock was blurred with dust, clouds of sand with wind-frayed edges rose into the sky, not a gleam of radiance showed through. The green and white snake of Salt Creek coiled sullenly among the sulphur-colored hills. Only the blue eye was bright, poisonous, unwinking. The fair water that was too polluted for human drinking seemed to mock us. We waited for the enchanter to come at sunset, but as the day merged into evening the scene became inexpressibly dreadful.

Suddenly Charlotte arose from the rock on which we were sitting.

"Let us go," she whispered, and without further comment we hurried back to camp and made the Worrier collect enough wood from the swamp for a truly cheerful fire.

The following day we traveled once more up the long, northern mesa of Death Valley, but by a different route from that by which we had descended. This way was shorter, avoiding the long pull across the valley, though it was rockier, steeper, and cut by more islands of hills to cross or go around than the other. In many places the road vanished utterly, and only a "desert-rat" could have piloted a wagon safely to its destination over that maze of ridges and gullies.

The day was fine. At last the wind had died down and the dust-clouds were slowly subsiding. Both Death Valley and the Mesquite Valley were veiled in heavy haze, but the brightness of their changing color now shimmered through. All day the white blaze of the sun was around us and the silence, after a week of tumultuous wind, was a mighty dreaming. It was the living silence which we had first known on the night when we wandered away from Silver Lake, the silence in which the earth moves. The mountains dwelt in it majestically. Mojave was again making her fine gesture, unconscious of the discomforts and terrors of small living things. Her pointing at the far-off shining is always a conquest of grimness, as though sorrow were a stepping-stone to beauty.

By the out-jutting cliff of Daylight Pass, from which we had first beheld Death Valley, we made a long stop. Familiarity had only enhanced its splendor. With different eyes we saw the shining floor, the sad Funeral Mountains, the calm, white curves of the high Panamints. What had been a picture was now a living experience. The rose and silver shifting over the white valley-floor had new meaning. We knew that floor, we knew the feel of it, and its ever-changing beauty was a miracle. We were justified in the pilgrimage, for only by going thus to the White Heart, making stones and brush and jagged rocks our companions, depending on the springs to keep us alive and the roots of the greasewood to warm us, could we have known what a miracle it was. The words "terror" and "beauty" which we had spoken during the first look down into the valley and had thought that we understood, had real content now. We knew that they belonged together and that one covered the other and changed its meaning.

XII

_The End of the Adventure_

It was April when we returned to Silver Lake. Spring was walking on the desert. The sand and the stony mesas were decked with flowers. Great patches of California-poppies bent on hairlike, invisible stems before the wind, little floating golden cups. Blue lupins, like spires of larkspur, glistened in the sun. A four-petaled, waxy flower with a shining, satiny texture spread in masses on the sand. Daisies with yellow centers and lavender petals clustered beside rocks. A little plant like the beginnings of a wild rose tossed tiny pink balloons in the air. The shoots of the purple verbena ran over the ground, sending up little stems to hold its many-floretted crowns. Even the thorny cactus bloomed with a crimson, poppy-shaped flower.

When we went on excursions to the mountains the bayonet-leaves of the yucca guarded tall spikes which bore aloft white, shining blossoms, and the grotesque branches of the Joshua palms were tipped with brightness like lighted candles. Everywhere high clumps of yellow coreopsis rivaled the sun. Beyond the dry lake at the base of the sand-ridge which had been so terrifying on our first drive through the desert stood stately Easter lilies hung with great white bells. Easter morning we went over there and gathered armfuls for our kind German hosts. Their house and ours were abloom during our stay, for we could no more resist gathering these amazing flowers than we could resist picking up the many-colored stones. Every dish and bowl was full and tin cans rescued from the dump were promoted to be vases.

The gallant little flowers in such a stern environment! They were touchingly lovely, blooming wherever they had the smallest chance and looking trustingly at the sun. It was as though we had never seen flowers before, never really seen them.

Indeed, until we went on pilgrimage to the White Heart, we had never seen the outdoors, never really seen it. How could we not see it when the outdoors is always on the doorstep? We had thought we saw it, we had talked about it, a place for pleasant dalliance when work inside the walls was done, or a sort of glorified gymnasium to make the blood race and the heart beat faster. The outdoors is the awe-full, magnificent universe moving along, inexpressibly fearful and beautiful!

And we might have seen it anywhere! The drama is always going on with its terror and beauty. The gentlest countryside is a part of it. Everywhere the grim touches hands with the fair, storm alternates with calm, flowers grow out of death, and the fairness, the calm and the flowers are the stronger. Poets and artists know this when they step across their thresholds in the morning--whence their unreasonable joy at being alive--but most of us have to be shaken awake before we can see what is in front of our eyes.

The desert shook us awake. We had come looking for mysteries and "terrible fascinations" and found only the mystery of the old outdoors and the terrible fascination of the old outdoors. Beauty pressing around sorrow--the desert is simply a very forceful statement about that.

For the adventure with the outdoors is the adventure with beauty. And when you have that adventure the jealous walls, however engrossing their contents, and they may be very interesting and amusing and serious and exciting, can never bully you again. They have doors and windows in them and beauty is around them like a garment. You and I, unaccountably split off from the vast drama and blessedly able to be aware of it for a little while, shall we let the din and bother inside the walls, the frantic lunging at the still face of time, raise such a dust in our eyes that we cannot see?

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know."

Every day while we rested at Silver Lake we looked the length of the barren lake bed to the bright mirage at the base of the black mountain that was no mountain at all, and northward over sandy emptiness to the enchanted pathway leading behind the Avawatz. Fourteen of the still, bright days of the desert were strung on the endless string before we had to say good-by to our hosts and to the Worrier.

Never can we forget any of the people whom we met during our adventure with the outdoors, neither the few whom we have mentioned in this inadequate telling of it, nor the many whom we have not. They were all unfailingly kind. It was very hard to part from our guide, and nothing reconciled us to it except his cheerful promise to act as Official Worrier again. Our hostess invited us to come any time and stay as long as we liked, an invitation of which we have gladly availed ourselves.

We piled our baggage into the automobile, abandoned so long at Silver Lake, and through a whole sunny day drove away from the White Heart. The dim road led past sinister little craters that long ago spilled ugly, black lava over the hills, through acres and acres of blue lupins blown to waves like a sea, across two ranges of enchanted mountains and down into and over the white Ivanpah Valley where the heavy sand made the engine boil. Several times we left the car to walk on the savage, torn-up hills made gentle by flowers. When the noise of the engine was hushed the silence was full of the singing of birds.

In the rose and orange of evening we reached Needles on the bank of the red Colorado River, and came out of the wild and lonely place onto the great highway that joins the Atlantic and the Pacific. The sand and rock trail follows the steel road of the Santa Fé. Transcontinental trains roar past and pennants flutter on automobiles from Maine and Florida, Michigan and Texas, Oregon and California. Dust clouds roll over the edge of Mojave as America goes by. Some travelers look at her curiously, some look longingly, some shudder, some pass with the window shades pulled down. All the time she is singing on her rosy mountain-tops and in her deep, hot valleys where the blaze of the sun is white.

APPENDIX

" ... That part of California which lies to the south and east of the southern inosculation of the Coast Range and the Sierra comprises an area of fully 50,000 sq.m. For the most part it is excessively dry and barren. The Mohave Desert--embracing Kern, Los Angeles and San Bernardino, as also a large part of San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties--belong to the 'Great Basin.' ... The Mohave Desert is about 2,000 ft. above the sea in general altitude. The southern part of the Great Basin region is vaguely designated the Colorado desert. In San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties a number of creeks or so called rivers, with beds that are normally dry, flow centrally toward the desert of Salton Sink or 'Sea'; this is the lowest part of a large area that is depressed below the level of the sea, at Salton 263 ft., and 287 ft. at the lowest point. In 1900 the Colorado River (q.v.) was tapped south of the Mexican boundary for water wherewith to irrigate land in the Imperial Valley along the Southern Pacific Railway, adjoining Salton Sea. The river enlarged the Canal, and finding a steeper gradient than that to its mouth, was diverted into the Colorado Desert, flooding Salton Sea, and when the break in this river was closed for the second time in February, 1907, though much of its water still escaped through minor channels and by seepage, a lake more than 400 sq.m. in area was left. A permanent 60 ft. masonry dam was completed in July, 1907.

" ... Death Valley surpasses for combined heat and aridity any meteorological stations on earth where regular observations are taken, although for extremes of heat it is exceeded by places in the Colorado desert. The minimum daily temperature in summer is rarely below 70° F. and often above 96° F. (in the shade), while the maximum may for days in succession be as high as 120° F. A record of six months (1891) showed an average daily relative humidity sometimes falls to 5. Yet the surrounding country is not devoid of vegetation. The hills are very fertile when irrigated, and the wet season develops a variety of perennial herbs, shrubs and annuals."

The Encyclopædia Britannica: "California."

"It is often said that America has no real deserts. This is true in the sense that there are no regions such as are found in Asia and Africa where one can travel a hundred miles at a stretch and scarcely see a sign of vegetation--nothing but barren gravel, graceful, wavy sand dunes, hard, wind-swept clay, or still harder rock salt broken into rough blocks with upturned edges. In the broader sense of the term, however, America has an abundance of deserts--regions which bear a thin cover of bushy vegetation but are too dry for agriculture without irrigation.... In the United States the deserts lie almost wholly between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, which keep out any moisture that might come from either the west or the east. Beginning on the north with the sagebrush plateau of southern Washington, the desert expands to a width of seven hundred miles in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah. In southern California and Arizona the sagebrush gives place to smaller forms like the salt-bush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect. Next comes the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south into Mexico. One of the notable features of the desert is the extreme heat of certain portions. Close to the Nevada border in southern California, Death Valley, 250 feet below sea-level, is the hottest place in America. There alone among the American regions familiar to the writer does one have the feeling of intense, overpowering aridity which prevails so often in the deserts of Arabia and Central Asia. Some years ago a Weather Bureau thermometer was installed in Death Valley at Furnace Creek, where the only flowing water in more than a hundred miles supports a depressing little ranch. There one or two white men, helped by a few Indians, raise alfalfa, which they sell at exorbitant prices to deluded prospectors searching for riches which they never find. Though the terrible heat ruins the health of the white men in a year or two, so that they have to move away, they have succeeded in keeping a thermometer record for some years. No other properly exposed out-of-door thermometer in the United States, or perhaps in the world, is so familiar with a temperature of 100° F. or more. During the period of not quite fifteen hundred days from the spring of 1911 to May, 1915, a maximum temperature of 100° F. or more was reached in five hundred and forty-eight days, or more than one-third of the time. On July 10, 1913, the mercury rose to 134° F. and touched the top of the tube. How much higher it might have gone no one can tell. That day marks the limit of temperature yet reached in this country according to official records. In the summer of 1914 there was one night when the thermometer dropped only to 114° F., having been 128° F. at noon. The branches of a pepper-tree whose roots had been freshly watered wilted as a flower wilts when broken from the stalk."

--The Chronicles of America.--Volume I. "The Red Man's Continent,"
by Ellsworth Huntington.

End of Project Gutenberg's The White Heart of Mojave, by Edna Brush Perkins