The Desert | Project Gutenberg (2024)

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THE DESERT

FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL
APPEARANCES

BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
AUTHOR OF “NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,”
“ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901

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Copyright, 1901, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published September, 1901.

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

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PREFACE-DEDICATION
To
A. M. C.

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CONTENTS

Chapter I. The Approach.—Desert mountain ranges—Earlymorning approach—Air illusions—Sand forms—Thewinds—Sun-shafts—Sunlight—Desert life—Antelope—TheLost Mountains—The ascent—Deer trails—Footprints—Thestone path—Defensive walls—The summit—Thefortified camp—Nature’s reclamations—Themountain dwellers—Invading hosts—Water and foodsupplies—The aborigines—Historic periods—The opendesert—Perception of beauty—Sense of beauty—Mountain“view” of the desert—Desert colors—The land offire—Drouth and heat—Sand and gypsum—Sand-whirls—Desertstorms—Drift of sands—Winter cold in the basin—Snowon desert—Sea and sand—Grim desolation—Lovefor the desert—The descent—The Padres in the desert—Thelight of the cross—Aboriginal faith 1

Chapter II. The Make of the Desert.—The sea ofsand—Mountain ranges on desert—Plains, valleys, andmesas—Effect of drouth—The rains—Harshness of desert—Agaunt land—Conditions of life—Incessant strife—Elementalwarfare—Desert vegetation—Protrudingedges—Shifting sands—Desert winds—Radiation of heat—Prevailingwinds—Wear of the winds—Erosion ofmountains—Rock-cutting—Fantastic forms—Wash-outs—Sand-linesin caves—Cloud-bursts—Canyon waters—Desertfloods—Power of water—Water-pockets—No(xiv)surface-streams—Oases in the waste—Catch-basins—Oldsea-beds—Volcanic action—Lava-flows—Geologicalages—Kinds of rock—Glaciers—Land slips—Movementof stones—The talus—Stages of the talus—Desert floors—Sandstoneblocks—Salt-beds—Sand-beds—Mountainvegetation—Withered grasses—Barren rock—Mountaincolors—Saw-toothed ridges—Seen from the peaks—TheSun-fire kingdom 23

Chapter III. The Bottom of the Bowl.—Early geologicaldays—The former Gulf—Sea-beaches on desert—Harborsand reefs—Indian remains—The Cocopas—TheColorado River—The delta dam—The inland lake—Thefirst fall—Springs and wells in the sea-bed—The NewRiver—New beaches—The second fall—The third beach—Thefailing water—Evaporation—Bottom of the Bowl—Dryingout of the sea-bed—Advance of the desert—Belowsea-level—Desolation of the basin—Beauty of thesand-dunes—Cactus and salt-bush—Desert animals—Birds—Lizardsand snakes—Mirage—The water illusion—Decorativelandscapes—Sensuous qualities in Nature—Changingthe desert—Irrigation in the basin—Changingthe climate—Dry air—Value of the air supply—Value ofthe desert—Destruction of natural beauty—Effects ofmining, lumbering, agriculture—Ploughing the prairies—“Practicalmen”—Fighting wind, sand, and heat—Natureeternal—Return of desolation 44

Chapter IV. The Silent River.—Rise of the Colorado—Inthe canyon—On the desert—The lower river—Sluggishmovement—Stillness of the river—The river’sname—Its red color—Compared with the Nile—Theblood hue—River changes—Red sands and silt—River-banks—“Bottom”lands—Green bordering bands—Bushesand flowers—Soundless water—Wild fowl—Herons(xv)and bitterns—Snipe—Sadness of bird-life—The forsakenshores—Solitude—Beauty of the river—Its majesty—Thedelta—Disintegration—The river in flood—The“bore”—Meeting of river and sea—The blue tomb—Shoresof Gulf 63

Chapter V. Light, Air, and Color.—Popular ideas—Sunlighton desert—Glare and heat—Pure sunlight—Atmosphericenvelope—Vapor particles in air—Clear air—Dustparticles—Hazes—Seeing the desert air—Sea-breezeson desert—Colored air—Different hues—Producingcolor—Refracted rays—Cold colors, how produced—Warmcolors—Sky colors—Color produced by dust—Effectof heat—Effect of winds—Sand-storms—Reflectionsupon sky—Blue, yellow, and pink hazes—The dust-veil—Summercoloring—Local hues—Greens of desertplants—Color of the sands—Sands in mirage—Color ofmountain walls—Weather staining—Influence of the air—Peakof Baboquivari—Buttes and spires—Sun-shaftsthrough canyons—Complementary hues in shadow—Coloredshadows—Blue shadows upon salt-beds—How lightmakes color—Desert sunsets 77

Chapter VI. Desert Sky and Clouds.—Commonplacethings of Nature—The blue sky—Changes in theblue—Dawns on the desert—Blue as a color—Sky frommountain heights—Blackness of space—Bright sky-colors—Horizonskies—Spectrum colors—Bands of yellow—Theorange sky—Desert-clouds—Rainfall—Effect ofthe nimbus—Cumuli—Heap-clouds at sunset—Strati—Cirri—Ice-clouds—Fire-clouds—Thecelestial tapestry—Thedesert moon—Rings and rainbows—Moonlight—Stars—Themidnight sky—Alone in the desert—The mysteries—Spaceand immensity—The silences—The cry ofthe human 95

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Chapter VII. Illusions.—Reality and appearance—Preconceivedimpressions—Deception by sunlight—Distortedforms and colors—Changed appearance of mountains—Changesin line and light—False perspective—Abnormalforeshortening—Contradictions and denials—Deceptivedistances—Dangers of the desert—Immensityof valley-plains—Shadow illusions—Color-patches onmountains—Illusions of lava-beds—Appearance of cloud-shadows—Mirage—Needof explanation—Refraction oflight-rays—Dense air-strata—Illustration of camera-lens—Bentlight-rays—Ships at sea and upside down—Whereinthe illusion—“Looming” of vessels, cities, andislands—Reversed image of mountains—Horses and cattlein mirage—Illusion of rising buttes—Other causes ofmirage—Water-mirage—The lake appearance—How produced—Objectsin water—Confused mirage—The swimmingwolf—Colors and shadows in mirage—Tremblingair—Beauty of mirage 109

Chapter VIII. Cactus and Grease Wood.—Views ofNature—Growth and decay—Nature’s plan—The law ofchange—Nature foiling her own plans—Attack anddrouth—Preservation of species—Means of preservation—Maintainingthe status quo—The plant-struggle for life—Fightingheat and drouth—Prevention of evaporation—Absenceof large leaves—Exhaust of moisture—Gumsand varnishes of bushes—The ocatilla—Tap roots—Undergroundstructure—Feeding the top growth—Storagereservoirs below ground—Reservoirs above ground—Thickenedbarks—Gathering moisture—Attacks upon desertplants—Browsing animals—Weapons of defence—Thespine and thorn—The crucifixion thorn—The stingof flowers—Fierceness of the plant—Odors and juices—Sapsastringent and cathartic—Expenditure of energy—Thedesert covering—Use of desert plants—Their beauty—Beauty(xvii)in character—Forms of the yucca and maguey—Thelluvia d’oro—Grotesque forms—Abnormal colors—Blossomsand flowers—Many varieties—Wild flowers—Salt-bush—Thegrasses and lichens—The continuousstruggle 128

Chapter IX. Desert Animals.—Meeting desert requirements—Peculiardesert character—Desert Indians—Lifewithout water—Endurance of the jack-rabbit—Prairiedogs and water—Water famine—Coyotesand wild-cats living without water—Lean, gaunt life—Fiercenessof animals—Attack and escape—The wild-cat—Springof the cat—Mountain lion—His habits—Thegray wolf—Home of the wolf—The coyote—Hiscleverness—His subsistence—His background—The fox—Theprey—Devices for escape—Senses of the rabbit—Speedof the jack-rabbit—His endurance—The “cotton-tail”—Squirrelsand gophers—Desert antelope—His eyes,nose, and ears—His swiftness—The mule-deer—Deerin flight—White-tailed deer—The reptiles—Defence ofpoison—The fang and sting—The rattlesnake and hispoison—Spiders and tarantulas—Centipedes and scorpions—Lizardsand swifts—The hydrophobia skunk—Thecutthroat band—The eternal struggle—Brute courageand character—Beauty in character—Graceful forms ofanimals—Colors of lizards—Mystery of motion 150

Chapter X. Winged Life.—First day’s walk—Tracksin the sand—Scarcity of birds—Dangers of bird-life—Nocover for protection—Food problem—Heat and drouthagain—A bird’s temperature—Innocent-looking birds—Theroad-runner—Wrens and fly-catchers—Developmentof special characteristics—Birds of the air—Thevulture—His hunting and sailing—The southern buzzard—Thecrow—The great condor—Eagles and hawks—Bats(xviii)and owls—The burrowing owl—Ground-birds—The road-runner’sswiftness—The vicious beak—The desert-quail—Wingsof the quail—Travelling for water—Habits ofthe quail—His strong legs—Bush-birds—Woodpeckersand cactus—Finches and mocking-birds—Humming-birds—Dovesand grosbeaks—The lark and flickers—Jays andmagpies—Water fowl—Beetles and worms—Fighting destructionby breed—Blue and green beetles—Butterflies—Designand character—Beauty of birds—Beauty also ofreptiles—Nature’s work all purposeful—Precious jewelof the toad 174

Chapter XI. Mesas and Foot-Hills.—Flat steps ofthe desert—Across Southern Arizona—Rising from thedesert—The great mesas—“Grease wood plains”—Uplandvegetation—Grass plains—Spring and summer on theplains—Home of the antelope—Beds of soda and gypsum—Ridinginto the unexpected—The Grand Canyoncountry—Hills covered with juniper—The Painted Desert—Ridingon the mesas—The reversion to savagery—Thethin air again—The light and its deceptions—Distortedproportions—Changed colors—The little hills—Paintingthe desert—Worn-down mountains—Mountain wash—Flatteningdown the plain—Mountain making—The foot-hills—Formsof the foot-hills—Mountain plants—Baremountains—The southern exposures—Gray lichens—Stillin the desert—Arida Zona—Cloud-bursts in the mesas—Washof rains—Gorge cutting—In the canyons—Wallsof rock—Color in canyon shadows—Blue sky—Desertlandscape—Knowledge of Nature—Nature-lovers—Humanlimitations 194

Chapter XII. Mountain Barriers.—The westernmountains—Saddles and passes—View from mountaintop—Looking toward the peaks—Lost streams—Avalanches(xix)and bowlder-beds—Ascent by the arroyo—Growthof the stream—Rising banks—Waterfalls—Gorges—Ascentby the ridges—The chaparral—Home of the grizzly—Ridgetrails—Among the live-oaks—Birds and deer—Yawningcanyons—Canyon streams—Snow—Water wear—Thepines—Barrancas and escarpments—Under thepines—Bushes, ferns, and mosses—Mountain quail—Indigojays—Warblers—The mountain air—The dwarfpines—The summit—The look upward at the sky—Thedark-blue dome—White light—Distant views—The Pacific—SouthernCalifornia—The garden in the desert—Reclaimingthe valleys—Nature’s fight against fertility—Thedesert from the mountain top—The great extent ofdesert—The fateful wilderness—All shall perish—Thedeath of worlds—The desert the beginning of the end—Developmentthrough adversity—Sublimity of thewaste—Desolation and silence—Good-night to thedesert 213

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THE DESERT

CHAPTER I
THE APPROACH

It is the last considerable group of mountainsbetween the divide and the low basin of theColorado desert. For days I have been watchingthem change color at sunset—watching thecanyons shift into great slashes of blue andpurple shadow, and the ridges flame with edgingsof glittering fire. They are lonesome lookingmountains lying off there by themselves onthe plain, so still, so barren, so blazing hotunder the sun. Forsaken of their kind, onemight not inappropriately call them the “LostMountains”—the surviving remnant no doubtof some noble range that long centuries agowas beaten by wind and rain into desert sand.And yet before one gets to them they may provequite formidable heights, with precipitous sidesand unsurmountable tops. Who knows? Notthose with whom I am stopping, for they have(2)not been there. They do not even know thename of them. The Papagoes leave them alonebecause there is no game in them. Evidentlythey are considered unimportant hills, nobody’shills, no man’s range; but neverthelessI am off for them in the morning at daylight.

I ride away through the thin mesquite andthe little adobe ranch house is soon lost to view.The morning is still and perfectly clear. Thestars have gone out, the moon is looking pale,the deep blue is warming, the sky is lighteningwith the coming day. How cool and crystallinethe air! In a few hours the great plain will bealmost like a fiery furnace under the rays ofthe summer sun, but now it is chilly. And ina few hours there will be rings and bands andscarves of heat set wavering across the wasteupon the opalescent wings of the mirage; butnow the air is so clear that one can see thebreaks in the rocky face of the mountainrange, though it is fully twenty miles away.It may be further. Who of the desert has notspent his day riding at a mountain and nevereven reaching its base? This is a land of illusionsand thin air. The vision is so cleared attimes that the truth itself is deceptive. But Ishall ride on for several hours. If, by twelve(3)o’clock, the foot hills are not reached, I shallturn back.

The summer heat has withered everythingexcept the mesquite, the palo verde,[1] thegrease wood, and the various cacti. Under footthere is a little dry grass, but more oftenpatches of bare gravel and sand rolled in shallowbeds that course toward the large valleys.In the draws and flat places the fine sand liesthicker, is tossed in wave forms by the wind,and banked high against clumps of cholla orprickly pear. In the wash-outs and over thecut banks of the arroyos it is sometimes heapedin mounds and crests like driven snow. Itblows here along the boundary line betweenArizona and Sonora almost every day; and thetailing of the sands behind the bushes showsthat the prevailing winds are from the Gulfregion. A cool wind? Yes, but only by comparisonwith the north wind. When you feelit on your face you may think it the breath ofsome distant volcano.

How pale-blue the Lost Mountains lookunder the growing light. I am watching theiredges develop into broken barriers of rock, and(4)even as I watch the tallest tower of all is struckwith a bright fawn color. It is the high pointto catch the first shaft of the sun. Quickly thelight spreads downward until the whole ridge istinged by it, and the abrupt sides of porphyrybegin to glow under it. It is not long beforegreat shafts of light alternating with shadowstretch down the plain ahead of me. The sunis streaming through the tops of the easternmountains and the sharp pointed pinnacles arecutting shadows in the broad beam of light.

That beam of light! Was there ever anythingso beautiful! How it flashes its colorthrough shadow, how it gilds the tops of themountains and gleams white on the dunes ofthe desert! In any land what is there moreglorious than sunlight! Even here in thedesert, where it falls fierce and hot as a rain ofmeteors, it is the one supreme beauty to whichall things pay allegiance. The beast and thebird are not too fond of its heat and as soon asthe sun is high in the heavens they seek coverin the canyons; but for all that the chief gloryof the desert is its broad blaze of omnipresentlight.

Yes, there is animal and bird life here thoughit is not always apparent unless you look for it.(5)Wrens and linnets are building nests in thecholla, and finches are singing from the top ofthe sahuaro.[2] There are plenty of reptiles,rabbits and ground squirrels quietly slippingout of your way; and now that the sun is upyou can see a long sun-burned slant-of-hairtrotting up yonder divide and casting an apprehensivehead from side to side as he moves off.It is not often that the old gray wolf showshimself to the traveller. He is usually up inthe mountains before sunrise. And seldomnow does one see the desert antelope along themesas, and yet off to the south you can seepatches of white that come and go almost likeflashing mirrors in the sun. They are stragglersfrom some band that have drifted up from centralSonora. No; they are not far away. Alittle mirage is already forming over that portionof the mesa and makes them look more distantthan they are in reality. You can be deceivedon the desert by the nearness of things quite asoften as by their remoteness.

These desert mountains have a fashion of appearingdistant until you are almost up to them.Then they seem to give up the game of deceptionand come out of their hiding-places. It is(6)just so with the mountains toward which I amriding. After several hours they seem to riseup suddenly in front of me and I am at theirbase. They are not high—perhaps fifteenhundred feet. The side near me is precipitousrock, weather-stained to a reddish-black. Aride around the bases discloses an almost completeperpendicular wall, slanting off half waydown the sides into sloping beds of bowldersthat have been shaken loose from the upperstrata. A huge cleft in the western side—halfbarranca half canyon—seems to suggest a wayto the summit.

The walking up the mountain is not the bestin the world. It is over splintered rock, steppingfrom stone to stone, creeping along thebackbone of bowlders, and worrying over rowsof granite blocks. Presently the course seemsto slip into a diagonal—a winding up andaround the mountain—and ahead of me thestones begin to look peculiar, almost familiar.There seems to be a trail over the ledges andthrough the broken blocks; but what shouldmake a trail up that deserted mountain?Mule-deer travelling toward the summit to liedown in the heat of the day? It is possible.The track of a band of deer soon becomes a(7)beaten path, and animals are just as fond ofa good path as humanity. By a strange coincidenceat this very moment the sharp-toedprint of a deer’s hoof appears in the groundbefore me. But it looks a little odd. The impressionis so clear cut that I stoop to examineit. It is with no little astonishment that I findit sunk in stone instead of earth—petrified inrock and overrun with silica. The bare suggestiongives one pause. How many thousandsof years ago was that impression stamped uponthe stone? By what strange chance has itsurvived destruction? And while it remainsquite perfect to-day—the vagrant hoof-mark ofa desert deer—what has become of the oncecarefully guarded footprints of the Sargons,the Pharaohs and the Cæsars? With whatcontempt Nature sometimes plans the survivalof the least fit, and breaks the conqueror on hisshield!

Further up the mountain the deer-trail theoryis abandoned—at least so far as recent times areconcerned. The stones are worn too smooth,the larger ones have been pushed aside bysomething more intelligent than a mule-deer’shoof; and in one place the trail seems to havebeen built up on the descending side. There is(8)not the slightest evidence, either by rub uponthe rocks, or overturned stones, or scrape inthe gravel, that any living thing has passed upthis pathway for many years; and yet the trailis a distinct line of lighter colored stone stretchingahead of me. It is a path worn in therocks, and there is no grass or vine or weed toobliterate it. It leads on and up to the saddleof the mountain. There is a crevasse or chasmbreaking through this saddle which might havebeen bridged at one time with mesquite trunks,but is now to be leaped if one would reach thesummit. It is narrow only in one place andthis is just where the trail happens to run.Across it, on the upper side, there is a horseshoeshaped enclosure of stone. It is onlya few feet in diameter, and the upper layers ofstone have fallen; but the little wall still standsas high as one’s waist. Could this have beena sentinel box used to guard the passage of thetrail at this place?

Higher and still higher until at last themountain broadens into a flat top. I am soeager to gain the height and am expecting somuch that at first I overlook what is before me.Gradually I make out a long parapet of loosestone on the trail side of the mountain which(9)joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. Aconclusion is instantly jumped at, for the imaginationwill not make haste slowly under suchcirc*mstances. These are the ruins of a oncefortified camp.

I wander about the flat top of the mountainand slowly there grows into recognizable form agreat rectangle enclosed by large stones placedabout two feet apart. There is no doubt aboutthe square and in one corner of it there seemsan elevated mound covered with high-piledstones that would indicate a place for burials.But not a trace of pottery or arrow-heads; andabout the stones only faint signs of fire whichmight have come from volcanic action as readilyas from domestic hearths. Upon the side ofone of the large rocks are some characters inred ochre; and on the ground near a pot-holein the rock, something that the imaginationmight torture into a rude pestle for grindingmaize.

The traces of human activity are slight. Naturehas been wearing them away and reclaimingher own on the mountain top. Greasewood is growing where once a floor was beatenhard as iron by human feet; out of the burialmound rises a giant sahuaro whose branching(10)arms give the look of the cross; and besidethe sahuaro rests a tall yucca with four feet ofclustering bellflowers swinging from its top.

And who were they who built these stone walls,these primitive entrenchments? When andwhere did they come from and what broughtthem here? The hands that executed thisrough work were certainly untrained. Indians?Very likely. Perhaps some small band that hadtaken up a natural defence in the mountainsbecause too feeble in numbers to fight in theopen. Here from this lookout they could watchthe country for a hundred miles around. Herethe scouts could see far away the thin string offoemen winding snake-like over the ridges ofthe desert, could see them grow in size andcount their numbers, could look down uponthem at the foot of the mountain and yell backdefiance to the challenge coming up the steepsides. Brave indeed the invaders that wouldpluck the eagles from that eerie nest! Climbinga hill against a shower of arrows, spears,and bowlders is to fight at a terrible disadvantage.

Starve them out? Yes; but the ones at thebottom would starve as quickly as those at thetop. Cut off their water supply? Yes; but(11)where did either besieged or besieger get water?If there was ever a spring in the mountain itlong ago dried up, for there is no trace of it to-day.Possibly the mountain-dwellers knew ofsome arroyo where by digging in the sand theycould get water. And possibly they carriedit in ollas up the stone trail to their mountainhome where they stored it in the rocks againstthe wrath of a siege to come. No doubt theytook thought for trouble, and being native tothe desert they could stand privation betterthan their enemies.

How long ago did that aboriginal band cometrailing over these trackless deserts to find andmake a home in a barren mountain standingin a bed of sand? Who can tell? A geologistmight make the remains of their fort an illustrationof the Stone Age and talk of unknowncenturies; an iconoclast might claimthat it was merely a Mexican corral built tohide stolen horses; but a plain person of thesouthwest would say that it was an old Indiancamp. The builders of the fortification and therectangle worked with stone because there wasno other material. The man of the Stone Ageexists to-day contemporary with civilized man.Possibly he always did. And it may be that(12)some day Science will conclude that historicperiods do not invariably happen, that there isnot always a sequential evolution, and that thewhite race does not necessarily require a flat-headedmass of stupidity for an ancestor.

But what brought them to seek a dwellingplace in the desert? Were they driven out fromthe more fertile tracts? Perhaps. Did theyfind this a country where game was plentifuland the conditions of life comparatively easy?It is possible. Or was it that they loved theopen country, the hot sun, the treeless wastes,the great stretches of mesa, plain and valley?Ah; that is more than likely. Mankind hasalways loved the open plains. He is like anantelope and wishes to see about him in all directions.Perhaps, too, he was born with a predilectionfor “the view,” but that is no easymatter to prove. It is sometimes assumed thathumanity had naturally a sense and a feelingfor the beautiful because the primitives decoratedpottery and carved war-clubs and totem-posts.Again perhaps; but from war-clubs andtotem-posts to sunsets and mountain shadows—thelove of the beautiful in nature—is a verylong hark. The peons and Indians in Sonoracannot see the pinks and purples in the mountain(13)shadows at sunset. They are astonished atyour question for they see nothing but mountains.And you may vainly exhaust ingenuitytrying to make a Pagago see the silvery sheenof the mesquite when the low sun is streamingacross its tops. He sees only mesquite—thesame dull mesquite through which he haschased rabbits from infancy.

No; it is not likely that the tribe ever chosethis abiding place for its scenery. A sensitivefeeling for sound, or form, or color, an impressionablenervous organization, do not belong tothe man with the hoe, much less to the manwith the bow. It is to be feared that they areindicative of some physical degeneration, somedecline in bone and muscle, some abnormaldevelopment of the emotional nature. Theytravel side by side with high civilization andare the premonitory symptoms of racial decay.But are we correct in assuming that becausethe red man does not see a colored shadowtherefore he is blind to every charm and sublimityof nature?

These mountain-dwellers, always looking outfrom their height, must have seen and remarkedthe large features of the desert—thegreat masses of form, the broad blocks of color.(14)They knew the long undulations of the valley-plainwere covered with sharp, broken rock, butfrom this height surely they must have noticedhow soft as velvet they looked, how smoothlythey rolled from one into another, how perfectlythey curved, how symmetrically they waved.And the long lines of the divides, lessening tothe west—their ridges of grease wood showinga peculiar green like the crests of sea-wavesin storm—did they not see them? Did theynot look down on the low neighboring hills andknow that they were pink, terra-cotta, orange-colored—allthe strange hues that may be compoundedof clay and mineral—with here andthere a crowning mass of white quartz or a far-extendingoutcrop of shale stained blue andgreen with copper? Doubtless, a wealth ofcolor and atmospheric effect was wasted uponthe aboriginal retina; but did it not take noteof the deep orange sunsets, the golden fringedheaps of cumulus, and the tongues of fire thatcurled from every little cirrus cloud that lingeredin the western sky?

And how often they must have looked outand down to the great basin of the desert wherecloud and sky, mountain and mesa, seemed todissolve into a pink mist! It was not an unknown(15)land to them and yet it had its terrors.Tradition told that the Evil Spirit dwelt there,and it was his hot breath that came up everymorning on the wind, scorching and burningthe brown faces of the mountain-dwellers!Fire!—he dwelt in fire. Whence came all thefierce glow of sunset down over that desert if itwas not the reflection from his dwelling place?The very mountain peaks flared red at times,and in the old days there were rivers of fire.The petrified waves and eddies of those riverswere still visible in the lava streams. Werethere not also great flames beneath the sandsthat threw up hot water and boiled great volcanoesof mud? And along the base of manya cliff were there not jets of steam and smokeblown out from the heart of the mountains?

It was a land of fire. No food, no grass, nowater. There were places in the canyons whereoccasionally a little stream was found forcingitself up through the rock; but frequently itwas salt or, worse yet, poisoned with copper orarsenic. How often the tribe had lost from itsnumbers—slain by the heat and drought inthat waste! More than once the bodies hadbeen found by crossing bands and always thesame tale was told. The victims were half(16)buried in sand, not decayed, but withered likethe grass on the lomas.

Mystery—a mystery as luminous and yet asimpenetrable as its own mirage—seemed alwayshanging over that low-lying waste. It was avast pit dug under the mountain bases. Themountains themselves were bare crags of fire inthe sunlight, and the sands of the pit grewonly cactus and grease wood. There were tractswhere nothing at all grew—miles upon miles ofabsolute waste with the pony’s feet breakingthrough an alkaline crust. And again, therewere dry lakes covered with silt; and vast bedsof sand and gypsum, white as snow and fine asdust. The pony’s feet plunged in and cameout leaving no trail. The surface smoothed overas though it were water. Fifty miles away onecould see the desert sand-whirls moving slowlyover the beds in tall columns two thousandfeet high and shining like shafts of marble inthe sunlight. How majestically they moved,their feet upon earth, their heads toweringinto the sky!

And then the desert winds that raised attimes such furious clouds of sand! All theair shone like gold dust and the sun turnedred as blood. Ah! what a stifling sulphureous(17)air! Even on the mountain tops that heavyair could be felt, and down in the desert itselfthe driving particles of sand cut the face andhands like blizzard-snow. The ponies couldnot be made to face it. They turned theirbacks to the wind and hung their heads betweentheir fore feet. And how that windroared and whistled through the thin greasewood! The scrubby growths leaned and bentin the blast, the sand piled high on the trunks;and nothing but the enormous tap-roots keptthem from being wrenched from the earth.

And danger always followed the high winds.They blew the sands in clouds that drifted fulland destroyed the trails. In a single nightthey would cover up a water hole, and in a fewdays fill in an arroyo where water could be gotby digging. The sands drove like breakers ona beach, washing and wearing everything upto the bases of the mountains. And the finesand reached still higher. It whirled up thecanyons and across the saddles, it eddied aroundthe enormous taluses, it even flung itself uponthe face walls of the mountain and left thesmoothing marks of its fingers upon the sharppinnacles of the peak.

It was in winter when the winds were fiercest.(18)With them at times came a sharp cold, themore biting for the thin dry air of the desert.All the warmth seemed blown out of the basinwith a breath, and its place filled by a storm-windfrom the north that sent the condorwheeling down the blast and made the coyoteshiver on the hill. How was it possible thatsuch a furnace could grow so cold! And onceor more each winter, when the sky darkenedwith clouds, there was a fall of snow that foran hour or so whitened the desert mountainsand then passed away. At those times thesprings were frozen, the high sierras weresnow-bound, and down in the desert it seemedas though a great frost-sheet had been let downfrom above. The brown skins for all theirdeer-hide clothing were red with cold, and thebreath blown from the pony’s nostrils waswhite as smoke.

A waste of intense heat and cold, of drouthand cloud-bursts, of winds and lightning, ofstorm and death, what could make any race ofhunters or band of red men care for it? Whatwas the attraction, wherein the fascination?How often have we wondered why the sailorloves the sea, why the Bedouin loves the sand!What is there but a strip of sky and another(19)strip of sand or water? But there is a simplicityabout large masses—simplicity inbreadth, space and distance—that is invitingand ennobling. And there is something veryrestful about the horizontal line. Things thatlie flat are at peace and the mind grows peacefulwith them. Furthermore, the waste placesof the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsakenof men and given over to loneliness, havea peculiar attraction of their own. The weirdsolitude, the great silence, the grim desolation,are the very things with which every desertwanderer eventually falls in love. You thinkthat very strange perhaps? Well, the beautyof the ugly was sometime a paradox, but to-daypeople admit its truth; and the grandeur ofthe desolate is just as paradoxical, yet thedesert gives it proof.

But the sun-tanned people who lived on thismountain top never gave thought to masses,or horizontal lines, or paradoxes. They livedhere, it may be from necessity at first, and thenstayed on because they loved the open wind-blowncountry, the shining orange-hued sands,the sweeping mesas, the great swing of thehorizontal circle, the flat desolation, the unbrokensolitude. Nor ever knew why they(20)loved it. They were content and that wasenough.

What finally became of them? Who knows?One by one they passed away, or perhaps wereall slaughtered in a night by the fierce bandnewly come to numbers called the Apaches.This stone wall stands as their monument, butit tells no date or tale of death. As I descendthe trail of stone the fancy keeps harping onthe countless times the bare feet must haverubbed those blocks of syenite and porphyryto wear them so smooth. Have there been noothers to clamber up these stairs of stone?What of the Padres—were they not here?As I ride off across the plain to the east thethought is of the heroism, the self-abnegation,the undying faith of those followers ofLoyola and Xavier who came into this waste somany years ago. How idle seem all the specioustales of Jesuitism and priestcraft. The Padreswere men of soul, unshrinking faith, and a perseverancealmost unparalleled in the annals ofhistory. The accomplishments of Columbus,of Cortez, of Coronado were great; but whatof those who first ventured out upon these sandsand erected missions almost in the heart of thedesert, who single-handed coped with dangers(21)from man and nature, and who lived and diedwithout the slightest hope of reward here onearth? Has not the sign of the cross cast moremen in heroic mould than ever the glitter ofthe crown or the flash of the sword?

And thinking such thoughts I turn to take afinal view of the mountain; and there on thefortified top something rears itself against thesky like the cross-hilt of a sword. It is thegiant sahuaro with its rising arms, and besideit the cream-white bloom of the yucca shiningin the sunlight seems like a lamp illuminatingit. The good Padres have gone and their missionchurches are crumbling back to the earthfrom which they were made; but the light ofthe cross still shines along the borders of thisdesert land. The flame, that through them theSpirit kindled, still burns; and in every Indianvillage, in every Mexican adobe, you will see onthe wall the wooden or grass-woven cross. Onthe high hills and at the cross-roads it stands,roughly hewn from mesquite and planted in acone of stones. It is now always weather-stainedand sun-cracked, but still the sign before whichthe peon and the Indian bow the head and whisperwords of prayer. The dwellers beside thedesert have cherished what the inhabitants of(22)the fertile plains have thrown away. They andtheir forefathers have never known civilization,and never suffered from the blight of doubt.Of a simple nature, they have lived in a simpleway, close to their mother earth, beside thedesert they loved, and (let us believe it!) nearerto the God they worshipped.

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CHAPTER II
THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

The first going-down into the desert isalways something of a surprise. The fancyhas pictured one thing; the reality shows quiteanother thing. Where and how did we gainthe idea that the desert was merely a sea ofsand? Did it come from that geography of ouryouth with the illustration of the sand-storm,the flying camel, and the over-excited Bedouin?Or have we been reading strange tales told bytravellers of perfervid imagination—the MarcoPolos of to-day? There is, to be sure, somemodicum of truth even in the statement thatmisleads. There are “seas” or lakes or pondsof sand on every desert; but they are not sovast, not so oceanic, that you ever lose sight ofthe land.

What land? Why, the mountains. Thedesert is traversed by many mountain ranges,some of them long, some short, some low, andsome rising upward ten thousand feet. They(24)are always circling you with a ragged horizon,dark-hued, bare-faced, barren—just as trulydesert as the sands which were washed downfrom them. Between the ranges there arewide-expanding plains or valleys. The mostarid portions of the desert lie in the basins ofthese great valleys—flat spaces that were oncethe beds of lakes, but are now dried out andleft perhaps with an alkaline deposit that preventsvegetation. Through these valleys runarroyos or dry stream-beds—shallow channelswhere gravel and rocks are rolled during cloud-burstsand where sands drift with every wind.At times the valleys are more diversified, that is,broken by benches of land called mesas, dottedwith small groups of hills called lomas, crossedby long stratified faces of rock called escarpments.

With these large features of landscape commonto all countries, how does the desert differfrom any other land? Only in the matter ofwater—the lack of it. If Southern Franceshould receive no more than two inches of raina year for twenty years it would, at the end ofthat time, look very like the Sahara, and theflashing Rhone would resemble the sluggishyellow Nile. If the Adirondack region in New(25)York were comparatively rainless for the samelength of time we should have something likethe Mojave Desert, with the Hudson changedinto the red Colorado. The conformations ofthe lands are not widely different, but theirsurface appearances are as unlike as it is possibleto imagine.

For the whole face of a land is changed bythe rains. With them come meadow-grassesand flowers, hillside vines and bushes, fields ofyellow grain, orchards of pink-white blossoms.Along the mountain sides they grow the forestsof blue-green pine, on the peaks they put whitecaps of snow; and in the valleys they gathertheir waste waters into shining rivers and flashinglakes. This is the very sheen and sparkle—thewitchery—of landscape which lend allurementto such countries as New England, France,or Austria, and make them livable and lovablelands.

But the desert has none of these charms.Nor is it a livable place. There is not a thingabout it that is “pretty,” and not a spot uponit that is “picturesque” in any Berkshire-Valleysense. The shadows of foliage, the drift ofclouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the soundof running waters—all the gentler qualities of(26)nature that minor poets love to juggle with—aremissing on the desert. It is stern, harsh,and at first repellent. But what tongue shalltell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it,the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimityof its lonely desolation! And who shallpaint the splendor of its light; and from therising up of the sun to the going down of themoon over the iron mountains, the glory of itswondrous coloring! It is a gaunt land ofsplintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies.And at every step there is the suggestion of thefierce, the defiant, the defensive. Everythingwithin its borders seems fighting to maintainitself against destroying forces. There is a warof elements and a struggle for existence goingon here that for ferocity is unparalleled elsewherein nature.

The feeling of fierceness grows upon you asyou come to know the desert better. The sun-shaftsare falling in a burning shower uponrock and dune, the winds blowing with thebreath of far-off fires are withering the bushesand the grasses, the sands drifting higher andhigher are burying the trees and reaching up asthough they would overwhelm the mountains,the cloud-bursts are rushing down the mountain’s(27)side and through the torn arroyos asthough they would wash the earth into the sea.The life, too, on the desert is peculiarly savage.It is a show of teeth in bush and beast andreptile. At every turn one feels the presence ofthe barb and thorn, the jaw and paw, the beakand talon, the sting and the poison thereof.Even the harmless Gila monster flattens hisbody on a rock and hisses a “Don’t step onme.” There is no living in concord or brotherhoodhere. Everything is at war with itsneighbor, and the conflict is unceasing.

Yet this conflict is not so obvious on the faceof things. You hear no clash or crash or snarl.The desert is overwhelmingly silent. Thereis not a sound to be heard; and not a thingmoves save the wind and the sands. But youlook up at the worn peaks and the jagged barrancas,you look down at the wash-outs andpiled bowlders, you look about at the wind-tossed,half-starved bushes; and, for all thesilence, you know that there is a struggle forlife, a war for place, going on day by day.

How is it possible under such conditions formuch vegetation to flourish? The grasses arescanty, the grease wood and cactus grow inpatches, the mesquite crops out only along the(28)dry river-beds. All told there is hardly enoughcovering to hide the anatomy of the earth.And the winds are always blowing it aside.You have noticed how bare and bony the hillsof New England are in winter when the treesare leafless and the grasses are dead? You haveseen the rocks loom up harsh and sharp, theledges assume angles, and the backbone and ribsof the open field crop out of the soil? Thedesert is not unlike that all the year round.To be sure there are snow-like driftings of sandthat muffle certain edges. Valleys, hills, andeven mountains are turned into rounded linesby it at times. But the drift rolled high inone place was cut out from some other place;and always there are vertebræ showing—elbowsand shoulders protruding through the yellowbyssus of sand.

The shifting sands! Slowly they move, waveupon wave, drift upon drift; but by day andby night they gather, gather, gather. Theyoverwhelm, they bury, they destroy, and thena spirit of restlessness seizes them and theymove off elsewhere, swirl upon swirl, line uponline, in serpentine windings that enfold somenew growth or fill in some new valley in thewaste. So it happens that the surface of the(29)desert is far from being a permanent affair.There is hardly enough vegetation to hold thesands in place. With little or no restraint uponthem they are transported hither and yon atthe mercy of the winds.

Yet the desert winds hardly blow where theylist. They follow certain channels or “draws”through the mountain ranges; and the reasonfor their doing so is plain enough. During theday the intense heat of the desert, meeting withonly a thin dry air above it, rises rapidly skywardleaving a vast vacuum below that must befilled with a colder air from without. Thiscolder air on the southern portion of the ColoradoDesert comes in from the Gulf region.One can feel it in the passes of the mountainsabout Baboquivari, rushing up toward theheated portions of Arizona around Tucson.And the hotter the day the stronger the inwardrush of the wind. Some days it will blow atthe rate of fifty miles an hour until sunset, andthen with a cessation of radiation the windstops and the night is still.

On the western portions of the Colorado thewind comes from the Pacific across SouthernCalifornia. The hot air from the desert goesup and out over the Coast Range, reaching seaward.(30)How far out it goes is unknown, butwhen it has cooled off it descends and flowsback toward the land as the daily sea-breeze.It re-enters the desert through such loop holesin the Coast Range as the San Gorgonio Pass—theold Puerta de San Carlos—above Indio.The rush of it through that pass is quite violentat times. For wind is very much likewater and seeks the least obstructed way. Itsgoal is usually the hottest and the lowest placeon the desert—such a place, for example, asSalton, though I am not prepared to point outthe exact spot on the desert that the windschoose as a target. On the Mojave Desert atthe north their action is similar, though therethey draw down from the Mount Whitney regionas well as from the Pacific.

In open places these desert winds are sometimesterrific in force though usually they aremoderate and blow with steadiness from certaindirections. As you feel them softly blowingagainst your cheek it is hard to imagine that theyhave any sharp edge to them. Yet about youon every side is abundant evidence of theirworks. The sculptor’s sand-blast works swifterbut not surer. Granite and porphyry cannotwithstand them, and in time they even cut(31)through the glassy surface of lava. Their wearis not here nor there, but all over, everywhere.The edge of the wind is always against the stone.Continually there is the slow erosion of canyon,crag, and peak; forever there is a gnawing atthe bases and along the face-walls of the greatsierras. Grain by grain, the vast foundations,the beetling escarpments, the high domes in airare crumbled away and drifted into the valleys.Nature heaved up these mountains at one timeto fulfil a purpose: she is now taking themdown to fulfil another purpose. If she hasnot water to work with here as elsewhere she isnot baffled of her purpose. Wind and sand answerquite as well.

But the cutting of the wind is not alwayseven or uniform, owing to the inequalities inthe fibre of rock; and often odd effects are producedby the softer pieces of rock wearing awayfirst and leaving the harder section exposed toview. Frequently these remainders take onfantastic shapes and are likened to things human,such as faces, heads, and hands. In theSan Gorgonio Pass the rock-cuttings are inparallel lines, and occasionally a row of garnetsin the rock will make the jewel-pointedfingers of a hand protruding from the parent(32)body.[3] Again shafts of hard granite may maketall spires and turrets upon a mountain peak, avein of quartz may bulge out in a white or yellowor rose-colored band; and a ridge of blacklava, reaching down the side of a foot-hill, maycreep and heave like the backbone of an enormousdragon.

Perhaps the greatest erosion is in the passesthrough which the winds rush into the desert.Here they not only eat into the ledges and cutaway the rock faces, but they make great wash-outsin the desert itself. These trenches lookin every respect as though caused by water. Infact the effects of wind and water are often soinextricably mixed that not even an expert geologistwould be able to say where the one leavesoff and the other begins. The shallow caves ofthe mountains—too high up for any wave actionfrom sea or lake, and too deep to be reachedby rains—have all the rounded appearance ofwater-worn receptacles. One can almost seethe water-lines upon the walls. But the sand-heapedfloor suggests that the agent of erosionwas the wind.

Yes; there is some water on the deserts, some(33)rainfall each year. Even Sahara gets its occasionalshowers, and the Colorado and the Mojaveshow many traces of the cloud-burst. Thedark thunder-clouds that occasionally gatherover the desert seem at times to reserve all theirstores of rain for one place. The fall is usuallyshort-lived but violent; and its greatest forceis always on the mountains. There is no sod,no moss, to check or retard the flood; and theresult is a great rush of water to the low places.In the canyons the swollen streams roll downbowlders that weigh tons, and in the ravinesmany a huge barranca is formed in a singlehour by these rushing waters. On the lomasand sloping valleys they are not less destructive,running in swift streams down the hollows, andwhirling stones, sand, and torn bushes into theold river-beds.

In a very short time there is a great torrentpouring down the valley—a torrent composedof water, sand, and gravel in about equal parts.It is a yellow, thick stream that has nothing butdisaster for the man or beast that seeks to swimit. Many a life has been lost there. The greatonset of the water destroys anything like buoyancy,and the tendency is to drag down androll the swimmer like a bowlder. Even the(34)enormous strength of the grizzly bear has beenknown to fail him in these desert rivers. Theyboil and seethe as though they were hot; andthey rush on against banks, ripping out thelong roots of mesquite, and swirling away tonsof undermined gravel as though it were only somuch snow. At last after miles of this mill-racingthe force begins to diminish, the streamsreach the flat lake-beds and spread into broad,thin sheets; and soon they have totally vanished,leaving scarce a rack behind.

The desert rainfall comes quickly and goesquickly. The sands drink it up, and it sinksto the rock strata, where, following the ledges, itis finally shelved into some gravel-bed. There,perhaps a hundred feet under the sand, it slowlyoozes away to the river or the Gulf. Thereis none of it remains upon the surface exceptperhaps a pool caught in a clay basin, or acatch of water in a rocky bowl of some canyon.Occasionally one meets with a little streamwhere a fissure in the rock and a pressure frombelow forces up some of the water; but thesesprings are of very rare occurrence. And theyalways seem a little strange. A brook that ranon the top of the ground would be an anomalyhere; and after one lives many months on the(35)desert and returns to a well-watered country,the last thing he becomes accustomed to is thesight of running water.

In every desert there are isolated placeswhere water stands in pools, fed by undergroundsprings, where mesquite and palmsgrow, and where there is a show of coarsegrass over some acres. These are the so-calledoases in the waste that travellers have picturedas Gardens of Paradise, and poets have usedfor centuries as illustrations of happiness surroundedby despair. To tell the truth theyare wretched little mud-holes; and yet becauseof their few trees and their pockets of yellowbrackish water they have an appearance of unreality.They are strange because bright-greenfoliage and moisture of any kind seem out ofplace on the desert.

Yet surely there was plenty of water here atone time. Everywhere you meet with the drylake-bed—its flat surface devoid of life and oftenglimmering white with salt. These bedsare no doubt of recent origin geologically, andwere never more than the catch-basins of surfacewater; but long before ever they werebrought forth the whole area of the desertwas under the sea. To-day one may find on(36)the high table-lands sea-shells in abundance.The petrified clams are precisely like the liveclams that one picks up on the western coastof Mexico. The corals, barnacles, dried spongeforms, and cellular rocks do not differ fromthose in the Gulf of California. The changefrom sea to shore, and from shore to table-landand mountain, no doubt took place very slowly.Just how many centuries ago who shallsay? Geologists may guess and laymen maydoubt, but the Keeper of the Seals says nothing.

Nor is it known just when the porphyrymountains were roasted to a dark wine-red,and the foot-hills burnt to a terra-cotta orange.Fire has been at work here as well as windand water. The whole country has a burntand scorched look proceeding from somethingmore fiery than sunlight. Volcanoes have lefttheir traces everywhere. You can still see thestreams of lava that have chilled as they ran.The blackened cones with their craters exist;and about them, for many miles, there aregreat lakes and streams of reddish-black lava,frozen in swirls and pools, cracked like glass,broken into blocks like a ruined pavement.Wherever you go on the desert you meet with(37)chips and breaks of lava, showing that at onetime there must have been quantities of itbelched out of the volcanoes.

There were convulsions in those days whenthe sea washed close to the bases of the mountains.Through the crevasses and fissures in therocks the water crept into the fires of the earth,and explosions—volcanic eruptions—were theresult. Wandering over these stony tracks youmight fancy that all strata and all geologicalages were blown into discord by those explosions.For here are many kinds of splinteredand twisted rocks—rocks aqueous and igneous,gritstones, conglomerates, shales, slates,syenite, basalt. And everywhere the whitecoatings of carbonate of lime that look asthough they were run hot from a puddling furnace;and the dust of sulphur, copper, andiron blown upon granite as though oxidized byfire.

The evidence for glaciers is not so convincing.There is no apparent sign of an ice age.Occasionally one sees scratches upon mountainwalls that are suspicious, or heaps of sand andgravel that look as though pushed into thesmall valleys by some huge force. And againthere are places on the Mojave where windrows(38)of heavy bowlders are piled on either side ofmountain water-courses, looking as though icemay have caused their peculiar placing. Butthere is no certainty about any of these. Landslips may have made the windrows as easily asice slips; and water can heap mounds of sandand gravel as readily as glaciers. One cannottrace the geological ages with such facility.Things sometimes “just happen,” in spite ofscientific theories.

Besides, the movement of the stones into thevalleys is going on continuously, irrespective ofglaciers. They are first broken from the peaksby erosion, and then they fall into what is calleda talus—a great slope of stone blocks beginninghalf way down the mountain and often reachingto the base or foot. Many of them, of course,are rolled over steep declivities into the canyonsand thence carried down by flood waters; butthe talus is the more uniform method for bowldersreaching the plain.

In the first stage of the talus the blocks areragged-edged and as large as a barrel. Nothingwhatever grows upon the slope. It is as bare asthe side of a volcanic crater. And just as difficultto walk over. The talus is added to at thetop by the falling rock of the face-wall, and it(39)is losing at the bottom by the under blocksgrinding away to stone and gravel. The flatteningout at the bottom, the breaking up ofthe blocks, and the push-out of the mountainfoot upon the plain is the second stage of thetalus. In almost all the large valleys of thedesert the depressed talus extends, sometimesmiles in length, out from the foot of the mountainrange. When it finally slips down into thevalley and becomes a flat floor it has enteredupon its third and last stage. It is then theordinary valley-bed covered with its cactus andcut by its arroyos. Yet this valley-floor insteadof being just one thing is really many things—orrather made up of many different materialsand showing many different surfaces.

You may spend days and weeks studying themake-up of these desert-floors. Beyond Yumaon the Colorado there are thousands of acres ofmosaic pavement, made from tiny blocks ofjasper, carnelian, agate—a pavement of pebblesso hard that a horse’s hoof will make no impressionupon it—wind-swept, clean, compactas though pressed down by a roller. One canimagine it made by the winds that have cutand drifted away the light sands and allowedthe pebbles to settle close together until they(40)have become wedged in a solid surface. For noknown reason other portions of the desert arecovered with blocks of red-incrusted sandstone—theincrustation being only above the sand-line.In the lake-beds there is usually a surfaceof fine silt. It is not a hard surface though itoften has a crust upon it that a wild-cat canwalk upon, but a horse or a man would poundthrough as easily as through crusted snow.The salt-beds are of sporadic appearance andhardly count as normal features of the desert.They are often quite beautiful in appearance.The one on the Colorado near Salton is hard asice, white, and after sunset it often turns blue,yellow, or crimson, dependent upon the skyoverhead which it reflects. Borax and gypsum-bedsare even scarcer than the salt-beds. Theyare also white and often very brilliant reflectorsof the sky. The sand-beds are, of course, morefrequently met with than any others; and yetyour horse does not go knee-deep in sand forany great distance. It is too light, and isdrifted too easily by the winds. Bowlders,gravel, and general mountain wash is the mostcommon flooring of all.

The mountains whence all the wash comes,are mere ranges of rock. In the canyons, where(41)there is perhaps some underground water, thereare occasionally found trees and large bushes,and the very high sierras have forests of pinebelted about their tops; but usually the desertranges are barren. They never bore fruit. Thewashings from them are grit and fry of rockbut no vegetable mould. The black dirt thatlies a foot or more in depth upon the surface ofthe eastern prairies, showing the many yearsaccumulations of decayed grasses and weeds, isnot known anywhere on the desert. The slightvegetation that grows never has a chance to turninto mould. And besides, nothing ever rots ordecays in these sands. Iron will not rust, nortin tarnish, nor flesh mortify. The grass andthe shrub wither and are finally cut into piecesby flying sands. Sometimes you may see smallparticles of grass or twigs heaped about an ant-hill,or find them a part of a bird’s nest in acholla; but usually they turn to dry dust andblow with the wind—at the wind’s will.

The desert mountains gathered in clustersalong the waste, how old and wrinkled, how setand determined they look! Somehow theyremind you of a clinched hand with theknuckles turned skyward. They have strengthand bulk, the suggestion of quiescent force.(42)Barren rock and nothing more; but what couldbetter epitomize power! The heave of theenormous ridge, the loom of the domed top,the bulk and body of the whole are colossal.Rising as they do from flat sands they give theimpression of things deep-based—veritable islandsof porphyry bent upward from a yellowsea. They are so weather-stained, so worn,that they are not bright in coloring. Usuallythey assume a dull garnet-red, or the red ofperoxide of iron; but occasionally at sunsetthey warm in color and look fire-red throughthe pink haze.

The more abrupt ranges that appear youngerbecause of their saw-toothed ridges and brokenpeaks, are often much finer in coloring. Theyhave needles that are lifted skyward like Moslemminarets or cathedral spires; and at evening,if there is a yellow light, they shine likebrazen spear-points set against the sky. It isastonishing that dull rock can disclose suchmarvellous coloring. The coloring is not localin the rock, nor yet again entirely reflected.Desert atmosphere, with which we shall have toreckon hereafter, has much to do with it.

And whether at sunset, at sunrise, or at midnight,how like watch-towers these mountains(43)stand above the waste! One can almost fancythat behind each dome and rampart there arecloud-like Genii—spirits of the desert—keepingguard over this kingdom of the sun. And whata far-reaching kingdom they watch! Plain uponplain leads up and out to the horizon—far as theeye can see—in undulations of gray and gold;ridge upon ridge melts into the blue of thedistant sky in lines of lilac and purple; foldupon fold over the mesas the hot air drops itsveilings of opal and topaz. Yes; it is thekingdom of sun-fire. For every color in thescale is attuned to the key of flame, every air-wavecomes with the breath of flame, everysunbeam falls as a shaft of flame. There isno questioning who is sovereign in these dominions.

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CHAPTER III
THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

In the ancient days when the shore of thePacific was young, when the white sierras hadonly recently been heaved upward and the desertit*elf was in a formative stage, the oceanreached much farther inland than at the presenttime. It pushed through many a pass andflooded many a depression in the sands, as itswave-marks upon granite bases and its numerousbeaches still bear witness. In those daysthat portion of the Colorado Desert known asthe Salton Basin did not exist. The Gulf ofCalifornia extended as far north as the SanBernardino Range and as far west as the Passof San Gorgonio. Its waters stood deep wherenow lies the road-bed of the Southern Pacificrailway, and all the country from Indio almostto the Colorado River was a blue sea. TheBowl was full. No one knew if it had a bottomor imagined that it would ever be emptiedof water and given over to the drifting sands.

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No doubt the tenure of the sea in this SaltonBasin was of long duration. The sand-dunesstill standing along the northern shore—fiftyfeet high and shining like hills of chalk—werenot made in a month; nor was the longshelving beach beneath them—still coveredwith sea-shells and pebbles and looking asthough washed by the waves only yesterday—formedin a day. Both dunes and beach areplainly visible winding across the desert formany miles. The southwestern shore, stretchingunder a spur of the Coast Range, shows thesame formation in its beach-line. The oldbays and lagoons that led inland from the sea,the river-beds that brought down the surfacewaters from the mountains, the inlets and naturalharbors are all in place. Some of themare drifted half full of sand, but they have notlost their identity. And out in the sea-bedstill stand masses of cellular rock, honeycombedand water-worn (and now for many years wind-worn),showing the places where once rose thereefs of the ancient sea.

These are the only records that tell of thesea’s occupation. The Indians have no traditionabout it. Yet when the sea was therethe Indian tribes were there also. Along the(46)bases of the San Bernardino and San JacintoRanges there are indications of cave-dwelling,rock-built squares that doubtless were fortifiedcamps, heaps of stone that might have beenburial-mounds. Everywhere along the ancientshores and beaches you pick up pieces of pottery,broken ollas, stone pestels and mortars,axe-heads, obsidian arrow-heads, flint spear-points,agate beads. There is not the slightestdoubt that the shores were inhabited. It wasa warm nook, accessible to the mountains andthe Pacific; in fact, just the place wheretribes would naturally gather. Branches ofthe Yuma Indians, like the Cocopas, overranall this country when the Padres first crossedthe desert; and it was probably their forefatherswho lived by the shores of this UpperGulf. No doubt they were fishermen, tradersand fighters, like their modern representativeson Tiburon Island; and no doubt they fishedand fought and were happy by the shores ofthe mountain-locked sea.

But there came a time when there was a disturbanceof the existing conditions in the UpperGulf. Century after century the ColoradoRiver had been carrying down to the sea itsburden of sedimental sand and silt. It had(47)been entering the Gulf far down on the easternside at an acute angle. Gradually its depositshad been building up, banking up; and graduallythe river had been pushing them out andacross the Gulf in a southwesterly direction.Finally there was formed a delta dam stretchingfrom shore to shore. The tides no longerbrought water up and around the bases of thebig mountains. Communication with the seawas cut off and what was once the top of theGulf changed into an inland lake. It now hadno water supply from below, it lay under aburning sun, and day by day evaporation carriedit away.

No one knows how many days, how manyyears, elapsed before the decrease of the waterbecame noticeable. Doubtless the lake shrunkaway slowly from the white face of the sand-dunesand the red walls of the mountains.The river-mouths that opened into the lakenarrowed themselves to small stream-beds.The shelving beaches where the waves hadfallen lazily year after year, pushing themselvesover the sand in beautiful water-mirrors, shonebare and dry in the sunlight. The raggedreefs, over which the chop sea had tumbledand tossed so long, lifted their black hulks out(48)of the water and with their hosts of barnaclesand sea-life became a part of the land.

The waters of the great inland lake fell perhapsa hundred feet and then they made a pause.The exposed shores dried out. They baked hardin the sun, and were slowly ground down to sandand powdered silt by the action of the winds.The waters made a long pause. They were receivingreinforcements from some source. Possiblythere was more rainfall in those days thannow, and the streams entering the lake fromthe mountains were much larger. Again theremay have been underground springs. Thereare flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed—wellsthat cast up water salter than the sea itself.No one knows their fountain-head. Perhapsby underground channels the water creepsthrough from the Gulf, or comes from mountainreservoirs and turns saline by passing throughbeds of salt. These are the might-bes; but itis far more probable that the Colorado River athigh water had made a breach of some kind inthe dam of its own construction and had pouredoverflow water into the lake by way of a drychannel called the New River. The bed of thisriver runs northward from below the boundary-lineof Lower California; and in 1893, during(49)a rise in the Colorado, the waters rushed in andflooded the whole of what is called the SaltonBasin. When the Colorado receded, the basinsoon dried out again.

It was undoubtedly some accident of thiskind that called the halt in the original recession.During the interim the lake had time toform new shores where the waves pounded andwashed on the gravel as before until miles uponmiles of new beach—pebbled, shelled, and slopingdownward with great uniformity—came intoexistence. This secondary beach is intact to-dayand looks precisely like the primary exceptthat it is not quite so large. Across the basin,along the southern mountains, the second water-traceryis almost as apparent as the first. Therocks are eaten in long lines by wave-action,and are honeycombed by the ceaseless energiesof the zoöphite.

Nor was the change in beach and rock alone.New bays and harbors were cut out from wherethe sea had been, new river-channels wereopened down to the shrunken lake, new lagoonswere spread over the flat places. Nature evidentlymade a great effort to repair the damageand adapt the lake to its new conditions. Andthe Indians, too, accepted the change. There(50)are many indications in broken pottery, arrow-heads,and mortars that the aboriginal tribesmoved down to the new beach and built wickiupsby the diminished waters. And the oldfishing-foraging-fighting life was probably resumed.

Then once more the waters went down, down,down. Step by step they receded until the secondarybeach was left a hundred feet above thewater level. Again there was a pause. Againnew beaches were beaten into shape by thewaves, new bays were opened, new arroyos cutthrough from above. The whole process ofshore-making—the fitting of the land to theshrunken proportions of the lake—was gonethrough with for the third time; while thewater supply from the river or elsewhere wasmaintained in decreased volume but with somesteadiness of flow. Possibly the third halt ofthe receding water was not for a great length oftime. The tertiary beach is not so large as itspredecessors. There never was any strong wave-actionupon it, its pebbles are few, its faultsand breaks are many. The water supply wasfailing, and finally it ceased altogether.

What fate for a lake in the desert receivingno supplies from river or sea—what fate save(51)annihilation? The hot breath of the wind blewacross the cramped water and whipped its surfaceinto little waves; and as each tiny pointof spray rose on the crest and was lifted intothe air the fiery sunbeam caught it, and in atwinkling had evaporated and carried it upward.Day by day this process went on overthe whole surface until there was no more sea.The hollow reefs rose high and dark above thebed, the flat shoals of silt lifted out of the ooze,and down in the lowest pools there was therush and plunge of monster tortuabas, sharksand porpoises, caught as it were in a net andvainly struggling to get out. How strange musthave seemed that landscape when the low ridgeswere shining with the slime of the sea, whenthe beds were strewn with algæ, sponges, andcoral, and the shores were whitening with salt!How strange, indeed, must have been the firstsight of the Bottom of the Bowl!

But the sun never relaxed its fierce heat northe wind its hot breath. They scorched andburned the silt of the sea-bed until it bakedand cracked into blocks. Then began the wearof the winds upon the broken edges until theblocks were reduced to dry fine powder. Finallythe desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of(52)sand blown through the valleys settled in theempty basin; gravel and bowlder-wash camedown from the mountains; the grease wood,the salt-bush, and the so-called pepper-grasssprang up in isolated spots. Slowly the desertfastened itself upon the basin. Its heat becametoo intense to allow the falling rain to reachthe earth, its surface was too salt and alkalineto allow of much vegetation, it could supportneither animal nor bird life; it became moredeserted than the desert itself.

And thus it remains to this day. When youare in the bottom of it you are nearly threehundred feet below the level of the sea. Circlingabout you to the north, south, and westare sierras, some of them over ten thousand feetin height. These form the Rim of the Bowl.And off to the southwest there is a side brokenout of the Bowl through which you can passto the river and the Gulf. The basin is perhapsthe hottest place to be found anywhere on theAmerican deserts. And it is also the most forsaken.The bottom itself is, for the great partof it, as flat as a table. It looks like a greatplain leading up and out to the horizon—aplain that has been ploughed and rolled smooth.The soil is drifted silt—the deposits made by(53)the washings from the mountains—and isalmost as fine as flour.

The long line of dunes at the north are justas desolate, yet they are wonderfully beautiful.The desert sand is finer than snow, and itscurves and arches, as it builds its succession ofdrifts out and over an arroyo, are as graceful asthe lines of running water. The dunes are alwaysrhythmical and flowing in their forms;and for color the desert has nothing that surpassesthem. In the early morning, before thesun is up, they are air-blue, reflecting the skyoverhead; at noon they are pale lines of dazzlingorange-colored light, waving and undulatingin the heated air; at sunset they are oftenflooded with a rose or mauve color; under ablue moonlight they shine white as icebergs inthe northern seas.

But neither the dunes nor the flats growvegetation of consequence. About the highedges, up near the mountain slopes, you findgrowths of mesquite, palo verde, and cactus;but down in the basin there are many mileswhere no weed or grass breaks the level uniformity.Not even the salt-bush will grow insome of the areas. And this is not due topoverty of soil but to absence of water and(54)intense heat. Plants cannot live by sunlightalone.

Nor will the desert animals inhabit an absolutewaste. The coyote and the wild-cat do notrelish life in this dip in the earth. They carelittle for heat and drouth, but the question offood appeals to them. There is nothing to eat.Even the abstemious jack-rabbit finds livinghere something of a difficulty. Many kinds oftracks are found in the uncrusted silt—tracksof coyotes, gray wolves, sometimes mountainlions—but they all run in straight trails, showingthe animals to be crossing the basin to themountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too,you will occasionally find birds—linnets, bobolinks,mocking-birds, larks—but they are seenone at a time, and they look weary—like landbirds far out at sea that seek a resting-place onpassing vessels. They do not belong to thedesert and are only stopping there temporarilyon some long flight. Snakes and lizards are notparticular about their abiding-place, and yetthey do not care to live in a land where thereis no bush or stone to creep under. You meetwith them very seldom. Practically there is nolife of any kind that is native to the place.

Is there any beauty, other than the dunes,(55)down in this hollow of the desert? Yes.From a picturesque point of view it has themost wonderful light, air, and color imaginable.You will not think so until you see themblended in that strange illusion known asmirage. And here is the one place in all theworld where the water-mirage appears to perfection.It does not show well over grassy orbushy ground, but over the flat lake-beds of thedesert its appearance is astonishing. Down inthe basin it is accompanied by a second illusionthat makes the first more convincing. Youare below sea-level, but instead of the groundabout you sloping up and out, it apparentlyslopes down and away on every side. You arein the centre of a disk or high point of ground,and around the circumference of the disk iswater—palpable, almost tangible, water. Itcannot be seen well from your horse, and fiftyfeet up on a mountain side it would not bevisible at all. But dismount and you see itbetter; kneel down and place your cheek to theground and now the water seems to creep up toyou. You could throw a stone into it. Theshore where the waves lap is just before you.But where is the horizon-line? Odd enough,this vast circling sea does not always know a(56)horizon; it sometimes reaches up and blendsinto the sky without any point of demarcation.Through the heated air you see faint outlines ofmountains, dim glimpses of foot-hills, suggestionsof distance; but no more. Across themis drawn the wavering veil of air, and the redearth at your feet, the blue sky overhead, arebut bordering bands of flat color.

And there you have the most decorative landscapein the world, a landscape all color, a dreamlandscape. Painters for years have been tryingto put it upon canvas—this landscape of color,light, and air, with form almost obliterated,merely suggested, given only as a hint of themysterious. Men like Corot and Monet havetold us, again and again, that in painting, clearlydelineated forms of mountains, valleys, trees,and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of thepicture. The great struggle of the modernlandscapist is to get on with the least possibleform and to suggest everything by tones of color,shades of light, drifts of air. Why? Becausethese are the most sensuous qualities in natureand in art. The landscape that is the simplestin form and the finest in color is by all odds themost beautiful. It is owing to just these featuresthat this Bowl of the desert is a thing of(57)beauty instead of a dreary hollow in the hills.Only one other scene is comparable to it, andthat the southern seas at sunset when the calmocean reflects and melts into the color-glory ofthe sky. It is the same kind of beauty. Formis almost blurred out in favor of color and air.

Yet here is more beauty destined to destruction.It might be thought that this forsakenpot-hole in the ground would never come underthe dominion of man, that its very worthlessnesswould be its safeguard against civilization, thatnone would want it, and everyone from necessitywould let it alone. But not even the spot desertedby reptiles shall escape the industry or theavarice (as you please) of man. A great companyhas been formed to turn the Colorado Riverinto the sands, to reclaim this desert basin, andmake it blossom as the rose. The water is tobe brought down to the basin by the old channelof the New River. Once in reservoirs it is to bedistributed over the tract by irrigating ditches,and it is said a million acres of desert will thusbe made arable, fitted for homesteads, ready forthe settler who never remains settled.

A most laudable enterprise, people will say.Yes; commercially no one can find fault withit. Money made from sand is likely to be clean(58)money, at any rate. And economically theseacres will produce large supplies of food. Thatis commendable, too, even if those for whom itis produced waste a good half of what theyalready possess. And yet the food that is producedthere may prove expensive to peopleother than the producers. This old sea-bed is,for its area, probably the greatest dry-heatgenerator in the world because of its depressionand its barren, sandy surface. It is a furnacethat whirls heat up and out of the Bowl, overthe peaks of the Coast Range into SouthernCalifornia, and eastward across the plains toArizona and Sonora. In what measure it is responsiblefor the general climate of those Statescannot be accurately summarized; but it certainlyhas a great influence, especially in thematter of producing dry air. To turn thisdesert into an agricultural tract would be toincrease humidity, and that would be practicallyto nullify the finest air on the continent.

And why are not good air and climate as essentialto human well-being as good beef andgood bread? Just now, when it is a world toolate, our Government and the forestry societiesof the country are awakening to the necessityof preserving the forests. National parks are(59)being created wherever possible and the cuttingof timber within them is prohibited. Why isthis being done? Ostensibly to preserve thetrees, but in reality to preserve the water supply,to keep the fountain-heads pure, to maintaina uniform stage of water in the rivers.Very proper and right. The only pity is thatit was not undertaken forty years ago. Buthow is the water supply, from an economic andhygienic stand-point, any more important thanthe air supply?

Grasses, trees, shrubs, growing grain, they,too, may need good air as well as human lungs.The deserts are not worthless wastes. Youcannot crop all creation with wheat and alfalfa.Some sections must lie fallow that othersections may produce. Who shall say that thepreternatural productiveness of California isnot due to the warm air of its surrounding deserts?Does anyone doubt that the healthfulnessof the countries lying west of the Mississippimay be traced directly to the dry air andheat of the deserts. They furnish health tothe human; why not strength to the plant?The deserts should never be reclaimed. Theyare the breathing-spaces of the west and shouldbe preserved forever.

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To speak about sparing anything because itis beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incurridicule in the bargain. The æsthetic sense—thepower to enjoy through the eye, the ear,and the imagination—is just as important afactor in the scheme of human happiness asthe corporeal sense of eating and drinking; butthere has never been a time when the worldwould admit it. The “practical men,” whoseem forever on the throne, know very wellthat beauty is only meant for lovers and youngpersons—stuff to suckle fools withal. Themain affair of life is to get the dollar, and ifthere is any money in cutting the throat ofBeauty, why, by all means, cut her throat. Thatis what the “practical men” have been doingever since the world began. It is not necessaryto dig up ancient history; for have we notseen, here in California and Oregon, in ourown time, the destruction of the fairest valleysthe sun ever shone upon by placer and hydraulicmining? Have we not seen in Minnesotaand Wisconsin the mightiest forests thatever raised head to the sky slashed to piecesby the axe and turned into a waste of tree-stumpsand fallen timber? Have we not seenthe Upper Mississippi, by the destruction of(61)the forests, changed from a broad, majesticriver into a shallow, muddy stream; and thebeautiful prairies of Dakota turned under bythe plough and then allowed to run to weeds?Men must have coal though they ruin the valleysand blacken the streams of Pennsylvania,they must have oil though they disfigure halfof Ohio and Indiana, they must have copperif they wreck all the mountains of Montanaand Arizona, and they must have gold thoughthey blow Alaska into the Behring Sea. It ismore than possible that the “practical men”have gained much practice and many dollarsby flaying the fair face of these UnitedStates. They have stripped the land of itsrobes of beauty, and what have they given inits place? Weeds, wire fences, oil-derricks,board shanties and board towns—things thatnot even a “practical man” can do less thancurse at.

And at last they have turned to the desert!It remains to be seen what they will do with it.Reclaiming a waste may not be so easy as breakinga prairie or cutting down a forest. AndNature will not always be driven from herpurpose. Wind, sand, and heat on Saharahave proven hard forces to fight against; they(62)may prove no less potent on the Colorado.And sooner or later Nature will surely come toher own again. Nothing human is of long duration.Men and their deeds are obliterated,the race itself fades; but Nature goes calmlyon with her projects. She works not for man’senjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and herown glory. She made the fat lands of theearth with all their fruits and flowers and foliage;and with no less care she made the desertwith its sands and cacti. She intendedthat each should remain as she made it. Whenthe locust swarm has passed, the flowers andgrasses will return to the valley; when manis gone, the sand and the heat will come backto the desert. The desolation of the kingdomwill live again, and down in the Bottom ofthe Bowl the opalescent mirage will waverskyward on wings of light, serene in its solitude,though no human eye sees nor humantongue speaks its loveliness.

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CHAPTER IV
THE SILENT RIVER

The career of the Colorado, from its rise inthe Wind River Mountains in Wyoming to itsfinal disappearance in the Gulf of California,seems almost tragic in its swift transitions. Itstarts out so cheerily upon its course; it is soclear and pure, so sparkling with sunshine andspirit. It dashes down mountain valleys, gurglesunder bowlders, swirls over waterfalls,flashes through ravines and gorges. With itssweep and glide and its silvery laugh it seems tolead a merry life. But too soon it plunges intoprecipitous canyons and enters upon its fiercestruggle with the encompassing rock. Now itboils and foams, leaps and strikes, thunders andshatters. For hundreds of miles it wears andworries and undermines the rock to its destruction.During the long centuries it has cutdown into the crust of the earth five thousandfeet. But ever the stout walls keep casting itback, keep churning it into bubbles, beating it(64)into froth. At last, its canyon course run, exhaustedand helpless, it is pushed through theescarpments, thrust out upon the desert, to findits way to the sea as best it can. Its spirit isbroken, its vivacity is extinguished, its color isdeepened to a dark red—the trail of blood thatleads up to the death. Wearily now it driftsacross the desert without a ripple, without amoan. Like a wounded snake it drags its lengthfar down the long wastes of sand to where theblue waves are flashing on the Californian Gulf.And there it meets—obliteration.

After the clash and roar of the conflict in thecanyons how impressive seems the stillness ofthe desert, how appalling the unbroken silenceof the lower river! Day after day it moves seaward,but without a sound. You start at itsbanks to find no waves, no wash upon gravelbeaches, no rush of water over shoals. Insteadof the soothing murmur of breaking falls thereis at times the boil of currents from below—watersflung up sullenly and soon flattenedinto drifting nothingness by their own weight.

And how heavily the stream moves! Its loadof silt is gradually settling to the bottom, yetstill the water seems to drag upon the shores.Every reef of sand, every island of mud, every(65)overhanging willow or cottonwood or handfulof arrow-weed holds out a restraining hand.But slowly, patiently, winding about obstructions,cutting out new channels, creeping whereit may not run, the bubbleless water works itsway to the sea. The night-winds steal along itsshores and pass in and out among its sedges,but there are no whispering voices; and the starsemerge and shine upon the flat floor of water,but there is no lustre. The drear desolation ofit! The blare of morning sunlight does notlift the pall, nor the waving illusions of themirage break the stillness. The Silent Rivermoves on carrying desolation with it; and atevery step the waters grow darker, darker withthe stain of red—red the hue of decay.

It was not through paucity of imaginationthat the old Spaniards gave the name—Colorado.[4]During the first fifty years after itsdiscovery the river was christened many times,but the name that finally clung to it was theone that gave accurate and truthful description.(66)You may see on the face of the globe numerousmuddy Missouris, blue Rhones, and yellowTibers; but there is only one red river and thatthe Colorado. It is not exactly an earthy red,not the color of shale and clay mixed; but thered of peroxide of iron and copper, the sang-du-bœufred of oriental ceramics, the deep insistentred of things time-worn beyond memory. Andthere is more than a veneer about the color. Ithas a depth that seems luminous and yet is sadlydeceptive. You do not see below the surfaceno matter how long you gaze into it. As welltry to see through a stratum of porphyry asthrough that water to the bottom of the river.

To call it a river of blood would be exaggeration,and yet the truth lies in the exaggeration.As one walks along its crumbling banks there isthe thought of that other river that changed itshue under the outstretched rod of the prophet.How weird indeed must have been the ensanguinedflow of the Nile, with its little wavesbreaking in crests of pink foam! How strangethe shores where the receding waters left uponsand and rock a bordering line of scarlet froth!But the Colorado is not quite like that—notso ghastly, not so unearthly. It may suggestat times the heavy welling flow of thickening(67)blood which the sands at every step are tryingto drink up; but this is suggestion only, notrealization. It seems to hint at blood, andunder starlight to resemble it; but the resemblanceis more apparent than real. The Coloradois a red river but not a scarlet one.

It may be thought odd that the river shouldchange so radically from the clear blue-greenof its fountain-head to the opaque red of itsdesert stream, but rivers when they go wanderingdown to the sea usually leave their mountainpurity behind them. The Colorado rushingthrough a thousand miles of canyons, cutsand carries seaward with it red sands of shale,granite, and porphyry, red rustings of iron, redgrits of carnelian, agate and garnet. All thetributaries come bearing their tokens of redcopper, and with the rains the whole red surfaceof the watershed apparently washes intothe smaller creeks and thus into the valleys.When the river reaches the desert carrying itsburden of silt, it no longer knows the bowlder-bed,the rocky shores, the breaking waterfallsthat clarify a stream. And there are no largepools where the water can rest while the siltsettles to the bottom. Besides, the desertit*elf at times pours into the river an even(68)deeper red than the canyons. And it does thisnot through arroyos alone, but also by a widesurface drainage.

Often the slope of the desert to the river isgradual for many miles—sometimes like thetop of a huge table slightly tilted from thehorizontal. When the edge of the table isreached the mesa begins to break into terraces(often cut through by small gullies), and thefinal descent is not unlike the steps of a Romancircus leading down into the arena. Duringcloud-bursts the waters pour down these stepswith great fury and the river simply acts asa catch-basin for all the running color of thedesert.

The “bottom” lands, forming the immediatebanks of the river, are the silt deposits offormer years. Often they are several miles inwidth and are usually covered with arrow-weed,willows, alders, and cottonwoods. The growthis dense if not tall and often forms an almostimpenetrable jungle through which are scatteredlittle openings where grass and flowersgrow and Indians build reed wickiups and raisemelons and corn in season. The desert terraceson either side (sometimes there is a row of sand-dunes)come down to meet these “bottom” lands,(69)and the line where the one leaves off and theother begins is drawn as with the sharp edge ofa knife. Seen from the distant mountain topsthe river moves between two long ribbons ofgreen, and the borders are the gray and goldmesas of the desert.

Afloat and drifting down between these linesof green your attention is perhaps not at firstattracted by the water. You are interested inthe thickets of alders and the occasional burstsof white and yellow flowers from among thebushes. They are very commonplace bushes,very ordinary flowers; but how lovely they lookas they seem to drift by the boat! How silentagain are these clumps of alder and willow!There may be linnets and sparrows among thembut they do not make their presence obtrusivein song. A hawk wheels along over the arrow-weedlooking for quail, but his wings cut theair without noise. How deathly still everythingseems! The water wears into the soft banks,the banks keep sloughing into the stream, butagain you hear no splashing fall.

And the water itself is just as soundless.There is never a sunken rock to make a littlegurgle, never a strip of gravel beach where awave could charm you with its play. The beat(70)of oars breaks the air with a jar, but breaks nobubbles on the water. You look long at thestream and fall to wondering if there can beany life in it. What besides a polywog or abullhead could live there? Obviously, and infact—nothing. Perhaps there are otter andbeaver living along the pockets in the banks?Yes; there were otter and beaver here at onetime, but they are very scarce to-day. Butthere are wild fowl? Yes; in the spring andfall the geese and ducks follow the river intheir flights, but they do not like the red water.What proof? Because they do not stop long inany one place. They swing into a bayou orslough late at night and go out at early dawn.They do not love the stream, but wild fowl ontheir migratory flights must have water, andthis river is the only one between the Rockiesand the Pacific that runs north and south.

The blue herons and the bitterns do not mindthe red mud or the red water, in fact theyrather like it; but they were always solitarypeople of the sedge. They prowl about themarshes alone and the swish of oars drives theminto the air with a guttural “Quowk.” Andthere are snipe here, bands of them, flashingtheir wings in the sun as they wheel over the(71)red waters or trip along the muddy bankssingly or in pairs. They are quite at home onthe bars and bayou flats, but it seems not a veryhappy home for them—that is judging by theabsence of snipe talk. The little teeter fliesahead of you from point to point, but makes notwitter, the yellow-leg seldom sounds his mellowthree-note call, and the kill-deer, even thoughyou shoot at him, will not cry “Kill-deer!”“Kill-deer!”

It may be the season when birds are mute, orit may merely happen so for to-day, or it maybe that the silence of the river and the desert isan oppressive influence; but certainly you havenever seen bird-life so hopelessly sad. Eventhe kingfisher, swinging down in a blue linefrom a dead limb and skimming the water,makes none of that rattling clatter that youknew so well when you were a child by a NewEngland mill-stream. And what does a kingfisheron such a river as this? If it were filledwith fish he could not see them through thatthick water.

The voiceless river! From the canyon to thesea it flows through deserts, and ever the seal ofsilence is upon it. Even the scant life of itsborders is dumb—birds with no note, animals(72)with no cry, human beings with no voice. Andso forsaken! The largest river west of themountains and yet the least known. There aremiles upon miles of mesas stretching upwardfrom the stream that no feet have ever trodden,and that possess not a vestige of life of anykind. And along its banks the same tale istold. You float for days and meet with notraces of humanity. When they do appear it isbut to emphasize the solitude. An Indianwickiup on the bank, an Indian town; yes, awhite man’s town, what impression do theymake upon the desert and its river? You driftby Yuma and wonder what it is doing there.Had it been built in the middle of the Pacificon a barren rock it could not be more isolated,more hopelessly “at sea.”

After the river crosses the border-line ofMexico it grows broader and flatter than ever.And still the color seems to deepen. For all itssuggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color.On the contrary, that deep red contrasted withthe green of the banks and the blue of the sky,makes a very beautiful color harmony. Theyare hues of depth and substance—hues thatcomport excellently well with the character ofthe river itself. And never a river had more(73)character than the Colorado. You may notfancy the solitude of the stream nor its suggestivecoloring, but you cannot deny its majestyand its nobility. It has not now the babble ofthe brook nor the swift rush of the canyonwater; rather the quiet dignity that is aboveconflict, beyond gayety. It has grown old, itis nearing its end; but nothing could be calmer,simpler, more sublime, than the drift of it downinto the delta basin.

The mountains are receding on every side,the desert is flattening to meet the sea, and theocean tides are rising to meet the river. Halfhuman in its dissolution, the river begins tobreak joint by joint. The change has beengradually taking place for miles and now manifestsitself positively. The bottom lands widen,many channels or side-sloughs open upon thestream, and the water is distributed into themouths of the delta. There is a break in thevolume and mass—a disintegration of forces.And by divers ways, devious and slow, thecrippled streams well out to the Gulf and nevercome together again.

It is not so when the river is at its height withspring freshets. Then the stream is swollenbeyond its banks. All the bottom lands for(74)miles across, up to the very terraces of themesas, are covered; and the red flood moveslike an ocean current, vast in width, ponderousin weight, irresistible in strength. All thingsthat can be uprooted or wrenched away, movewith it. Nothing can check or stop it now.It is the Grand Canyon river once more, free,mighty, dangerous even in its death-throes.

And now at the full and the change of themoon, when the Gulf waters come in like atidal wave, and the waters of the north meetthe waters of the south, there is a mighty conflictof opposing forces. The famous “bore”of the river-mouth is the result. When theforces first meet there is a slow push-up of thewater which rises in the shape of a ridge orwedge. The sea-water gradually proves itselfthe greater and the stronger body, and the ridgebreaks into a crest and pitches forward with aroar. The undercut of the river sweeps awaythe footing of the tide, so to speak, and flingsthe top of the wave violently forward. The redriver rushes under, the blue tide rushes over.There is the flash and dash of parti-coloredfoam on the crests, the flinging of jets of sprayhigh in air, the long roll of waves breaking notupon a beach, but upon the back of the river,(75)and the shaking of the ground as though anearthquake were passing. After it is all donewith and gone, with no trace of wave or foamremaining, miles away down the Gulf the redriver slowly rises in little streams through theblue to the surface. There it spreads fan-likeover the top of the sea, and finally mingles withand is lost in the greater body.

The river is no more. It has gone down toits blue tomb in the Gulf—the fairest tomb thatever river knew. Something of serenity in theGulf waters, something of the monumental inthe bordering mountains, something of the unknownand the undiscovered over all, make it afit resting-place for the majestic Colorado. Thelonely stream that so shunned contact withman, that dug its bed thousands of feet in thedepths of pathless canyons, and trailed its lengthacross trackless deserts, sought out instinctivelya point of disappearance far from the maddingcrowd. The blue waters of the Gulf, thebeaches of shell, the red, red mountains standingwith their feet in the sea, are still far removedfrom civilization’s touch. There are no townsor roads or people by those shores, there are noships upon those seas, there are no dust andsmoke of factories in those skies. The Indians(76)are there as undisturbed as in the days ofCoronado, and the white man is coming buthas not yet arrived. The sun still shines onunknown bays and unexplored peaks. Thereforeis there silence—something of the hush ofthe deserts and the river that flows between.

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CHAPTER V
LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

These deserts, cut through from north tosouth by a silent river and from east to west bytwo noisy railways, seem remarkable for only afew commonplace things, according to the consensusof public opinion. All that one hearsor reads about them is that they are very hot,that the sunlight is very glaring, and that thereis a sand-storm, a thirst, and death waitingfor every traveller who ventures over the firstdivide.

There is truth enough, to be sure, in the heatand glare part of it, and an exceptional truth inthe other part of it. It is intensely hot on thedesert at times, but the sun is not responsiblefor it precisely in the manner alleged. Theheat that one feels is not direct sunlight somuch as radiation from the receptive sands;and the glare is due not to preternatural brightnessin the sunbeam, but to there being no reliefsfor the eye in shadows, in dark colors, in(78)heavy foliage. The vegetation of the desert isso slight that practically the whole surface ofthe sand acts as a reflector; and it is this, ratherthan the sun’s intensity, that causes the greatbody of light. The white roads in SouthernFrance, for the surface they cover, are moreglaring than any desert sands; and the sunlightupon snow in Minnesota or New England ismore dazzling. In certain spots where thereare salt or soda beds the combination of heatand light is bewildering enough for anyone;but such places are rare. White is somethingseldom seen on desert lands, and black is anunknown quantity in my observations. Evenlava, which is popularly supposed to be as blackas coal, has a reddish hue about it. Everythinghas some color—even the air. Indeed, we shallnot comprehend the desert light without a momentarystudy of this desert air.

The circumambient medium which we callthe atmosphere is to the earth only as so muchground-glass globe to a lamp—something thatbreaks, checks, and diffuses the light. We havenever known, never shall know, direct sunlight—thatis, sunlight in its purity undisturbed byatmospheric conditions. It is a blue shaft fallingperfectly straight, not a diffused white or(79)yellow light; and probably the life of the earthwould not endure for an hour if submitted toits unchecked intensity. The white or yellowlight, known to us as sunlight, is produced bythe ground-glass globe of air, and it followsreadily enough that its intensity is absolutelydependent upon the density of the atmosphere—thethickness of the globe. The cause forthe thickening of the aërial envelope lies in theparticles of dust, soot, smoke, salt, and vaporwhich are found floating in larger or smallerproportions in all atmospheres.

In rainy countries like England and Hollandthe vapor particles alone are sufficiently numerousto cause at times great obscurity of light,as in the case of fog; and the air is onlycomparatively clear even when the skies are all blue.The light is almost always whitish, and thehorizons often milky white. The air is thick,for you cannot see a mountain fifteen milesaway in any sharpness of detail. There is amistiness about the rock masses and a vaguenessabout the outline. An opera-glass doesnot help your vision. The obscurity is not inthe eyes but in the atmospheric veil throughwhich you are striving to see. On the contrary,in the high plateau country of Wyoming, where(80)the quantities of dust and vapor in the air arecomparatively small, the distances that one cansee are enormous. A mountain seventy milesaway often appears sharp-cut against the sky,and at sunset the lights and shadows upon itssides look only ten miles distant.

But desert air is not quite like the plateauair of Wyoming, though one can see through itfor many leagues. It is not thickened by moistureparticles, for its humidity is almost nothing;but the dust particles, carried upward byradiation and the winds, answer a similar purpose.They parry the sunshaft, break and colorthe light, increase the density of the envelope.Dust is always present in the desert air in somedegree, and when it is at its maximum with theheat and winds of July, we see the air as a blue,yellow, or pink haze. This haze is not seen sowell at noonday as at evening when the sun’srays are streaming through canyons, or at dawnwhen it lies in the mountain shadows and reflectsthe blue sky. Nor does it muffle or obscureso much as the moisture-laden mists ofHolland, but it thickens the air perceptibly anddecreases in measure the intensity of the light.

Yet despite the fact that desert air is dust-ladenand must be thickened somewhat, there(81)is something almost inexplicable about it. Itseems so thin, so rarefied; and it is so scentless—Ihad almost said breathless—that it islike no air at all. You breathe it without feelingit, you look through it without being consciousof its presence. Yet here comes in thecontradiction. Desert air is very easily recognizedby the eyes alone. The traveller in Californiawhen he wakes in the morning andglances out of the car-window at the air in themountain canyons, knows instantly on whichside of the Tehachepi Range the train is moving.He knows he is crossing the Mojave.The lilac-blue veiling that hangs about thosemountains is as recognizable as the sea air ofthe Massachusetts shore. And, strange enough,the sea breezes that blow across the deserts alldown the Pacific coast have no appreciable effectupon this air. The peninsula of LowerCalifornia is practically surrounded by water,but through its entire length and down theshores of Sonora to Mazatlan, there is nothingbut that clear, dry air.

I use the word “clear” because one can seeso far through this atmosphere, and yet it isnot clear or we should not see it so plainly.There is the contradiction again. Is it perhaps(82)the coloring of it that makes it so apparent?Probably. Even the clearest atmosphere hassome coloring about it. Usually it is an indefinableblue. Air-blue means the most delicateof all colors—something not of surface depthbut of transparency, builded up by superimposedstrata of air many miles perhaps inthickness. This air-blue is seen at its best inthe gorges of the Alps, and in the mountaindistances of Scotland; but it is not so apparenton the desert. The coloring of the atmosphereon the Colorado and the Mojave is oftenerpink, yellow, lilac, rose-color, sometimes fire-red.And to understand that we must take upthe ground-glass globe again.

It has been said that our atmosphere breaks,checks, and diffuses the falling sunlight likethe globe of a lamp. It does something more.It acts as a prism and breaks the beam of sunlightinto the colors of the spectrum. Some ofthese colors it deals with more harshly thanothers because of their shortness and theirweakness. The blue rays, for instance, are thegreatest in number; but they are the shortestin length, the weakest in travelling power ofany of them. Because of their weakness, andbecause of their affinity (as regards size) with(83)the small dust particles of the higher air region,great quantities of these rays are caught,refracted, and practically held in check in theupper strata of the atmosphere. We see themmassed together overhead and call them the“blue sky.” After many millions of theseblue rays have been eliminated from the sunlightthe remaining rays come down to earthas a white or yellow or at times reddish light,dependent upon the density of the lower atmosphere.

Now it seems that an atmosphere laden withmoisture particles obstructs the passage earthwardof the blue rays, less perhaps than anatmosphere laden with dust. In consequence,when they are thus allowed to come down intothe lower atmosphere in company with theother rays, their vast number serves to dominatethe others, and to produce a cool tone ofcolor over all. So it is that in moist countrieslike Scotland you will find the sky cold-blueand the air tinged gray, pale-blue, or at twilightin the mountain valleys, a chilly purple.A dust-laden atmosphere seems to act just thereverse of this. It obstructs all the rays inproportion to its density, but it stops the bluerays first, holds them in the upper air, while(84)the stronger rays of red and yellow are onlychecked in the lower and thicker air-stratanear the earth. The result of this is to producea warm tone of color over all. So it isthat in dry countries like Spain and Moroccoor on the deserts of Africa and America, youwill find the sky rose-hued or yellow, and theair lilac, pink, red, or yellow.

I mean now that the air itself is colored. Ofcourse countless quantities of light-beams anddispersed rays break through the aërial envelopeand reach the earth, else we should not seecolor in the trees or grasses or flowers aboutus; but I am not now speaking of the color ofobjects on the earth, but of the color of the air.A thing too intangible for color you think?But what of the sky overhead? It is only tintedatmosphere. And what of the bright-huedhorizon skies at sunrise and sunset, the rosy-yellowskies of Indian summer! They are onlytinted atmospheres again. Banked up in greatmasses, and seen at long distances, the air-colorbecomes palpably apparent. Why then shouldit not be present in shorter distances, in mountaincanyons, across mesas and lomas, and overthe stretches of the desert plains?

The truth is all air is colored, and that of(85)the desert is deeper dyed and warmer hued thanany other for the reasons just given. It takeson many tints at different times, dependentupon the thickening of the envelope by heatand dust-diffusing winds. I do not know if itis possible for fine dust to radiate with heatalone; but certain it is that, without the aid ofthe wind, there is more dust in the air on hotdays than at any other time. When the thermometerrises above 100° F., the atmosphere isheavy with it, and the lower strata are dancingand trembling with phantoms of the mirage atevery point of the compass. It would seem asthough the rising heat took up with it countlesssmall dust-particles and that these were responsiblefor the rosy or golden quality of the air-coloring.

There is a more positive tinting of the airproduced sometimes by high winds. The lighterparticles of sand are always being drifted hereand there through the aërial regions, and evenon still days the whirlwinds are eddying andcircling, lifting long columns of dust skywardand then allowing the dust to settle back toearth through the atmosphere. The strongerthe wind, and the more of dust and sand, thebrighter the coloring. The climax is reached(86)in the dramatic sand-storm—a veritable sand-fogwhich often turns half the heavens into aluminous red, and makes the sun look like around ball of fire.

The dust-particle in itself is sufficient to accountfor the warmth of coloring in the desertair—sufficient in itself to produce the pink, yellow,and lilac hazes. And yet I am tempted tosuggest some other causes. It is not easy toprove that a reflection may be thrown upwardupon the air by the yellow face of the desertbeneath it—a reflection similar to that producedby a fire upon a night sky—yet I believe thereis something of the desert’s air-coloring derivedfrom that source. Nor is it easy to prove thata reflection is cast by blue, pink, and yellowskies, upon the lower air-strata, yet certaineffects shown in the mirage (the water illusion,for instance, which seems only the reflectionof the sky from heated air) seem to suggestit. And if we put together other casual observationsthey will make argument toward thesame goal. For instance, the common bluehaze that we may see any day in the mountains,is always deepest in the early morningwhen the blue sky over it is deepest. At noonwhen the sky turns gray-blue the haze turns(87)gray-blue also. The yellow haze of the desertis seen at its best when there is a yellow sunset,and the pink haze when there is a red sunset,indicating that at least the sky has some partin coloring by reflection the lower layers ofdesert air.

Whatever the cause, there can be no doubtabout the effect. The desert air is practicallycolored air. Several times from high mountainsI have seen it lying below me like an enormoustinted cloud or veil. A similar veiling of pink,lilac, or pale yellow is to be seen in the gorgesof the Grand Canyon; it stretches across theProvidence Mountains at noonday and is to beseen about the peaks and packed in the valleysat sunset; it is dense down in the CoahuilaBasin; it is denser from range to range acrossthe hollow of Death Valley; and it tinges thewhole face of the Painted Desert in Arizona.In its milder manifestations it is always present,and during the summer months its appearanceis often startling. By that I do not mean thatone looks through it as through a highly coloredglass. The impression should not be gainedthat this air is so rose-colored or saffron-huedthat one has to rub his eyes and wonder if he isawake. The average unobservant traveller looks(88)through it and thinks it not different fromany other air. But it is different. In itself,and in its effect upon the landscape, it is perhapsresponsible for the greater part of whateveryone calls “the wonderful color” of thedesert.

And this not to the obliteration of local huein sands, rocks, and plants. Quite independentof atmospheres, the porphyry mountains aredull red, the grease wood is dull green, the vaststretches of sand are dull yellow. And theselarge bodies of local color have their influence inthe total sum-up. Slight as is the vegetationupon the desert, it is surprising how it seemsto bunch together and count as a color-mass.Almost all the growths are “evergreen.” Theshrubs and the trees shed their leaves, to be sure,but they do it so slowly that the new ones areon before the old ones are off. The generalappearance is always green, but not a brighthue, except after prolonged rains. Usually itis an olive, bordering upon yellow. One canhardly estimate what a relieving note this thinthatch of color is, or how monotonous thedesert might be without it. It is welcome, forit belongs to the scene, and fits in the color-schemeof the landscape as perfectly as the(89)dark-green pines in the mountain scenery ofNorway.

The sands, again, form vast fields of localcolor, and, indeed, the beds of sand and gravel,the dunes, the ridges, and the mesas, make upthe most widespread local hue on the desert.The sands are not “golden,” except underpeculiar circ*mstances, such as when they arewhirled high in the air by the winds, and thenstruck broadside by the sunlight. Lying quietlyupon the earth they are usually a dull yellow.In the morning light they are often gray, atnoon frequently a bleached yellow, and at sunsetoccasionally pink or saffron-hued. Waveringheat and mirage give them temporary coloringat times that is beautifully unreal. They thenappear to undulate slightly like the smoothsurface of a summer sea at sunset; and thecolors shift and travel with the undulations.The appearance is not common; perfect calm,a flat plain, and intense heat being apparentlythe conditions necessary to its existence.

The rocks of the upper peaks and those thatmake the upright walls of mountains, thoughsmall in body of color, are perhaps more variedin hue than either the sands or the vegetation,and that, too, without primary notes as in the(90)Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The reds arealways salmon-colored, terra-cotta, or Indianred; the greens are olive-hued, plum-colored,sage-green; the yellows are as pallid as theleaves of yellow roses. Fresh breaks in thewall of rock may show brighter colors thathave not yet been weather-worn, or they mayreveal the oxidation of various minerals. Oftenlong strata and beds, and even whole mountaintops show blue and green with copper, ororange with iron, or purple with slates, or whitewith quartz. But the tones soon become subdued.A mountain wall may be dark red within,but it is weather-stained and lichen-coveredwithout; long-reaching shafts of granite thatloom upward from a peak may be yellow atheart but they are silver-gray on the surface.The colors have undergone years of “toningdown” until they blend and run together likethe faded tints of an Eastern rug.

But granted the quantity and the quality oflocal colors in the desert, and the fact still remainsthat the air is the medium that influencesif it does not radically change them all.The local hue of a sierra may be gray, dark red,iron-hued, or lead-colored; but at a distance,seen through dust-laden air, it may appear(91)topaz-yellow, sapphire-blue, bright lilac, rose-red—yes,fire-red. During the heated months ofsummer such colors are not exceptional. Theyappear almost every evening. I have seen atsunset, looking north from Sonora some twentymiles, the whole tower-like shaft of Baboquivarichange from blue to topaz and from topazto glowing red in the course of half an hour. Ido not mean edgings or rims or spots of thesecolors upon the peak, but the whole upper halfof the mountain completely changed by them.The red color gave the peak the appearance ofhot iron, and when it finally died out the darkdull hue that came after was like that of aclouded garnet.

The high ranges along the western side ofArizona, and the buttes and tall spires in theUpper Basin region, all show these warm fire-colorsunder heat and sunset light, and often inthe full of noon. The colored air in conjunctionwith light is always responsible for thehues. Even when you are close up to the mountainsyou can see the effect of the air in smallways. There are edgings of bright color to thehill-ridges and the peaks; and in the canyons,where perhaps a sunshaft streams across theshadow, you can see the gold or fire-color of the(92)air most distinctly. Very beautiful are thesegolden sun-shafts shot through the canyons.And the red shafts are often startling. Itwould seem as though the canyons were packedthick with yellow or red haze. And so in realitythey are.

There is one marked departure from the uniformwarm colors of the desert that should bementioned just here. It is the clear blue seenin the shadows of western-lying mountains atsunset. This colored shadow shows only whenthere is a yellow or orange hued sunset, and itis produced by the yellow of the sky casting itscomplementary hue (blue) in the shadow. At seaa ship crossing a yellow sunset will show a marvellousblue in her sails just as she crosses theline of the sun, and the desert mountains repeatthe same complementary color with equalfacility and greater variety. It is not of longduration. It changes as the sky changes, butmaintains always the complementary hue.

The presence of the complementary color inthe shadow is exceptional, however. The shadowscast by such objects as the sahuaro and thepalo verde are apparently quite colorless; andso, too, are the shadows of passing clouds. Thecolored shadow is produced by reflection from(93)the sky, mixed with something of local color inthe background, and also complementary color.It is usually blue or lilac-blue, on snow forexample, when there is a blue sky overhead; andlilac when shown upon sand or a blue stoneroad. Perhaps it does not appear often on theMojave-Colorado because the surfaces are toorough and broken with coarse gravel to makegood reflectors of the sky. The fault is not inthe light or in the sky, for upon the fine sandsof the dunes, and upon beds of fine gypsumand salt, you can see your own shadow coloredan absolute indigo; and often upon bowlders ofwhite quartz the shadows of cholla and greasewood are cast in almost cobalt hues.

All color—local, reflected, translucent, complementary—is,of course, made possible bylight and has no existence apart from it.Through the long desert day the sunbeams areweaving skeins of color across the sands, alongthe sides of the canyons, and about the tops ofthe mountains. They stain the ledges of copperwith turquoise, they burn the buttes to aterra-cotta red, they paint the sands with roseand violet, and they key the air to the hue ofthe opal. The reek of color that splashes thewestern sky at sunset is but the climax of the(94)sun’s endeavor. If there are clouds stretchedacross the west the ending is usually one of exceptionalbrilliancy. The reds are all scarlet,the yellows are like burnished brass, the orangeslike shining gold.

But the sky and clouds of the desert are ofsuch unique splendor that they call for achapter of their own.

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CHAPTER VI
DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS

How silently, even swiftly, the days glide byout in the desert, in the waste, in the wilderness!How “the morning and the eveningmake up the day” and the purple shadow slipsin between with a midnight all stars! Andhow day by day the interest grows in the longoverlooked commonplace things of nature! Ina few weeks we are studying bushes, bowlders,stones, sand-drifts—things we never thought oflooking at in any other country. And after atime we begin to make mental notes on thechanges of light, air, clouds, and blue sky. Atfirst we are perhaps bothered about the intensityof the sky, for we have always heard of the“deep blue” that overhangs the desert; andwe expect to see it at any and all times. Butwe discover that it shows itself in its greatestdepth only in the morning before sunrise. Thenit is a dark blue, bordering upon purple; andfor some time after the sun comes up it holds a(96)deep blue tinge. At noon it has passed througha whole gamut of tones and is pale blue, yellowish,lilac-toned, or rosy; in the late afternoonit has changed again to pink or gold ororange; and after twilight and under the moon,warm purples stretch across the whole reach ofthe firmament from horizon to horizon.

But the changes in the blue during the dayhave no constancy to a change. There is nofixed purpose about them. The caprices oflight, heat, and dust control the appearances.Sometimes the sky at dawn is as pallid as a snow-dropwith pearly grays just emerging from theblue; and again it may be flushed with saffron,rose, and pink. When there are clouds and greatheat the effect is often very brilliant. Thecolors are intense in chrome-yellows, golds, carmines,magentas, malachite-greens—a body ofgorgeous hues upheld by enormous side wingsof paler tints that encircle the horizon to thenorth and south, and send waves of color far upthe sky to the cool zenith. Such dawns are seldomseen in moist countries, nor are they usualon the desert, except during the hot summermonths.

The prevailing note of the sky, the one oftenestseen, is, of course, blue—a color we may(97)not perhaps linger over because it is so common.And yet how seldom it is appreciated!Our attention is called to it in art—in a hawthornjar as large as a sugar-bowl, made in acertain period, in a certain Oriental school.The æsthetic world is perhaps set agog bythis ceramic blue. But what are its depth andpurity compared to the ethereal blue! Yet thecolor is beautiful in the jar and infinitely morebeautiful in the sky—that is beautiful in itselfand merely as color. It is not necessary thatit should mean anything. Line and tint donot always require significance to be beautiful.There is no tale or text or testimony to be torturedout of the blue sky. It is a splendid bodyof color; no more.

You cannot always see the wonderful qualityof this sky-blue from the desert valley, becauseit is disturbed by reflections, by sand-storms, bylower air strata. The report it makes of itselfwhen you begin to gain altitude on a mountain’sside is quite different. At four thousand feetthe blue is certainly more positive, more intense,than at sea-level; at six thousand feet it beginsto darken and deepen, and it seems to fit in thesaddles and notches of the mountains like ablock of lapis lazuli; at eight thousand feet it(98)has darkened still more and has a violet hueabout it. The night sky at this altitude is almostweird in its purples. A deep violet fitsup close to the rim of the moon, and the orbitself looks like a silver wafer pasted upon thesky.

The darkening of the sky continues as theheight increases. If one could rise to, say, fiftythousand feet, he would probably see the sunonly as a shining point of light, and the firmamentmerely as a blue-black background. Thediffusion of light must decrease with the growingthinness of the atmospheric envelope. Atwhat point it would cease and the sky becomeperfectly black would be difficult to say, butcertainly the limit would be reached when ouratmosphere practically ceased to exist. Spacefrom necessity must be black except where thestraight beams of light stream from the sun andthe stars.

The bright sky-colors, the spectacular effects,are not to be found high up in the blue of thedome. The air in the zenith is too thin, toofree from dust, to take deep colorings of redand orange. Those colors belong near the earth,along the horizons where the aërial envelope isdense. The lower strata of atmosphere are in(99)fact responsible for the gorgeous sunsets, thetinted hazes, the Indian-summer skies, the hotSeptember glows. These all appear in theirsplendor when the sun is near the horizon-lineand its beams are falling through the manymiles of hot, dust-laden air that lie along thesurface of the earth. The air at sunset aftera day of intense heat-radiation is usually sothick that only the long and strong waves ofcolor can pass through it. The blues are almostlost, the neutral tints are missing, thegreens are seen but faintly. The waves of redand yellow are the only ones that travel throughthe thick air with force. And these are thecolors that tell us the story of the desert sunset.

Ordinarily the sky at evening over the desert,when seen without clouds, shows the colors ofthe spectrum beginning with red at the bottomand running through the yellows, greens, andblues up to the purple of the zenith. Incool weather, however, this spectrum arrangementseems swept out of existence by a broadband of yellow-green that stretches half wayaround the circle. It is a pale yellow fadinginto a pale green, which in turn melts into apale blue. In hot weather this pallor is changedto something much richer and deeper. A band(100)of orange takes its place. It is a flame-colored orange,and its hue is felt in reflection upon valley,plain, and mountain peak. This indeed is theorange light that converts the air in the mountaincanyons into golden mist, and is measurablyresponsible for the yellow sun-shafts that,streaming through the pinnacles of the westernmountains, reach far across the upper sky inever-widening bands. This great orange belt islacking in that variety and vividness of coloringthat comes with clouds, but it is not wantingin a splendor of its own. It is the broadest, thesimplest, and in many respects the sublimestsunset imaginable—a golden dream with thesky enthroned in glory and the earth at its feetreflecting its lustre.

But the more brilliant sunsets are only seenwhen there are broken translucent clouds inthe west. There are cloudy days even onthe desert. After many nights of heat, longskeins of white stratus will gather along thehorizons, and out of them will slowly be wovenforms of the cumulus and the nimbus. And itwill rain in short squalls of great violence onthe lomas, mesas, and bordering mountains.But usually the cloud that drenches a mountaintop eight thousand feet up will pass over an(101)intervening valley, pouring down the same floodof rain, and yet not a drop of it reaching theground. The air is always dry and the rain-dropthat has to fall through eight thousandfeet of it before reaching the earth, never getsthere. It is evaporated and carried up to itsparent cloud again. During the so-called “rainyseason” you may frequently see clouds all aboutthe horizon and overhead that are “raining”—lettingdown long tails and sheets of rain thatare plainly visible; but they never touch theearth. The sheet lightens, breaks, and dissipatestwo thousand feet up. It rains, trueenough, but there is no water, just as there aredesert rivers, but they have no visible stream.That is the desert of it both above and below.

With the rain come trooping almost all thecloud-forms known to the sky. And the thickones like the nimbus carry with them a chilling,deadening effect. The rolls and sheets of rain-cloudsthat cover the heavens at times rob thedesert of light, air, and color at one fell swoop.Its beauty vanishes as by magic. Instead ofcolored haze there is gray gloom settling alongthe hills and about the mesas. The sands losetheir lustre and become dull and formless, thevegetation darkens to a dead gray, and the(102)mountains turn slate-colored, mouldy, unwholesomelooking. A mantle of drab envelops thescene, and the glory of the desert has departed.

All the other cloud-forms, being more or lesstransparent, seem to aid rather than to obscurethe splendor of the sky. The most commonclouds of all are the cumuli. In hot summerafternoons they gather and heap up in hugemasses with turrets and domes of light that reachat times forty thousand feet above the earth.At sunset they begin to show color before anyof the other clouds. If seen against the suntheir edges at first gleam silver-white and thenchange to gold; if along the horizon to thenorth or south, or lying back in the eastern sky,they show dazzling white like a snowy Alp.As the sun disappears below the line they beginto warm in color, turning yellow, pink, and rose.Finally they darken into lilac and purple, thensink and disappear entirely. The smaller formsof cumulus that appear in the west at eveningare always splashes of sunset color, sometimesbeing shot through with yellow or scarlet. Theyultimately appear floating against the night skyas spots of purple and gray.

Above the cumuli and often flung across themlike bands of gauze, are the strati—clouds of(103)the middle air region. This veil or sheet-cloudmight be called a twilight cloud, giving out asit does its greatest splendor after the sun hasdisappeared below the verge. It then takes allcolors and with singular vividness. At times itwill overspread the whole west as a sheet ofbrilliant magenta, but more frequently it blareswith scarlet, carmine, crimson, flushing up andthen fading out, shifting from one color toanother; and finally dying out in a beautifulashes of roses. When these clouds and all theirvariations have faded into lilac and deep purples,there are still bright spots of color in theupper sky where the cirri are receiving the lastrays of the sun.

The cirrus with its many feathery and fleecyforms is the thinnest, the highest, and the mostbrilliant in light of all the clouds. Perhaps itsbrilliancy is due to its being an ice-cloud. Itseems odd that here in the desert with so muchheat rising and tempering the upper air thereshould be clouds of ice but a few miles above it.The cirrus and also the higher forms of thecumulo-stratus are masses of hoar-frost, spiculesof ice floating in the air, instead of tiny globulesof vapor.

There is nothing remarkable about the desert(104)clouds—that is nothing very different from theclouds of other countries—except in light, color,and background. They appear incomparablymore brilliant and fiery here than elsewhere onthe globe. The colors, like everything else onthe desert, are intense in their power, fierce intheir glare. They vibrate, they scintillate, theypenetrate and tinge everything with their hue.And then, as though heaping splendor uponsplendor, what a wonderful background theyare woven upon! Great bands of orange, green,and blue that all the melted and fused gemsin the world could not match for translucentbeauty. Taken as a whole, as a celestial tapestry,as a curtain of flame drawn between nightand day, and what land or sky can rival it!

After the clouds have all shifted into purplesand the western sky has sunk into night, thenup from the east the moon—the misshapenorange-hued desert moon. How large it looks!And how it warms the sky, and silvers the edgesof the mountain peaks, and spreads its widelight across the sands! Up, up it rises, losingsomething of its orange and gaining somethingin symmetry. In a few hours it is high in theheavens and has a great aureole of color aboutit. Look at the ring for a moment and you will(105)see all the spectrum colors arranged in order.Pale hues they are but they are all there. Rainbowsby day and rainbows by night! Radiantcircles of colored light—not one but many.Arches above arches—not two or three but fivesolar bows in the sky at one time! Whatstrange tales come out of the wilderness! Buthow much stranger, how much more weird andextraordinary the things that actually happenin this desert land.

High in the zenith rides the desert moon.What a flood of light comes from it! Whatpale, phosphorescent light! Under it miles andmiles of cactus and grease wood are half revealed,half hidden; and far away against thedark mountains the dunes of the desert shinewhite as snow-clad hills in December. Thestars are forth, the constellations in their places,the planets large and luminous, yet none ofthem has much color or sparkle. The moondims them somewhat, but even without themoon they have not the twinkle of the stars inhigher, colder latitudes. The desert air seemsto veil their lustre somewhat, and yet as pointsof light set in that purple dome of sky howbeautiful they are!

Lying down there in the sands of the desert,(106)alone and at night, with a saddle for your pillow,and your eyes staring upward at the stars,how incomprehensible it all seems! The immensityand the mystery are appalling; andyet how these very features attract the thoughtand draw the curiosity of man. In the presenceof the unattainable and the insurmountablewe keep sending a hope, a doubt, a query,up through the realms of air to Saturn’sthrone. What key have we wherewith to unlockthat door? We cannot comprehend a tinyflame of our own invention called electricity,yet we grope at the meaning of the blazingsplendor of Arcturus. Around us stretchesthe great sand-wrapped desert whose mysteryno man knows, and not even the Sphinx couldreveal; yet beyond it, above it, upward stillupward, we seek the mysteries of Orion andthe Pleiades.

What is it that draws us to the boundless andthe fathomless? Why should the lovely thingsof earth—the grasses, the trees, the lakes, thelittle hills—appear trivial and insignificantwhen we come face to face with the sea or thedesert or the vastness of the midnight sky? Isit that the one is the tale of things known andthe other merely a hint, a suggestion of the unknown?(107)Or have immensity, space, magnitudea peculiar beauty of their own? Is it not truethat bulk and breadth are primary and essentialqualities of the sublime in landscape? Andis it not the sublime that we feel in immensityand mystery? If so, perhaps we have a partialexplanation of our love for sky and sea anddesert waste. They are the great elements.We do not see, we hardly know if their boundariesare limited; we only feel their immensity,their mystery, and their beauty.

And quite as impressive as the mysteries arethe silences. Was there ever such a stillness asthat which rests upon the desert at night! Wasthere ever such a hush as that which stealsfrom star to star across the firmament! Youperhaps think to break the spell by raising yourvoice in a cry; but you will not do so again.The sound goes but a little way and then seemsto come back to your ear with a suggestion ofinsanity about it.

A cry in the night! Overhead the planetsin their courses make no sound, the earth isstill, the very animals are mute. Why then thecry of the human? How it jars the harmonies!How it breaks in discord upon the unitiesof earth and air and sky! Century after(108)century that cry has gone up, mobbing highheaven; and always insanity in the cry, insanityin the crier. What folly to protest wherenone shall hear! There is no appeal from thelaw of nature. It was made for beast and birdand creeping thing. Will the human never learnthat in the eye of the law he is not differentfrom the things that creep?

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CHAPTER VII
ILLUSIONS

In our studies of landscape we are very frequentlymade the victims of either illusion ordelusion. The eye or the mind deceives us,and sometimes the two may join forces to ourcomplete confusion. We are not willing toadmit different reports of an appearance. TheAnglo-Saxon in us insists that there can beonly one truth, and everything else must beerror. It is known, for instance, that CastleDome, which looks down on the Colorado Riverfrom Western Arizona, is a turret of granite—gray,red, brown, rock-colored, whatever coloryou please. With that antecedent knowledgein mind how difficult it is for us to believe thereport of our eyes which says that at sunset thedome is amethystine, golden, crimson, or perhapslively purple. The reality is one thing,the appearance quite another thing; but whyare not both of them truthful?

And how very shy people are about accepting(110)a pink air, a blue shadow, or a field of yellowgrass—sunlit lemon-yellow grass! They havebeen brought up from youth to believe that airis colorless, that shadows are brown or gray orsooty black, and that grass is green—bottle-green.The preconceived impression of themind refuses to make room for the actual impressionof the eyes, and in consequence we aremisled and deluded.

But do the eyes themselves always report thetruth? Yes; the truth of appearances, but asregards the reality they may deceive you quiteas completely as the mind deceives you aboutthe apparent. And for the deception of theeyes there is no wizard’s cell or magician’s cabinetso admirably fitted for jugglery as this baredesert under sunlight. Its combination oflight and air seem like reflecting mirrors thatforever throw the misshapen image in unexpectedplaces, in unexpected lights and colors.

What, for instance, could be more perplexingthan the odd distortions in the forms and colorsof the desert mountains! A range of thesemountains may often look abnormally grand,even majestic in the early morning as theystand against the eastern sky. The outlines ofthe ridges and peaks may be clear cut, the light(111)and shade of the canyons and barrancas wellmarked, the cool morning colors of the face-wallsand foot-hills distinctly placed and holdingtheir proper value in the scene. But bynoon the whole range has apparently lost itslines and shrunken in size. Under the beatingrays of the sun and surrounded by waveringheated atmosphere its shadow masses have beengrayed down, neutralized, perhaps totally obliterated;and the long mountain surface appearsas flat as a garden wall, as smooth as a row ofsand-dunes. There is no indication of barrancaor canyon. The air has a blue-steel glowthat muffles light and completely wrecks color.Seen through it the escarpments show onlydull blue and gray. All the reds, yellows, andpinks of the rocks are gone; the surfaces weara burnt-out aspect as though fire had eaten intothem and left behind only a comb of volcanicash.

At evening, however, the range seems to returnto its majesty and magnitude. The peaksreach up, the bases broaden, the walls breakinto gashes, the ridges harden into profiles.The sun is westering, and the light fallingmore obliquely seems to bring out the shadowsin the canyons and barrancas. Last of all the(112)colors come slowly back to their normal condition,as the flush of life to one recoveringfrom a trance. One by one they begin to glowon chasm, wall, and needled summit. The air,too, changes from steel-blue to yellow, from yellowto pink, from pink to lilac, until at lastwith the sun on the rim of the earth, the mountains,the air, the clouds, and the sky are allglowing with the tints of ruby, topaz, rose-diamond—huesof splendor, of grandeur, of glory.

Suppose, if you please, a similar range ofmountains thirty miles away on the desert.Even at long distance it shows an imposingbulk against the sky, and you think if you wereclose to it, wall and peak would loom colossal.How surprised you are then as you ride towardit, hour after hour, to find that it does not seemto grow in size. When you reach the foot-hillsthe high mountains seem little larger than whenseen at a distance. You are further surprisedthat what appeared like a flat-faced range withits bases touching an imaginary curb-stone formiles, is in reality a group-range with retiringmountains on either side that lead off on acuteangles. The group is round, and has as muchbreadth as length. And still greater is yoursurprise when you discover that the green top(113)of the gray-based mountain, which has beenpuzzling you for so many hours, does not belongto the gray base at all. It is a pine-cladtop resting upon another and more massive basefar back in the group. It is the highest andmost central peak of the range.

Such illusions are common, easily explained;and yet, after all, not so easily understood. Theyare caused by false perspective, which in turnis caused by light and air. On the desert,perspective is always erratic. Bodies fail to detachthemselves one from another, foreshortening isabnormal, the planes of landscape are flattenedout of shape or telescoped, objects are huddledtogether or superimposed one upon another.The disturbance in aërial perspective is justas bad. Colors, lights, and shadows fall intocontradictions and denials, they shirk and bearfalse witness, and confuse the judgment of themost experienced.

No wonder amid this distortion of the natural,this wreck of perspective, that distance is sucha proverbially unknown quantity. It is the onething the desert dweller speaks about with caution.It may be thirty or fifty miles to thatpicacho—he is afraid to hazard a guess. If youshould go up to the top of your mountain range(114)and look at the valley beyond it, the distanceacross might seem very slight. You can easilysee to where another mountain range beginsand trails away into the distance. Perhaps youfancy a few hours’ ride will take you over thatvalley-plain to where the distant foot-hills arelying soft and warm at the bases of the mountains.You may be right and then again youmay be wrong. You may spend two days gettingto those foot-hills.

This deception of distance is not infrequentlyaccompanied by fatal consequences. The inexperiencedtraveller thinks the distance short, hecan easily get over the ground in a few hours.But how the long leagues drag out, spin out,reach out! The day is gone and he is notthere, the slight supply of water is gone andhe is not there, his horse is gone and he himselfis going, but he is not there. The story and itsending are familiar to those who live near thedesert, for every year some mining or exploringparty is lost. If there are any survivorsthey usually make the one report: “The distanceseemed so short.” But there are no shortdistances on the desert. Every valley-plain isan immense wilderness of space.

There is another illusion—a harmless one—that(115)has not to do with perspective but withshadow and local color. The appearance is thatof shadows cast down along the mountain’s sideby the ridges or hogbacks. Any little patch ofshadow is welcome on the desert, particularlyupon the mountains which are always so stronglyflooded with light. But this is only a counterfeitpresentment. The ridges have no vegetationupon them to hold in place the soil and rocksand these are continually breaking away intoland-slips. The slips or slides expose to viewstreaks of local color such as may be seen inveins of iron and copper, in beds of lignite orlayers of slate. It is these streaks and patchesof dark color that have broken away and slippeddown the mountain side under the ridges thatgive the appearance of shadows. They havethe true value in light, and are fair to look uponeven though they are deception. The weather-beatenrocks of a talus under a peak may createa similar illusion, but the shadow effect loses avelvety quality which it has when seen underthe ridges.

The illusion of a cloud-shadow resting uponthe foot-hills or in the valley, is frequently producedby the local color of lava-beds. Lavamay be of almost any color, but when seen close(116)to view it is usually a reddish-black. At a distance,however, and as a mass, its beds have theexact value of a cloud-shadow. Any eye wouldbe deceived by it. The great inundations oflava that have overrun the plains and oozeddown the foot-hills and around the lomas (particularlyon the Mojave) look the shadow to thevery life. The beds are usually hedged abouton all sides by banks of fine sand that seem tostand for sunlight surrounding the shadow, andthus the deception is materially augmented.Many times I have looked up at the sky to besure there was no cloud there, so palpable is thislava shadow-illusion.

But perhaps the most beautiful deceptionknown to the desert is the one oftenest seen—mirage.Everyone is more or less familiarwith it, for it appears in some form whereverthe air is heated, thickened, or has strata ofdifferent densities. It shows on the water, onthe grass plains, over ploughed fields or gravelroads, on roadbeds of railways; but the baredesert with its strong heat-radiation is primarilyits home. The cause of its appearance—orat least one of its appearances—is familiarknowledge, but it may be well to state it indictionary terms: “An optical illusion due to(117)excessive bending of light-rays in traversingadjacent layers of air of widely different densities,whereby distorted, displaced, or invertedimages are produced.”[5]

This is no doubt the true explanation of thatform of mirage in which people on Sahara seecaravans in the sky trailing along, upside down,like flies upon the ceiling; or on the ocean seeships hanging in the air, masts and sails downward.But the explanation is very general andis itself in some need of explanation. Perhapsthen I may be pardoned for trying to illustratethe theory of mirage in my own way.

The rays of light that come from the sun tothe earth appear to travel in a straight line,but they never do. As soon as they meet withand pass into the atmospheric envelope they arebent or deflected from their original directionand reach the earth by obtuse angles or in longdescending curves like a spent rifle ball. Thisbending of the rays is called refraction, whichmust not be confounded with reflection—a somethingquite different. Now refraction is, ofcourse, the greatest where the atmosphere is thedensest. The thicker the air the more acute thebending of the light-ray. Hence the thick layers(118)of air lying along or a few feet above thesurface of the earth on a hot day are peculiarlywell-fitted to distort the light-ray, and consequentlywell-fitted to produce the effect of mirage.These layers of air are of varying densities.Some are thicker than others; and inthis respect the atmosphere bears a resemblanceto an ordinary photographic or telescopic lens.Let us use the lens illustration for a momentand perhaps it will aid comprehension of thesubject.

You know that the lens, like the air, is ofvarying thicknesses or densities, and you knowthat in the ordinary camera the rays of light,passing through the upper part of the lens,are refracted or bent toward the perpendicularso that they reach the ground-glass “finder”at the bottom; and that the rays passingthrough the lower part of the lens go to the topof the “finder” The result is that you haveon the “finder” or the negative something reversed—thingsupside down. That, so far asthe reversed image goes, is precisely the case inmirage. The air-layers act as a lens and bendthe light-rays so that when seen in our “finder”—theeye—the bottom of a tree, for example,goes to the top and the top goes to the bottom.

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But there is something more to mirage thanthis reversed image. The eyes do not see things“in their place,” but see them hanging in theair as in the case of ships and caravans. Toexplain this, in the absence of a diagram, weshall have to take up another illustration. Supposea light-ray so violently bent by the heatlying above a sidewalk that it should come tous around a street corner, and thereby we shouldsee a man coming up a side street that lies atright angles to us. He would appear to oureyes to be coming up, not the side street, butthe street we are standing in. The man, to allappearances, would not be “in his place.” Weshould see him where he is not.

Now suppose again instead of the light-raysbending to right or left (as in the street-cornerillustration), we consider them as bending skywardor earthward. Suppose yourself at seaand that you are looking up into the sky abovethe horizon. You see there a ship “out of itsplace,” hanging in the air in an impossiblemanner—something which is equivalent, or atleast analogous, to looking down the street andseeing the image of the man around the corner.You are looking straight into the sky, yet seeinga ship below the verge. The light-rays(120)coming from the ship on the water describe anobtuse angle or curve in reaching the eye. Therays from the bottom of the ship, lying in adense part of the air-lens, are more acutelybent than those from the masts, and hence theygo to the top of the photographic plate or yourfield of vision, whereas the rays from the ship’smasts, being in a thinner atmosphere, are lessviolently bent, and thus go to the bottom of yourfield of vision. The result is the ship high inair above the horizon-line and upside down.

The illusion or deception consists in this:We usually see things in flat trajectory, so tospeak. Light comes to us in comparativelystraight rays. The mind, therefore, has formulateda law that we see only by straight rays.In the case of mirage the light comes to us oncurved, bent, or angular rays. The eyes recognizethis, but the mind refuses to believe it andhence is deceived. We think we see the shipin the air by the straight ray, but in reality wesee the ship on the water by the bent ray. Itis thus that ships are often seen when far belowthe horizon-line, and that islands in the sea belowthe ocean’s rim, and so far away as a hundredmiles, are seen looming in the air. “Looming”is the word that describes the excessive(121)apparent elevation of the object in the sky andis more striking on sea than land. Captains ofvessels often tell strange tales of how high inthe air, ships and towns and coasts are seen.The report has even come back from Alaska ofa city seen in the sky that is supposed to be thecity of Bristol. In tropical countries and overwarm ocean-currents there are often very acutebendings of the light-rays. Why may it not beso in colder lands with colder currents?

The form of mirage that gives us the reversedimage is seen on the desert as well as on thesea; but not frequently—at least not in my experience.There is an illusion of mountainshanging peak downward from the sky, but onemay wander on the deserts for months andnever see it. The reality and the phantomboth appear in the view—the phantom seemingto draw up and out of the original in a distorted,cloud-like shape. It is almost alwaysmisshapen, and as it rises high in air it seemsto be detached from the original by currents ofair drifted in between. More familiar sightsare the appearances of trees, animals, houses,wagons, all hanging in the air in enlarged andelongated shapes and, of course, reversed. Ihave seen horses hitched to a wagon hanging(122)high up in the air with the legs of the horsestwenty feet long and the wagon as large as acabin. The stilted antelope “forty feet highand upside down” is as seldom seen in thesky as upon the earth; but desert cattle inbunches of half a dozen will sometimes walkabout on the aërial ceiling in a very astonishingway.

Yet these, too, are infrequent appearances.Nor is the illusion of buttes rising from theplain in front of you often seen. It happensonly when there are buttes at one side or theother, and, I presume, this mirage is caused bythe bending of the light-rays to the right or left.It presents certainly a very beautiful effect.The buttes rise up from the ground, first oneand then another, until there is a range of themthat holds the appearance of reality perhaps forhours, and then gradually fades out like a stereopticonpicture—the bases going first and thetops gradually melting into the sky. Whenseen at sunset against a yellow sky the effect ismagnificent. The buttes, even in illusion, takeon a wonderful blue hue (the complementarycolor of yellow), and they seem to drift upon thesky as upon an open sea.

The bending of the light-rays to either side(123)instead of up or down, as following the perpendicular,may or may not be of frequent occurrence.I do not even know if the butte appearanceis to be attributed to that. The opportunityto see it came to me but once, and I had notthen the time to observe whether the buttes inthe mirage had sides the reverse of the originals.Besides, it is certain that mirage is caused inother ways than by the bending of light-rays.The most common illusion of the desert is thewater-mirage and that is caused by reflection,not refraction. Its usual appearance is that ofa lake or sea of water with what looks at a distanceto be small islands in it. There are thosewith somewhat more lively imagination thantheir fellows who can see cows drinking in thewater, trees along the margin of the shore(palms usually), and occasionally a farm-house,a ship, or a whale. I have never seen any ofthese wonderful things, but the water andisland part of the illusion is to be seen almostanywhere in the desert basins during hot weather.In the lower portions of the Colorado itsometimes spreads over thousands of acres, andappears not to move for hours at a stretch. Atother times the wavering of the heat or theswaying of the air strata, or a change in the(124)density of the air will give the appearance ofwaves or slight undulations on the water. Ineither case the illusion is quite perfect. Waterlying in such a bed would reflect the exact colorof the sky over it; and what the eyes reallysee in this desert picture is the reflection of thesky not from water but from strata of thick air.

This illusion of water is probably seen moreperfectly in the great dry lake-beds of the desertwhere the ground is very flat and there isno vegetation, than elsewhere. In the old CoahuilaValley region of the Colorado the watercomes up very close to you and the more youflatten the angle of reflection by flattening yourselfupon the ground, the closer the water approaches.The objects in it which people imaginelook like familiar things are certainly verynear. And these objects—wild-fowl, bushes,tufts of swamp grass, islands, buttes—are frequentlybewildering because some of them areright side up and some of them are not. Someare reversed in the air and some are quietlyresting upon the ground.

It happens at times that the whole picture isconfused by the light-rays being both reflectedand refracted, and in addition that the raysfrom certain objects come to us in a direct line.(125)The ducks, reeds, and tufts of grass, for instance,are only clods of dirt or sand-banked busheswhich are detached at the bottom by heavy driftsof air. We see their tops right side up by lookingthrough the air-layer or some broken portionof it. But in the same scene there may betrees upside down, and mountains seen in reflection,drawn out to stupendous proportions.In the Salton Basin one hot day in September astartled coyote very obligingly ran through amost brilliant water-mirage lying directly beforeme. I could only see his head and part ofhis shoulders, for the rest of him was cut offby the air-layer; but the appearance was that ofa wolf swimming rapidly across a lake of water.The illusion of the water was exact enough becauseit was produced by reflection, but therewas no illusion about the upper part of thecoyote. The rays of light from his head andshoulders came to me unrefracted and unreflected—cameas light usually travels from objectto eye.

But refracted or reflected, every feature of thewater-mirage is attractive. And sometimes itskaleidoscopic changes keep the fancy moving ata pretty pace. The appearance and disappearanceof the objects and colors in the mirage(126)are often quite wonderful. The reversed mountainpeaks, with light and shade and color uponthem, wave in and out of the imaginary lake,and are perhaps succeeded by undulations ofhorizon colors in grays and pinks, by sunsetskies and scarlet clouds, or possibly by thewhite cap of a distant sierra that has beencaught in the angle of reflection.

But with all its natural look one is at loss tounderstand how it could ever be seriously acceptedas a fact, save at the first blush. Peopledying for water and in delirium run toward it—atleast the more than twice-told tales of travellersso report—but I never knew any healthyeye that did not grow suspicious of it after thefirst glance. It trembles and glows too muchand soon reveals itself as something intangible,hardly of earth, little more than a shifting fantasy.You cannot see it clear-cut and well-defined,and the snap-shot of your camera doesnot catch it at all.

Yet its illusiveness adds to, rather than detractsfrom, its beauty. Rose-colored dreams arealways delightful; and the mirage is only adream. It has no more substantial fabric thanthe golden haze that lies in the canyons at sunset.It is only one of nature’s veilings which(127)she puts on or off capriciously. But again itsloveliness is not the less when its uncertain,fleeting character is revealed. It is one of thedesert’s most charming features because of itsstrange light and its softly glowing opaline color.And there we have come back again to thatbeauty in landscape which lies not in the linesof mountain valley and plain, but in the almostformless masses of color and light.

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CHAPTER VIII
CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD

Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolentgoddess just as our own inadequate visionhappens to see her. If we have eyes only forher creative beauties we think her all goodness;if we see only her power of destruction weincline to think she is all evil. With whatinfinite care and patience, worthy only of agood goddess, does she build up the child, theanimal, the bird, the tree, the flower! Howwonderfully she fits each for its purpose, roundingit with strength, energy, and grace; andbeautifying it with a prodigality of colors. Fortwenty years she works night and day to bringthe child to perfection, for twenty days she toilsupon the burnished wings of some insect buzzingin the sunlight, for twenty hours she paintsthe gold upon the petals of the dandelion. Andthen what? What of the next twenty? Doesshe leave her handiwork to take care of itselfuntil an unseen dragon called Decay comes(129)along to destroy it? Not at all. The goodgoddess has a hand that builds up. Yes; andshe has another hand that takes down. Themarvellous skill of the one has its complement,its counterpart, in the other. Block by blockshe takes apart the mosaic with just as muchdeftness as she put it together.

Those first twenty years of our life we wereallowed to sap blood and strength from our surroundings;the last twenty years of our life oursurroundings are allowed to sap blood andstrength from us. It is Nature’s plan and it iscarried out without any feeling. With the sameindifferent spirit that she planted in us an eyeto see or an ear to hear, she afterward plants amicrobe to breed and a cancer to eat. She inherself is both growth and decay. The virileand healthy things of the earth are hers; andso, too, are disease, dissolution, and death. Theflower and the grass spring up, they fade, theywither; and Nature neither rejoices in the lifenor sorrows in the death. She is neither goodnor evil; she is only a great law of change thatpasseth understanding. The gorgeous pageantryof the earth with all its beauty, the lifethereon with its hopes and fears and struggles,and we a part of the universal whole, are brought(130)up from the dust to dance on the green in thesunlight for an hour; and then the processionthat comes after us turns the sod and we creepback to Mother Earth. All, all to dust again;and no man to this day knoweth the why thereof.

One is continually assailed with queries ofthis sort whenever and wherever he begins tostudy Nature. He never ceases to wonder whyshe should take such pains to foil her own plansand bring to naught her own creations. Whydid she give the flying fish such a willowy tailand such long fins, why did she labor so industriouslyto give him power of flight, when atthe same time she was giving another fish in thesea greater strength, and a bird in the air greaterswiftness wherewith to destroy him? Whyshould she make the tarantula such a powerfulengine of destruction when she was in the samehour making his destroyer, the tarantula-wasp?And always here in the desert the questioncomes up: Why should Nature give theseshrubs and plants such powers of enduranceand resistance, and then surround them by heat,drouth, and the attacks of desert animals? Itis existence for a day, but sooner or later thegrowth goes down and is beaten into dust.

The individual dies. Yes; but not the species.(131)Perhaps now we are coming closer to an understandingof Nature’s method. It is the speciesthat she designs to last, for a period at least;and the individual is of no great importance,merely a sustaining factor, one among millionsrequiring continual renewal. It is a small matterwhether there are a thousand acres of greasewood more or less, but it is important that thefamily be not extinguished. It grows readilyin the most barren spots, is very abundant andvery hardy, and hence is protected only by anodor and a varnish. On the contrary take thebisnaga—a rather rare cactus. It has only athin, short tap-root, therefore it has an enormousupper reservoir in which to store water,and a most formidable armor of fish-hookshaped spines that no beast or bird can penetrate.Remove the danger which threatens theextinction of the family and immediately Natureremoves the defensive armor. On thedesert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn likea point of steel. Follow it from the desert intothe high tropical table-lands of Mexico wherethere is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty ofchance for yuccas to thrive, and you will findit turned into a tree, and the thorn merely adull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the(132)pitahaya into the tropics again, and with theircousin, the organ cactus, you find them growinga soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.Abundance of soil and rain, abundanceof other vegetation for browsing animals, andthere is no longer need of protection. Withit the family would increase too rapidly.

So it seems that Nature desires neither increasenor decrease in the species. She wishesto maintain the status quo. And for the sakeof keeping up the general healthfulness andvirility of her species she requires that thereshall be change in the component parts. Eachmust suffer not a “sea change,” but a chemicalchange; and passing into liquids, gases, or dusts,still from the grave help on the universal plan.So it is that though Nature dips each one of herdesert growths into the Styx to make them invulnerable,yet ever she holds them by the heeland leaves one point open to the destroyingarrow.

Yet it is remarkable how Nature designs andprepares the contest—the struggle for life—thatis continually going on in her world. Howwonderfully she arms both offence and defence!What grounds she chooses for the conflict!What stern conditions she lays down! Given a(133)waste of sand and rock, given a heat so intensethat under a summer sun the stones will blistera bare foot like hot iron, given perhaps two orthree inches of rain in a twelvemonth; andwhat vegetation could one expect to find growingthere? Obviously, none at all. Butno; Nature insists that something shall fightheat and drouth even here, and so she designsstrange growths that live a starved life, andbring forth after their kind with much labor.Hardiest of the hardy are these plants and justas fierce in their way as the wild-cat. You cannottouch them for the claw. They have noidea of dying without a struggle. You willfind every one of them admirably fitted to endure.They are marvellous engines of resistance.

The first thing that all these plants have tofight against is heat, drouth, and the evaporationof what little moisture they may have. Andhere Nature has equipped them with ingenuityand cunning. Not all are designed alike, to besure, but each after its kind is good. Thereare the cacti, for example, that will grow whereeverything else perishes. Why? For one reasonbecause they have geometrical forms thatprevent loss from evaporation by contracting a(134)minimum surface for a given bulk of tissue.[6]There is no waste, no unnecessary exposure ofsurface. Then there are some members of thefamily like the “old man” cactus, that havethick coatings of spines and long hairy growthsthat prevent the evaporation of moisture bykeeping off the wind. Then again the cactihave no leaves to tempt the sun. Many of thedesert growths are so constructed. Even sucha tree as the lluvia d’oro has needles rather thanleaves, though it does put forth a row of tinyleaves near the end of the needle; and when wecome to examine the ordinary trees such as themesquite, the depua, the palo breya, the paloverde, and all the acacia family, we find theyhave very narrow leaves that have a fashion ofhanging diagonally to the sun and thus avoidingthe direct rays. Nature is determined thatthere shall be no unnecessary exhaust of moisturethrough foliage. The large-leafed bush ortree does not exist. The best shade to be foundon the desert is under the mesquite, and unlessit is very large, the sun falls through it easilyenough.

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As an extra precaution some shrubs are givena shellac-like sap or gum with which they varnishtheir leaves and make evaporation almostimpossible. The ordinary greasewood is an exampleof this; and perhaps because of its varnish,it is, with the cacti, the hardiest of all thedesert growths. It is found wherever anythingliving is found, and flourishes under the fiercestheat. Its leaves always look bright and have asticky feeling about them as though recentlyshellacked.

There are other growths that seem to have afine sense of discretion in the matter of danger,for they let fall all their leaves at the first approachof drouth. The ocatilla, or “candlewood” as it is sometimes called, puts out a longrow of bright leaves along its stems after a rain,but as soon as drouth comes it sheds them hastilyand then stands for months in the sunlight—abundle of bare sticks soaked with a resinthat will burn with fire, but will not evaporatewith heat. The sangre de dragon (sometimescalled sangre en grado) does the same thing.

But Nature’s most common device for theprotection and preservation of her desert broodis to supply them with wonderful facilities forfinding and sapping what moisture there is, and(136)conserving it in tanks and reservoirs. Theroots of the greasewood and the mesquite arealmost as powerful as the arms of an octopus,and they are frequently three times the lengthof the bush or tree they support. They willbore their way through rotten granite to find adamp ledge almost as easily as a diamond drill;and they will pry rocks from their foundationsas readily as the wistaria wrenches the ornamentalwood-work from the roof of a porch. Theyare always thirsty and they are always runninghere and there in the search for moisture. Avertical section of their underground structurerevealed by the cutting away of a river bank orwash is usually a great surprise. One marvelsat the great network of roots required to supportsuch a very little growth above ground.

Yet this network serves a double purpose.It not only finds and gathers what moisturethere is but stores it in its roots, feeding thetop growth with it economically, not wastefully.It has no notion of sending too much moistureup to the sunlight and the air. Cut a twig andit will often appear very dry; cut a root andyou will find it moist.

The storage reservoir below ground is not anunusual method of supplying water to the plant.(137)Many of the desert growths have it. Perhapsthe most notable example of it is the wild gourd.This is little more than an enormous tap rootthat spreads out turnip-shaped and is in sizeoften as large around as a man’s body. It holdswater in its pulpy tissue for months at a time, andwhile almost everything above ground is parchedand dying the vines and leaves of the gourd,fed from the reservoir below, will go on growingand the flowers continue blooming with themost unruffled serenity. In the Sonora desertsthere is a cactus or a bush (its name I have neverheard) growing from a root that looks almost likea hornet’s nest. This root is half-wood, half-vegetable,and is again a water reservoir like theroot of the gourd.

But there are reservoirs above ground quiteas interesting as those below. The tall flutedcolumn of the sahuaro, sometimes fifty feethigh, is little more than an upright cistern forholding moisture. Its support within is a seriesof sticks arranged in cylindrical form andheld together by some fibre, some tissue, and agreat deal of saturated pulp. Drive a stickinto it after a rain and it will run sap almostlike the maguey from which the Indians distillmescal. All the cacti conserve water in their(138)lobes or columns or at the base near the ground.So too the Spanish bayonets, the yuccas, theprickly pears and the chollas.

Many of the shrubs and trees like the sangrede dragon and the torote have enlarged orthickened barks to hold and supply water. Ifyou cut them the sap runs readily. When itcongeals it forms a gum which heals over thewound and once more prevents evaporation.Existence for the plants would be impossiblewithout such inventions. Plant life of everykind requires some moisture all the time. Itis an error to suppose because they grow in theso-called “rainless desert” that therefore theyexist without water. They gather and husbandit during wet periods for use during dryperiods, and in doing so they seem to displayalmost as much intelligence as a squirrel or an antdoes in storing food for winter consumption.

Is Nature’s task completed then when shehas provided the plants with reservoirs of waterand tap roots to pump for them? By no means.How long would a tank of moisture exist in thedesert if unprotected from the desert animals?The mule-deer lives here, and he can go forweeks without water, but he will take it everyday if he can get it. And the coyote can run(139)the hills indefinitely with little or no moisture;but he will eat a water melon, rind and all, andwith great relish, when the opportunity offers.The sahuaro, the bisnaga, the cholla, and thepan-cake lobed prickly pear would have a shortlife and not a merry one if they were left to themercy of the desert prowler. As it is they aresometimes sadly worried about their roots byrabbits and in their lobes by the deer. Itseems almost incredible but is not the less afact, that deer and desert cattle will eat thecholla—fruit, stem, and trunk—though itbristles with spines that will draw blood fromthe human hand at the slightest touch.

Nature knows very well that the attack willcome and so she provides her plants with variousdifferent defenses. The most common weaponwhich she gives them is the spine or thorn.Almost everything that grows has it and itsdifferent forms are many. They are all of themsharp as a needle and some of them have saw-edgesthat rip anything with which they comein contact. The grasses, and those plants akinto them like the yucca and the maguey, areoften both saw-edged and spine-pointed. Allthe cacti have thorns, some straight, somebarbed like a harpoon, some curved like a hook.(140)There are chollas that have a sheath coveringthe thorn—a scabbard to the sword—and whenanything pushes against it the sheath is leftsticking in the wound. The different forms ofthe bisnaga are little more than vegetable porcupines.They bristle with quills or have hook-shapedthorns that catch and hold the intruder.The sahuaro has not so many spines, but theyare so arranged that you can hardly strike thecylinder without striking the thorns.

The cacti are defended better than the othergrowths because they have more to lose, and areconsequently more subject to attack. And yetthere is one notable exception. The crucifixionthorn is a bush or tree somewhat like thepalo verde, except that it has no leaf. It is athorn and little else. Each small twig runsout and ends in a sharp spike of which thebranch is but the supporting shaft. It bearsin August a small yellow flower but this growsout of the side of the spike. In fact the wholeshrub seems created for no other purpose thanthe glorification of the thorn as a thorn.[7]

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Tree, bush, plant and grass—great and smallalike—each has its sting for the intruder. Youcan hardly stoop to pick a desert flower or pull abunch of small grass without being aware of aprickle on your hand. Nature seems to haveprovided a whole arsenal of defensive weaponsfor these poor starved plants of the desert.Not any of the lovely growths of the earth,like the lilies and the daffodils, are so well defended.And she has given them not onlyarmor but a spirit of tenacity and stubbornnesswherewith to carry on the struggle. Cut outthe purslain and the iron weed from the gardenwalk, and it springs up again and again, contendingfor life. Put heat, drouth, and animalattack against the desert shrubs and theyfight back like the higher forms of organic life.How typical they are of everything in and aboutthe desert. There is but one word to describeit and that word—fierce—I shall have wornthreadbare before I have finished these chapters.

We have not yet done with enumerating thedefenses of these plants. The bushes like thegreasewood and the sage have not the bulk ofbody to grow the thorn. They are too slight,too rambling in make-up. Besides their reservoirsare protected by being in their roots under(142)the ground. But Nature has not left theirtops wholly at the mercy of the deer. Takethe leaf of the sage and crush it in your hand.The odor is anything but pleasant. No animalexcept the jack-rabbit, no bird except the sagehen will eat it; and no human being will eateither the rabbit or the hen, if he can get anythingelse, because of the rank sage flavor.Rub the greasewood in your hand and it feelsharsh and brittle. The resinous varnish of theleaves gives it a sticky feeling and a disagreeableodor again. Nothing on the desert will touchit. Cut or break a twig of the sangre de dragonand a red sap like blood runs out. Touch it tothe tongue and it proves the most powerful ofastringents. The Indians use it to cauterizebullet wounds. Again no animal will touch it.Half the plants on the desert put forth theirleaves with impunity. They are not disturbedby either browsers or grazers. Some of themare poisonous, many of them are cathartic oremetic, nearly all of them are disagreeable tothe taste.

So it seems with spines, thorns, barbs, resins,varnishes and odorous smells Nature has armedher desert own very effectually. And her expenditureof energy may seem singularly disproportionate(143)to the result attained. The littlevegetation that grows in the waste may notseem worth while, may seem insignificantcompared with the great care bestowed upon it.But Nature does not think so. To her the cactusof the desert is just as important in itsplace as the arrowy pine on the mountain.She means that something shall grow and bearfruit after its kind even on the gravel beds ofthe Colorado; she means that the desert shallhave its covering, scanty though it be, just thesame as the well-watered lands of the tropics.

But are they useful, these desert growths?Certainly they are; just as useful as the pinetree or the potato plant. To be sure, mancannot saw them into boards or cook them in apot; but then Nature has other animals besideman to look after, other uses for her productsthan supporting human life. She toilsand spins for all alike and man is not her specialcare. The desert vegetation answers herpurposes and who shall say her purposes haveever been other than wise?

Are they beautiful these plants and shrubsof the desert? Now just what do you meanby that word “beautiful”? Do you meansomething of regular form, something smooth(144)and pretty? Are you dragging into naturesome remembrances of classic art; and areyou looking for the Dionysius face, theDoryphorus form, among these trees andbushes? If so the desert will not furnish youtoo much of beauty. But if you mean somethingthat has a distinct character, somethingappropriate to its setting, something admirablyfitted to a designed end (as in art the peasantsof Millet or the burghers of Rembrandt andRodin), then the desert will show forth muchthat people nowadays are beginning to thinkbeautiful. Mind you, perfect form and perfectcolor are not to be despised; neither shall youdespise perfect fitness and perfect character.The desert plants, every one of them, have verypositive characters; and I am not certain butthat many of them are interesting and beautifuleven in form and color.

No doubt it is an acquired taste that leadsone to admire greasewood and cactus; but cananyone be blind to the graceful form of themaguey, or better still, the yucca with its tallstalk rising like a shaft from a bowl and cappedat the top by nodding creamy flowers? On themountains and the mesas the sahuaro is so commonthat perhaps we overlook its beauty of(145)form; yet its lines are as sinuous as those of aMoslem minaret, its flutings as perfect as thoseof a Doric column. Often and often you see itstanding on a ledge of some rocky peak, likethe lone shaft of a ruined temple on a Greekheadland. And by way of contrast what couldbe more lovely than the waving lightness, thedrooping gracefulness of the lluvia d’oro. Theswaying tossing lluvia d’oro, well called the“shower of gold”! It is one of the most beautifulof the desert trees with its white skin likethe northern birch, its long needles like thepine, and the downward sweep of its brancheslike the willow. A strange wild tree that seemsto shun all society, preferring to dwell like ahermit among the rocks. It roots itself in thefissures of broken granite and it seems at itshappiest when it can let down its shower of goldover some precipice.

There are other tree forms, like the palo verdeand the mesquite, that are not wanting in anative grace; and yet it may as well be admittedthat most of the trees and bushes are lackingin height, mass, and majesty. It is no placefor large growths that reach up to the sun. Theheat and drouth are too great and tend to makeform angular and grotesque. But these very(146)conditions that dwarf form perhaps enhancecolor by distorting it in an analogous manner.When plants are starved for water and grow inthin poor soil they often put on colors that areabnormal, even unhealthy. Because of starvationperhaps the little green of the desert is asallow green; and for the same reason the lobesof the prickly pear are pale-green, dull yellow,sad pink or livid mauve. The prickly pearseems to take all colors dependent upon thepoverty, or the mineral character, of the groundwhere it grows. In that respect perhaps it isinfluenced in the same way as the parti-coloredhydrangea of the eastern dooryard.

All the cacti are brilliant in the flowers theybear. The top of the bisnaga in summer is atfirst a mass of yellow, then bright orange, finallydark red. The sahuaro bears a purple flower,and the cholla, the ocatilla, the pitahaya comealong with pink or gold or red or blue flowers.And again all the bushes and trees in summerput forth showers of color—graceful masses ofpetaled cups that look more like flowers grownin a meadow than blossoms grown on a tree.In June the palo verde is a great ball of yellow-gold,but there is a variety of it with a blue-greenbark that grows a blossom almost like an(147)eastern violet. And down in Sonora one is dazzledby the splendor of the guyacan (or guallacan)which throws out blossoms half-blue andhalf-red. All the commoner growths like thesage, the mesquite, the palo fierro, and the paloblanco, are blossom bearers. In fact everythingthat grows at all in the desert puts forth in seasonsome bright little flag of color. In themass they make little show, but examined inthe part they are interesting because of theirnurture, their isolation, and their peculiarityof form and color. The conditions of life haveperhaps contorted them, have paled or grayedor flushed or made morbid their coloring; butthey are all of them beautiful. Beautiful coloris usually unhealthy color as we have alreadysuggested.

Aside from the blossoms upon bush and treethere are few bright petals shining in the desert.It is no place for flowers. They are toodelicate and are usually wanting in tap rootand armor. If they spring up they are sooncut down by drouth or destroyed by animals.Many tales are told of the flowers that grow onthe waste after the rains, but I have not seenthem though I have seen the rains. There areno lupins, phacelias, pentstemons, poppies, or(148)yellow violets. Occasionally one sees the wildverbena or patches of the evening primrose, orup in the swales the little baby blue-eye growingall alone, or perhaps the yellow mimulus;but all told they do not make up a very strongcontingent. The salt bush that looks the colorof Scotch heather, out-bulks them all; and yetis not conspicuously apparent. Higher up in thehills and along the mesas one often meets withmany strange flowers, some fiery red and somewith spines like the Canadian thistle; but notdown in the hot valleys of the desert.

Nor are there many grasses of consequenceaside from a small curled grass and the heavysacaton that grow in bunches upon isolatedportions of the desert. By “isolated” I meanthat for some unknown reason there are tractson the desert seemingly sacred to certain plants,some to cholla, some to yuccas, some to greasewood, some to sahuaros, some to sacaton grass.It seems to be a desert oddity that the vegetationdoes not mix or mingle to any great extent.There are seldom more than four or fivekinds of growth to be found in one tract. Itis even noticeable in the lichens. One mountainrange will have all gray lichens on itsnorthern walls, another range will have all(149)orange lichens, and still another will be mottledby patches of coal-black lichens.

Strange growths of a strange land! Heat,drouth, and starvation gnawing at their vitalsmonth in and month out; and yet how determinedto live, how determined to fulfill theirdestiny! They keep fighting off the elements,the animals, the birds. Never by day or bynight do they loose the armor or drop the spearpoint. And yet with all the struggle they serenelyblossom in season, perpetuate their kinds,and hand down the struggle to the newer generationwith no jot of vigor abated, no tittleof hope dissipated. Strange growths indeed!And yet strange, perhaps, only to us who havenever known their untrumpeted history.

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CHAPTER IX
DESERT ANIMALS

The life of the desert lives only by virtue ofadapting itself to the conditions of the desert.Nature does not bend the elements to favor theplants and the animals; she makes the plantsand the animals do the bending. The toroteand the evening primrose must get used to heat,drouth, and a rocky bed; the coyote must learnto go without food and water for long periods.Even man, whose magnificent complacency leadshim to think himself one of Nature’s favorites,fares no better than a wild cat or an angle ofcholla. He must endure the same heat, thirst,and hunger or perish. There is no other alternative.

And so it happens that those things that canlive in the desert become stamped after a timewith a peculiar desert character. The struggleseems to develop in them special characteristicsand make them, not different from their kind;but more positive, more insistent. The yucca(151)of the Mojave is the yucca of New Mexico andOld Mexico but hardier; the wild cat of theColorado is the wild cat of Virginia but swifter,more ferocious; the Yuma Indian is like theZuni or the Navajo but lanker, more sinewy,more enduring. Father Garces, who passedthrough here one hundred and twenty-five yearsago, records in his Memoirs more than once thewonderful endurance of the desert Indians.“The Jamajabs (a branch of the Yumas) endurehunger and thirst for four days,” he writesin one place. The tale is told that the Indiansin the Coahuila Valley at the present day cando substantially the same thing. And, too, itis said that the Yumas have traveled from theColorado to the Pacific, across the desert onfoot, without any sustenance whatever. Noone, not to the desert born, could do such athing. Years of training in starvation, thirstand exposure have produced a man almost ashardy as the cactus, and just as distinctly atype of the desert as the coyote.

But the Indian and the plant must have somewater. They cannot go without it indefinitely.And just there the desert animals seem to fittheir environment a little snugger than eitherplant or human. For, strange as it may appear,(152)many of them get no water at all. Thereare sections of the desert, fifty or more milessquare, where there is not a trace of water inriver, creek, arroyo or pocket, where there isnever a drop of dew falling; and where the twoor three showers of rain each year sink into thesand and are lost in half an hour after theyhave fallen. Yet that fifty-mile tract of sandand rock supports its animal, reptile and insectlife just the same as a similar tract in Illinoisor Florida. How the animals endure, how—evenon the theory of getting used to it—thejack-rabbit, the ground squirrel, the rat, andthe gopher can live for months without eventhe moisture from green vegetation, is one ofthe mysteries. A mirror held to the nose ofa desert rabbit will show a moist breath-markon the glass. The moisture came out of therabbit, is coming out of him every few secondsof the day; and there is not a drop ofmoisture going into him. Evidently the ancientaxiom: “Out of nothing, nothing comes”is all wrong.

It is said in answer that the jack-rabbit getsmoisture from roots, cactus-lobes and the like.And the reply is that you find him where thereare no roots but greasewood and no cactus at(153)all. Besides there is no evidence from an examinationof his stomach that he ever eats anythingbut dried grass, bark, and sage leaves.But if the matter is a trifle doubtful about therabbit on account of his traveling capacities,there is no doubt whatever about the groundsquirrels, the rock squirrels, and the prairiedogs. None of them ever gets more than a hundredyards from his hole in his life, except possiblywhen migrating. And the circuit abouteach hole is usually bare of everything exceptdried grass. There in no moisture to be had.The prairie dog is not found on the desert, butin Wyoming and Montana there are villages ofthem on the grass prairies, with no water, root,lobe, or leaf within miles of them. The oldtheory of the prairie dog digging his hole downto water has no basis in fact. Patience, a strongarm and a spade will get to the bottom of hisburrow in half an hour.

All the desert animals know the meaning ofa water famine, and even those that are pronouncedwater drinkers know how to get onwith the minimum supply. The mule-deerwhose cousin in the Adirondacks goes down towater every night, lives in the desert mountains,month in and month out with nothing more(154)watery to quench thirst than a lobe of theprickly pear or a joint of cholla. But he is naturallyfond of green vegetation, and in the earlymorning he usually leaves the valley and climbsthe mountains where with goats and mountainsheep he browses on the twigs of shrub and tree.The coyote likes water, too, but he puts up withsucking a nest of quail eggs, eating some mesquitebeans, or at best absorbing the blood fromsome rabbit. The wild cat will go for weekswithout more moisture than the blood of birdsor lizards, and then perhaps, after long thirst,he will come to a water pocket in the rocks tolap only a handful, doing it with an angrysnarling snap as though he disliked it and wasdrinking under compulsion. The gray wolfis too much of a traveler to depend upon anyone locality. He will run fifty miles in a nightand be back before morning. Whether hegets water or not is not possible to ascertain.The badger, the coon, and the bear are veryseldom seen in the more arid regions. Theyare not strictly speaking desert animals becauseunfitted to endure desert hardships. They arenaturally great eaters and sleepers, loving coolweather and their own fatness; and to that thedesert is sharply opposed. There is nothing(155)fat in the land of sand and cactus. Animallife is lean and gaunt; if it sleeps at all it is withone eye open; and as for heat it cares very littleabout it. For the first law of the desert towhich animal life of every kind pays allegianceis the law of endurance and abstinence. Afterthat requirement is fulfilled special needs producethe peculiar qualities and habits of the individual.

Yet there is one quality more general thanspecial since almost everything possesses it, andthat is ferocity—fierceness. The strife is desperate;the supply of food and moisture issmall, the animal is very hungry and thirsty.What wonder then that there is the determinationof the starving in all desert life! Everythingpursues or is pursued. Every muscle isstrung to the highest tension. The boundingdeer must get away; the swift-following wolfmust not let him. The gray lizard dashes fora ledge of rock like a flash of light; but thebayonet bill of the road runner must catchhim before he gets there. Neither can affordto miss his mark. And that is perhaps thereason why there is so much development inspecial directions, so much fitness for a particularpurpose, so much equipment for the(156)doing or the avoiding of death. Because thewild-cat cannot afford to miss his quarry, thereforeis he made a something that seldom doesmiss.

The description of the lion as “a jaw on fourpaws” will fit the wild-cat very well—only heis a jaw on two paws. The hind legs are insignificantcompared with the front ones, andthe body back of the shoulders is lean, lank,slight, but withal muscular and sinewy. Thehead is bushy, heavy, and square, the neck andshoulders are massive, the forelegs and paws solarge that they look to belong to some other animal.The ears are small yet sensitive enoughto catch the least noise, the nose is acute, theeyes are like great mirrors, the teeth like pointsof steel. In fact the whole animal is little morethan a machine for dragging down and devouringprey. That and the protection of his breedare his only missions on earth. He is the samecreeping, snarling beast that one finds in themountains of California, but the desert animalis larger and stronger. He sneaks upon a bandof quail or a rabbit with greater caution, andwhen he springs and strikes it is with greatercertainty. The enormous paws pin the game tothe earth, and the sharp teeth cut through like(157)knives. It is not more than once in two orthree days that a meal comes within reach andhe has no notion of allowing it to get away.

The panther, or as he is more commonlycalled, the mountain lion, is no such square-builtmass of muscle, no such bundle of energyas the wild-cat, though much longer and larger.The figure is wiry and serpentine, and has all theaction and grace of the tiger. It is pre-eminentlya figure for crouching, sneaking, springing, anddragging down. His struggle-for-life is perhapsnot so desperate as that of the cat because he liveshigh up in the desert mountains where game ismore plentiful; but he is a very good strugglerfor all that. Occasionally one hears his cry inthe night (a cry that stops the yelp of the coyotevery quickly and sets the ears of the jack-rabbita-trembling) but he is seldom seen unless soughtfor. Even then the seeker does not usuallycare to look for him, or at him too long. Hehas the tiger eye, and his jaw and claw are toopowerful to be trifled with. He will not attackone unless at bay or wounded; but as a mountainprowler he is the terror of the young deer,the mountain sheep, and the rabbit family.

One sees the gray wolf but little oftener thanthe mountain lion. Sometimes in the very(158)early morning you may catch a glimpse of himsneaking up a mountain canyon, but he usuallykeeps out of sight. His size is great for a wolf—sometimesover six feet from nose to tail tip—butit lies mostly in length and bulk. He doesnot stand high on his feet and yet is a swift andlong-winded runner. In this and in his strengthof jaw lies his special equipment. He is notvery cunning but he takes up and follows atrail, and runs the game to earth with considerableperseverance. I have never seen anythingbut his footprints on the desert. Usually hekeeps well up in the mountains and comes downon the plains only at night. He prefers prairieor table-land country, with adjacent stockranges, to the desert, because there the huntingis not difficult. Sheep, calves, and pigs he willeat with some relish, but his favorite game is theyoung colt. He runs all his game and catchesit as it runs like the true wolf that he is. Sometimeshe hunts in packs of half a dozen, but ifthere is no companionship he does not hesitateto hunt alone.

The prairie wolf or coyote is not at all likethe gray wolf. He seldom runs after things,though he does a good deal of running awayfrom them. And he is a fairly good runner too.(159)But he does not win his living by his courage.His special gift is not the muscular energy thatcrushes at a blow; nor the great strength thatfollows and tires and finally drags down. Naturedesigned him with the wolf form and instinct,but gave him something of the clevernessof the fox. It is by cunning and anobliging stomach that the coyote is enabled toeke out a living. He is cunning enough toknow, for instance, that you cannot see him ona desert background as long as he does notmove; so he sits still at times for many minutes,watching you from some little knoll. Aslong as he is motionless your eyes pass over himas a patch of sand or a weathered rock. Whenhe starts to move, it is with some deliberation.He prefers a dog-trot and often several shotsfrom your rifle will not stir him into a run. Heslips along easily and gracefully—a lean, hungry-lookingwretch with all the insolence of a hoodlumand all the shrewdness of a thief. He requiresjust such qualities together with a keennose, good eyes and ears, and some swiftness ofdash to make a living. The desert bill of fareis not all that a wolf could desire; but the coyoteis not very particular. Everything is food thatcomes to his jaws. He likes rabbit meat, but(160)does not often get it. For desert rabbits donot go to sleep with both eyes shut. Failingthe rabbit he snuffs out birds and their nests,trails up anything sick or wounded, and in emergenciesruns down and devours a lizard. Ifanimal food is scarce he turns his attention tovegetation, eats prickly pears and mesquitebeans; and up in the mountains he stands onhis hind legs and gathers choke cherries andmanzanitas. With such precarious living he becomesgaunt, leathery, muscled with whip-cord.There is a meagreness and a scantiness about him;his coarse coat of hair is sun-scorched, his wholeappearance is arid, dusty, sandy. There is noother animal so thoroughly typical of the desert.He belongs there, skulking along the arroyosand washes just as a horned toad belongs undera granite bowlder. That he can live there at allis due to Nature’s gift to him of all-around cleverness.

The fox is usually accounted the epitome ofanimal cunning, but here in the desert he isnot frequently seen and is usually thought lessclever than the coyote. He prefers the foot-hillsand the cover of dense chaparral where hepreys upon birds, smells out the nest of thevalley quail, catches a wood-rat; or, if hard(161)pushed to it, makes a meal of crickets and grasshoppers.But even at this he is not more facilethan the coyote. Nor can he surpass the coyotein robbing a hen-roost and keeping out of atrap while doing it. He cuts no important figureon the desert and, indeed, he is hardly adesert animal though sometimes found there.The conditions of existence are too severe forhim. The strength of the cat, the legs of thewolf, and the stomach of the coyote are not his;and so he prowls nearer civilization and takesmore risk for an easier life.

And the prey, what of the prey! The animalsof the desert that furnish food for themeat eaters like the wolf and the cat—the animalsthat cannot fight back or at least wage unequalwarfare—are they left hopelessly and helplesslyat the mercy of the destroyers? Not so.Nature endows them and protects them as bestshe can. Every one of them has some device tobaffle or trick the enemy. Even the poor littlehorned toad, that has only his not too thickskin to save him, can slightly change the colorof that skin to suit the bowlder he is flattenedupon so that the keenest eye would pass himover unnoticed. The jack-rabbit cannot changehis skin, but he knows many devices whereby he(162)contrives to save it. Lying in his form at theroot of some bush or cactus he is not easily seen.He crouches low and the gray of his fur fitsinto the sand imperceptibly. You do not seehim but he sees you. His eyes never close;they are always watching. Look at them closelyas he lies dead before you and how large andprotruding they are! In the life they see everythingthat moves. And if his eyes fail him,perhaps his ears will not. He was named thejackass-rabbit because of his long ears; and thelength of them is in exact proportion to theiracuteness of hearing. No footstep escapes them.They are natural megaphones for the receptionof sound. It can hardly be doubted that his noseis just as acute as his eyes and his ears. Sothat all told he is not an animal easily caughtnapping.

And if the jack-rabbit’s senses fail him, hashe no other resource? Certainly, yes; that is ifhe is not captured. In proportion to his sizehe has the strongest hind legs of anything onthe desert. In this respect he is almost like akangaroo. When he starts running and beginswith his long bound, there is nothing that canovertake him except a trained greyhound. Hericochets from knoll to knoll like a bounding(163)ball, and as he crosses ahead of you perhaps youthink he is not moving very fast. But shoot athim and see how far behind him your rifle ballstrikes the dust. No coyote or wolf is foolishenough to chase him or ever try to run himdown. His endurance is quite as good as hisspeed. It makes no difference about his notdrinking water and that all his energy comesfrom bark and dry grass. He keeps right onrunning; over stones, through cactus, down acanyon, up a mountain. For keen senses andswift legs he is the desert type as emphaticallyas the coyote that is forever prowling on histrack.

The little “cotton-tail” rabbit is not perhapsso well provided for as the jack-rabbit; butthen he does not live in the open and is not soexposed to attack. He hides in brush, weeds, orgrass; and when startled makes a quick dashfor a hole in the ground or a ledge of rock. Hislegs are good for a short distance, and his sensesare acute; but the wild-cat or the coyote catcheshim at last. The continuance of his specieslies in prolific breeding. The wild-cat, too,catches a good many gophers, rats, mice, andsquirrels. The squirrels are many in kind andbeautiful in their forms and colorings. One(164)can hardly count them all—squirrels with longtails and short tails and no tails; squirrelsyellow, brown, gray, blue, and slate-colored.They live in the rocks about the bases of thedesert mountains; and eventually they fall aprey to the wild-cat who watches for them justas the domestic cat watches for the house rat.Their only safeguard is their energetic way ofdarting into a hole. For all their sharp nosesand ears they are foolish little folk and willkeep poking their heads out to see what is goingon.

But for acute senses, swift legs, and powerfulendurance nothing can surpass the antelope.He is rarely seen to-day (more’s the pity!); butonly a few years ago there were quite a numberof them on the Sonora edge of the ColoradoDesert. Usually they prefer the higher mesaswhere the land is grass-grown and the view isunobstructed; but they have been known tocome far down into the desert. And the antelopeis very well fitted for the sandy waste. Thelack of water does not bother him, he can eatanything that grows in grass or bush; and hecan keep from being eaten about as cleverly asany of the deer tribe. His eye alone is a marvelof development. It protrudes from the socket—bulges(165)out almost like the end of an egg—andif there were corners on the desert mesasI believe that eye could see around them. Hecannot be approached in any direction withoutseeing what is going on; but he may be still-huntedand shot from behind crag or cover.

His curiosity is usually the death of him, becausehe will persist in standing still and lookingat things; but his senses almost always givehim fair warning. His nose and ears are justas acute as his eyes. And how he can run!His legs seem to open and shut like the bladesof a pocket-knife, so leisurely, so apparentlyeffortless. But how they do take him over theground! With one leg shot from under himhe runs pretty nearly as fast as before. Atougher, more wiry, more beautiful animal wasnever created. Perhaps that is the reason whyevery man’s hand has been raised against himuntil now his breed is almost extinct. He waswell fitted to survive on the desert mesas andthe upland plains—a fine type of swiftness andendurance—but Nature in her economy neverreckoned with the magazine rifle nor the greedof the individual who calls himself a sportsman.

The mule-deer with his large ears, long muzzle(166)and keen eyes, is almost as well provided foras the antelope. He has survived the antelopepossibly because he does not live in the opencountry. He haunts the brush and the rockcover of the gorge and the mountain side.There in the heavy chaparral he will skulkand hide while you may pass within a few feetof him. If he sees that he is discovered hecan make a dash up or down the mountain ina way that astonishes. Stones, sticks, and brushhave no terror for him. He jumps over themor smashes through them. He will boundacross a talus of broken porphyry that will cutthe toughest boots to pieces, striking all fourfeet with every bound, and yet not ruffle thehair around his dew claws; or he will dashthrough a tough dry chaparral at full speedwithout receiving a scrape or a cut of any kind.The speed he attains on such ground astonishesagain. His feet seem to strike rubber insteadof stone; for he bounds like a ball, describesa quarter circle, and bounds again. Themagazine of your rifle may be emptied at him;and still he may go on, gayly cutting quartercircles, until he disappears over the ridge. Heis one of the hardiest of the desert progeny.The lack of water affects him little. He browses(167)and gets fat on twigs and leaves that seem tohave as little nutriment about them as a telegraph-pole;and he lies down on a bed of stonesas upon a bed of roses. He is as tough asthe goats and sheep that keep well up on thehigh mountain ridges; and in cleverness is perhapssuperior to the antelope. But oftentimeshe will turn around to have a last look, andtherein lies his undoing. In Sonora there isfound a dwarf deer—a foolish if pretty littlecreature—and along river-beds the white-taileddeer is occasionally seen; but these deer withthe goats and the sheep hardly belong to thedesert, though living upon its confines.

In fact, none of the far-travelling animals livesright down in the desert gravel-beds continuously.They go there at night or in the earlymorning, but in the daytime they are usuallyfound in the neighboring hills. The rabbits,rats, and squirrels, if undisturbed, will usuallystay upon the flat ground; and there is also anothervariety of desert life that does not wanderfar from the sand and the rocks. I mean thereptiles. They are not as a class swift inflight, nor over-clever in sense, nor cunning indevices. Nor have they sufficient strength tograpple and fight with the larger animals. It(168)would seem as though Nature had broughtthem into the desert only half made-up—a preyto every beast and bird. But no; they aregiven the most deadly weapon of defence of all—poison.Almost all of the reptiles have poisonabout them in fang or sting. We are accustomedto label them “poisonous” or “not poisonous,”as they kill or do not kill a humanbeing; but that is not the proper criterion bywhich to judge. The bite of the trap-doorspider will not seriously affect a man, but itwill kill a lizard in a few minutes. In proportionto his size the common red ant of thedesert is more poisonous than the rattlesnake.It is reiterated with much positiveness that aswarm of these ants have been known to killmen. There is, however, only one reptile on thedesert that humanity need greatly fear on accountof his poison and that is the rattlesnake.There are several varieties called in local parlance“side-winders,” “ground rattlers,” andthe like; but the ordinary spotted, brown, oryellow rattlesnake is the type. He is not apleasant creature, but then he is not often metwith. In travelling many hundreds of miles onthe desert I never encountered more than half adozen.

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The rattle is indescribable, but a person willknow it the first time he hears it. It is somethingbetween a buzz and a burr, and cancause a cold perspiration in a minute fractionof time. The snake is very slow in gettingready to strike, in fact sluggish; but once thehead shoots out, it does so with the swiftness ofan arrow. Nothing except the road-runner candodge it. The poison is deadly if the fang hasentered a vein or a fleshy portion of the bodywhere the flow of blood to the heart is free. Ifstruck on the hand or foot, the man may recover,because the circulation there is slow andthe heart has time to repel the attack. Everyanimal on the desert knows just how venomousis that poison. Even your dog knows it by instinct.He may shake and kill garter-snakes,but he will not touch the rattlesnake.

All of the spider family are poisonous andyou can find almost every one of them on thedesert. The most sharp-witted of the family isthe trap-door spider—the name coming fromthe door which he hinges and fastens over theentrance of his hole in the ground. The tarantulais simply an overgrown spider, very heavyin weight, and inclined to be slow and stupidin action. He is a ferocious-looking wretch(170)and has a ferocious bite. It makes an uglywound and is deadly enough to small animals.The scorpion has the reputation of being veryvenomous; but his sting on the hand amountsto little more than that of an ordinary wasp.Nor is the long-bodied, many-legged, rathergraceful centipede so great a poison-carrier ashas been alleged. They are all of them poisonous,but in varying degrees. Doubtless the(to us) harmless horned toads and the swiftshave for their enemies some venom in store.

The lizards are many in variety, and theircolors are often very beautiful in grays, yellows,reds, blues, and indigoes. The Gila monsterbelongs to their family, though he is muchlarger. The look of him is very forbidding andhe has an ugly way of hissing at you; but justhow venomous he is I do not know. Verylikely there is some poison about him, thoughthis has been denied. It would seem that everythingthat cannot stand or run or hide mustbe defended somehow. Even the poor littleskunk when he comes to live on the desert developspoisoned teeth and his bite produceswhat is called hydrophobia. The truth aboutthe hydrophobia skunk is, I imagine, that he isan eater of carrion; and when he bites a person(171)he is likely to produce blood-poisoning,which is miscalled hydrophobia.

Taking them for all in all, they seem like aprecious pack of cutthroats, these beasts andreptiles of the desert. Perhaps there never wasa life so nurtured in violence, so tutored in attackand defence as this. The warfare is continuousfrom the birth to the death. Everythingmust fight, fly, feint, or use poison; andevery slayer eventually becomes a victim. Whata murderous brood for Nature to bring forth!And what a place she has chosen in which tobreed them! Not only the struggle amongthemselves, but the struggle with the land,the elements—the eternal fighting with heat,drouth, and famine. What else but fiercenessand savagery could come out of such conditions?

But, after all, is there not something in thesheer brute courage that endures, worthy of ouradmiration? These animals have made the bestout of the worst, and their struggle has giventhem a physical character which is, shall wenot say, beautiful? Perhaps you shudder at thethought of a panther dragging down a deer—oneenormous paw over the deer’s muzzle, oneon his neck, and the strain of all the back muscles(172)coming into play. But was not that thepurpose for which the panther was designed?As a living machine how wonderfully he works!Look at the same subject done in bronze byBarye and you will see what a revelation ofcharacter the great statuary thought it. Look,too, at Barye’s wolf and fox, look at the lions ofGéricault, and the tigers and serpents of Delacroix;and with all the jaw and poison of themhow beautiful they are!

You will say they are made beautiful throughthe art of the artists, and that is partly true;but we are seeing only what the artists saw.And how did they come to choose such subjects?Why, simply because they recognizedthat for art there is no such thing as nobility orvulgarity of subject. Everything may be fit ifit possesses character. The beautiful is thecharacteristic—the large, full-bodied, well-expressedtruth of character. At least that is onevery positive phase of beauty.

Even the classic idea of beauty, which regardsonly the graceful in form or movementor the sensuous in color, finds types amongthese desert inhabitants. The dullest personin the arts could not but see fine form and proportionin the panther, graceful movement in(173)the antelope, and charm of color in all thepretty rock squirrels. For myself, being somewhatprejudiced in favor of this drear wasteand its savage progeny, I may confess to havingwatched the flowing movements of snakes,their coil and rattle and strike, many times andwith great pleasure; to having stretched myselffor hours upon granite bowlders while followingthe play of indigo lizards in the sand;to having traced with surprise the slightlychanging skin of the horned toad produced bythe reflection of different colors held near him.I may also confess that common as is the jack-rabbithe never bursts away in speed before mewithout being followed by my wonder at hisgraceful mystery of motion; that the crawl ofa wild-cat upon game is something that arrestsand fascinates by its masterful skill; and thateven that desert tramp, the coyote, is entitledto admiration for the graceful way he can slipthrough patches of cactus. The fault is not inthe subject. It is not vulgar or ugly. Thetrouble is that we perhaps have not the properangle of vision. If we understood all, weshould admire all.

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CHAPTER X
WINGED LIFE

The desert’s secrets of life and growth anddeath are not to be read at a glance. The firstday’s walk is usually a disappointment. Yousee little more than a desolate waste. Thelight of the blue sky, the subtle color of the air,the roll of the valleys, the heave of the mountainsdo not reveal themselves at once. Thevegetation you think looks like a thin coveringof dry sticks. And as for the animals, the birds—theliving things on the desert—they are notapparent at all.

But the casual stroll does not bring you tothe end of the desert’s resources. You mayperhaps walk for a whole day and see not a beastor a bird of any description. Yet they are here.Even in the lava-beds where not even cactuswill grow, and where to all appearance there isno life whatever, you may see tracks in the sandwhere quail and road-runners and linnets havebeen running about in search of food. There(175)are tracks, too, of the coyote and the wild-cat—tracksfollowing tracks. The animals and thebirds belong to the desert or the neighboringmountains; but they are not always on view.You meet with them only in the early morningand evening when they are moving about. Inthe middle of the day they are in the shadow ofbush or rock or lying in some cut bank or cave—keepingout of the direct rays of the sun.The birds are not very numerous even whenthey come forth. They prefer places that affordbetter cover. And yet as you make a memorandumof each new bird you see you are surprisedafter a time to find how many are thevarieties.

And the surprise grows when you think ofthe dangers and hardships that continually harassbird-life here in the desert. It may befancied perhaps that the bird is exempt fromdanger because he has wings to carry him outof the reach of the animals; but we forget thathe has enemies of his own kind in the air. Andif he avoids the hawks by day, how shall heavoid the owls by night? Where at night shallhe go for protection? There are no broad-leavedtrees to offer a refuge—in fact few treesof any sort. The bushes are not so high that(176)a coyote cannot reach to their top at a jump;nor are the spines and ledges of rock in themountains so steep that a wild-cat cannot climbup them.

No; the bird is subject to the same dangersas the animals and the plants. Something isforever on his trail. He must always be onguard. And the food problem, ever of vitalinterest to bird-life, bothers him just as muchas it does the coyote. There is little for himto eat and nothing for him to drink; and hardlya resting-place for the sole of his foot. Besides,it would seem as though he should be affectedby the intense heat more than he is inreality. Humanity at times has difficulty inwithstanding this heat, for though it is notsuffocating, it parches the mouth and dries upthe blood so rapidly that if water is not attainablethe effect is soon apparent. The animals—thatis, the wild ones—are never fazed by it;but the domestic horse, dog, and cow yield toit almost as readily as a man. And men andanimals are all of low-blood temperature—aman’s normal temperature being about 98 F.But what of the bird in his coat of featherswhich may add to or detract from his warmth?What is his normal temperature? It varies(177)with the species, so far as I can ascertain by experiment,from 112 to 120 F. Consider thatblood temperature in connection with a surroundingair varying from 100 to 125 F.! Itwould seem impossible for any life to supportit. One may well wonder what strange wingsbeat this glowing air, what bird-life lives in thisfiery waste!

Yet the desert-birds look not very differentfrom their cousins of the woods and streamsexcept that they are thinner, more subdued incolor, somewhat more alert. They are verypretty, very innocent-looking birds. But wemay be sure that living here in the desert, enduringits hardships and participating in its incessantstruggle for life and for the species, theyhave just the same savage instincts as the plantsand the animals. The sprightliness and thecolor may suggest harmlessness; but the eye,the beak, the claw are designed for destruction.The road-runner is one of the mildest-lookingand most graceful birds of the desert, but thespring of the wild-cat to crush down a rabbit isnot more fierce than the snap of the bird’s beakas he tosses a luckless lizard. He is the onlything on the desert that has the temerity tofight a rattlesnake. It is said that he kills the(178)snake, but as to that I am not able to give evidence.

And it is not alone the bird of prey—notalone the road-runners, the eagles, the vultures,the hawks, and the owls that are savageof mood. Every little wisp of energy thatcarries a bunch of feathers is endowed with thesame spirit. The downward swoop of the cactuswren upon a butterfly and the snip of hislittle scissors bill, the dash after insects of thefly-catchers, vireos, swallows, bats, and whip-poor-willsare just as murderous in kind as theblow of the condor and the vice-like clutch ofhis talons as they sink into the back of a rabbit.Skill and strength in the chase are absolutelynecessary in a desert where food is soscarce, and in proportion the little birds havethese qualities in common with the great.

And naturally, as in the case of the animals,the skill and the strength develop along the lineof the bird’s needs, producing that quality ofcharacter, that fitness for the work cut out forhim, to which we have so often referred. Thereare birds that belong almost solely to the kingdomof the air—birds like the condor, thevulture, and the eagle. Upon the ground theymove awkwardly, not having better feet to(179)walk with than ducks and geese. The talonsare too much developed for walking. Whenthey rise from the ground they do it heavilyand with quick flapping wings. Not untilthey are fairly started in the upper air dothey show what wonderful wing-power theypossess.

The common brown-black vulture or turkeybuzzard is the type of all the wheelers and sailers.The “soaring eagle” of poetry is somethingof a goose beside him. For the wings ofthe vulture bear him through wind, sun, andheat, hour after hour, without a pause. Tosee him circling as he hunts down a mountainrange a hundred miles or more, one mightthink that the abnormal breast-muscles nevergrew weary. He goes over every foot of theground with his eyes and at the same timewatches every other vulture in the sky. Letone of his fellows stop circling and drop earthwardon a long incline, and immediately he isfollowed by all the black crew. They knowinstantly that something has been discovered.But often the hunt is in vain, and then forwhole days at a time those motionless wingsbear their burden apparently without fatigue.With no food perhaps for a fortnight and(180)never any water, that spare rack of musclessails the air with as little effort as floatingthistle-down. No one knows just how it isdone. In blow or calm, against the wind orwith it, high in the blue or low over theground, any place, anywhere, and under anycirc*mstances those wings cut through the airalmost like sunlight. You can hear a whizzlike the flight of arrows as the bird passesclose over your head; but you cannot see theslightest motion in the feathers.

The hot, thin air of the desert would seem aless favorable air for sailing than the moisteratmosphere of the south; but the vulture ofthe tropics is not the equal of the desert-bird.He is heavier, lazier, and more stupid—possiblybecause better fed. There are several varietiesin the family, the chief variants being theone with white tipped wings and the one witha white eagle-like head. Neither of them is asgood on the wing as the black species, thoughnone of them is to be despised. Even the ordinarycarrion crow of the desert is an expertsailer compared with any of the crow family tobe found elsewhere. The exigencies of the situationseem to require wings developed for long-distanceflights; and the vultures, the crows,(181)the eagles, the hawks, all respond after theirindividual fashions.

The condor is perhaps the vulture’s peerin the matter of sailing. He belongs to thevulture family, though very much larger thanany of its members, sometimes measuringfifteen feet across the wings and weighing fortypounds. He is the largest bird on the continent.At the present time he is occasionallyseen wheeling high in air like a mere insect inthe great blue dome. It is said that he soarsas high as twenty-five thousand feet above theearth. But to-day he sails alone and his tribehas grown less year by year. With the eagleshe keeps well up in the high sierras and buildsa nest on the inaccessible peaks or along thesteep escarpments. He belongs to the desertonly because it is one of his hunting-grounds.

This may be said of the eagles and the hawks.They hunt the desert by day, but go home tothe mountains at night. The owls are somewhatdifferent, not being given to long flight.The deep caves or wind-worn recesses undermountain ledges furnish them abiding-places.These caves also send forth at dusk a full complementof bats that seem not different fromthe ordinary Eastern bats. The burrowing(182)owl is perhaps misnamed, though not misplaced.There is no evidence whatever, that I have everseen or heard, to show that he burrows. Whathappens is that he crawls into some hole that isalready burrowed instead of a cave or recess inthe rocks. A prairie-dog or badger hole is hispreference. That the place has inhabitants,including the tarantula and (it is said) the rattlesnake,does not bother the owl. He walksin with his mate and speedily makes himself athome. How the different families get on togethercan be imagined by one person as well asby another. They do not seem to pay any attentionto each other so far as I have observed.Ordinarily the desert animals, birds, and reptilesagree to no such truce. They are at warfrom the start. I do not know that the owls,the bats, the night-hawks have any specialequipment for carrying on their part of thewar. Sometimes I have fancied they had largereyes than is usual with their kinds outside ofthe desert; but I have no proof of this. Perhapsit is like the speculation as to whether thebuzzard sees or scents the carrion that he discoversso readily—hardly amenable to proof.

All of the air-birds are strikingly developedin the wings and equally undeveloped in the(183)feet, while all the ground-birds of the desertare just the reverse of this—that is, deficient inwings but strong of foot and leg. The road-runner,or as he is sometimes called the chaparralco*ck,is a notable instance of this. He isa lizard-eater, and in order to eat he must firstcatch his lizard. Now this is by no means aneasy task. The ordinary gray, brown, or yellowlizard is the swiftest dodger and darterthere is in the sand, and even in straight-linerunning he will travel too fast for an ordinarydog to catch him. His facility, too, in dashingup, over, and under bowlders is not to be underestimated.The road-runner’s task then is notan easy one, and yet he seems to accomplish iteasily. There is no great effort about his pursuitand yet he generally manages to catch thelizard. It is because his legs are specially constructedfor running, and his head, neck, andbeak for darting. His wings are of little use.When chased by a dog he will finally take tothem, but only for about fifty yards. Then hedrops to the ground and starts on foot again.He will run away from a man, and sometimeseven a horse cannot keep up with him. Oddlyenough, he seems always to run a little sideways.The long tail (used as a rudder) is carried(184)a little to the right or the left and givesthis impression. When frightened, his top-knotis raised like that of the pheasant, and he oftenruns with his beak open. It is a most viciousbeak for all that it looks not more blood-thirstythan that of the crow. It snaps through ascorpion or a centipede like a pair of sheep-shearers.And with all his energy and strengththe road-runner weighs only about a pound.He is a long-geared bird, but not actually anylarger than a pigeon.

The blue valley-quail—whether of Arizona orCalifornia breeding—is quite as strong of leg asthe road-runner, though not perhaps so swift.He does not care much about using his wings;and at best they are not better than the ratherpoor average of quails’ wings. By that I meanthat all quails rise from cover with a great roarand bustle, and they fly very fast for a shortdistance; but they are soon down upon theground, running and hiding. The flight of thequail, too, is straight ahead. It is not possiblefor him to rise up over five hundred feet ofcanyon wall, for instance, and even on an ordinarymountain side he takes several flights beforehe reaches the summit. The wings arenot muscled like the legs, and that is because(185)the quail is a ground-bird. He gets his foodthere and spends most of his time there. Inthe East Bob White always roosts upon theground, but the desert-quail is usually tooclever to trust himself in such an exposed place.He will travel miles to get into a cotton-woodtree at dusk, and if there is water near at handso much the better. He dearly loves the waterand the tree, but if he cannot get them he acceptsthe situation philosophically and goes tosleep on a high ledge of rock with water perhapsin his thought but not in his crop.

Thanks to his capacity for travelling, thequail usually manages to get enough of smallseeds and insects to keep himself alive. He isa great roamer—in the course of a day travellingover many miles of country—and his questis always food. He likes to be among the greatbowlders that lie along the bases of the mountains;and when disturbed he flies and jumpsfrom rock to rock, much to the discouragementof the coyote that happens to be the disturber.When forced to rise he flies perhaps for a hundredyards or more and then drops and beginsrunning. In the spring he mates, raises abrood, and teaches the young ones the gentleart of running. In the fall he and his family(186)of a dozen or sixteen join with other familiesto make a great covey of several hundred, or inthe old days before the market-hunters came,several thousand. And they all run. Thebottom of the quail’s foot is always itching forthe ground; and he seems never so happy aswhen leaving the enemy far behind him. Hislittle legs take him through the brush so fastthat you cannot keep up with him. Everymuscle in him is as tough as a watch-spring.You may wound him, but you have not yet gothim. He will creep into some cactus patch orcrawl down a snake-hole—elude you in someway—and in the end die game just out of yourreach.

There are few trees upon the desert and fewbushes of any size; yet there are birds of thetree and the bush here just as there are birdsof the air and the ground. The most of themseem the same kind of linnets, sparrows, andthrushes that are seen along the Californiacoast; though probably they have some peculiardesert characteristic. I cannot see any differencebetween the little woodpeckers here andthe woodpeckers elsewhere; yet this desert varietyflies from sahuaro to sahuaro, alights onthe spiny trunk with a little thump, and immediately(187)begins hitching himself up throughthe worst imaginable rows of needles just asthough he were climbing a plain pine-tree.The ordinary turtle-dove with his red pigeon-feetalights on the top of the same sahuaro,the wren bores holes in it and makes a nestwithin the cylinder; and the dwarf thrushdashes in and out of tangled thickets of chollaall day long, and yet none of them suffers anyinjury. It seems incredible that birds not accustomedto the desert could do such things.

Possibly, too, these bush-birds—insect-devourersmost of them—have some special facultyfor catching their prey, though I have not beenable to discover it. The fly-catchers, the mocking-birds,the finches, in a land of plenty arequick enough in breaking the back of a butterflyor beetle, and any extra energy would seemsuperfluous. Still there is no telling what fineextra stimulus lies in an empty crop. Andcrops are usually empty on the desert. Eventhe little humming-bird has difficulty in pickinga living. In blossom time he is, of course,in fine condition, but I have seen him dashingabout in the fall when nothing at all was inbloom, and evidently none the worse for somestarvation. He is a swifter flyer than the ordinary(188)bird and is also duller in coloring, butin other respects he seems not different. Hebreeds on the desert, building his nest in thepitahaya; and he and his mate then have astanding quarrel with their neighbors for therest of the summer. There is not in the wholefeathered tribe a more quarrelsome scrap ofvivacity than the humming-bird.

The dwarf dove common to Sonora, theoven-bird, the red grosbeak, and many otherof the smaller birds known to civilization, arefound on the desert; but apparently with nospecial faculty for overcoming its hardships.This is due perhaps to the fact that they arenot always there—are not exclusively desert-birds.Nor do any of the migratory birds belongto the desert, though they stop here forweeks at a time in their flights north or south.At almost any season of the year one sees thecow-blackbird and the smaller crow-blackbird.The mocking-bird comes only in the springand fall, and the lark in early summer. Thelark looks precisely like the Eastern bird, buthis note is changed; whereas the flicker haschanged the color under his wings from yellowto pink, but not his note. The robin isno whit different from the front-lawn robin of(189)our childhood; and the bobolink rising fromsalt-bush and yucca, singing as he rises, is thebobolink of ancient days. At times there aretroops of magpies that come and go across thewaste, and at other times troops of blue-jays.And high in air through the warmth of springand the cold of autumn there are great flocksof ducks, geese, brant, divers, shags, willet,curlew, swinging along silently to the southernor northern waterways. They seldom pause,even when following the Colorado River, unlessin need of water. On the mesas and uplandsone sometimes sees a group of sand-hill craneswalking about and indulging in a crazy dancepeculiarly their own, but the sight is no longera common one.

And again the prey—what of the prey? HasNature left the beetles, the bugs, the worms,the bees, completely at the pleasure of the bird’sbeak? No; not completely, though it mustbe acknowledged that she has not providedmuch defensive armor for them individually.She incases her beautiful blue and yellowbeetles in hard shells that other insects cannotbreak through, but they are flimsy defencesagainst the mocking-bird. To bugs and wormsand bees she gives perhaps a sting, deadly(190)enough when thrust into a spider, but uselessagain when used in defence against a cactus-thrush.And this is where Nature shows herabsolute indifference to the life or the death ofthe individual. She allows the bugs and beetlesto be slaughtered like the mackerel in the sea.But she is a little more careful about preservingthe species. And how does she do this withoutpreserving the individual? Why, simply byincreasing the number of individuals, by breed,by fertility, by multiplicity. Thousands areannually slaughtered; yes, but thousands areannually bred. What matter about their livesor deaths provided they do not increase or decreaseas a species!

The insects on the desert are mere flashes oflife—pin-points of energy—but not without purposeand not without beauty. The beasts andthe birds may be bleached brown or gray by thesun; but the insects are many of them as gayas those of the tropics. The ordinary beetlesthat a chance turn of a stone reveals are likescarabs of gold, turquoise, azurite, bronze,platinum, hurrying and scurrying out of theway. The tarantula-wasp, with his gorgeousorange-colored body and his blue wings, is like abauble made of precious stones flickering along(191)the ground. The great dragon-fly with hismany lensed eyes, the bees with black and yellowbodies, the butterflies with bright-huedwings, the white and gray millers—all of themdwellers in the sands—are spots of light andcolor that illumine the desert as the rich jewelthe Ethiop’s ear. The wings of gauze thatbear the ordinary fly upon the air, the feet ofebony that carry the plain black beetle along therocks, are made with just as much care and skillas the wings of the condor and the foot of theroad-runner. Nature in every product of herhand shows the completeness of her workmanship.She made the wings and the legs for apurpose and they fulfil that purpose. Theyare without flaw and above reproach. Oncemore, therefore, have they character and fitness,and once more, therefore, are they beautiful.

I need not now argue beauty in the birds,the beetles, and the butterflies. You will admitit without argument. The slate-blue of thequail, the gay red of the grosbeak, the charmof the rock-wren, the vivacity of the bobolink orthe scale-runner, captivate you and compel yoursympathy and admiration. Yes; but everyoneof them is, after his kind, as much of a butcher,just as much of a destroyer, as the wild-cat or(192)the yellow rattlesnake. And they have no morecharacter and perhaps less fitness for the desertlife than the sneaking coyote or the flattenedlizard which you do not admire. But why arenot the coyote and the lizard beautiful too?Why not the beauty of the horned toad and theserpent? Are we never to love or to admiresave where form and color tickle the eye? Arethese forever to monopolize the name of beautyand gather to themselves the world’s applause?

If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas,which, taken en masse, are called education, weshould know that there is nothing ugly underthe sun, save that which comes from humandistortion. Nature’s work is all of it good, allof it purposeful, all of it wonderful, all of itbeautiful. We like or dislike certain thingswhich may be a way of expressing our prejudiceor our limitation; but the work is always perfectof its kind irrespective of human appreciation.We may prefer the sunlight to the starlight,the evening primrose to the bisnaga, theantelope to the mountain-lion, the mocking-birdto the lizard; but to say that one is good andthe other bad, that one is beautiful and the otherugly, is to accuse Nature herself of preference—somethingwhich she never knew. She designs(193)for the cactus of the desert as skilfully and asfaithfully as for the lily of the garden. Eachin its way is suited to its place, and each in itsway has its unique beauty of character. Andso, more truly perhaps than Shakespeare himselfknew, the toad called ugly and venomous,still holds a precious jewel in its head.

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CHAPTER XI
MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

The word mesa (table), by local usage inMexico and in the western United States, isapplied to any flat tract of ground that liesabove an arroyo or valley, as well as to the flattop of a mountain. In a broad, if somewhatstrained use of the word, it also means thegreat table-lands and elevated plains lying betweena river-valley and the mountain confineson either side of it. The mesas are the stepsor benches that lead upward from the riverto the mountain, though the resemblance tobenches is not always apparent because of thecuttings and washings of intermittent streams,and the breakings and crossings of mountain-spurs.

As you rise up from the Colorado Desert,crossing the river to the east, you meet with agreat plain or so-called mesa that extends faracross Southern Arizona and Sonora almost upto the Continental Divide. It is broken by(195)short ranges of barren mountains, that havethe general trend of the main Sierra Madre,and it looks so much like the country to thewest of the river that it is usually recognizedas a part of the desert, or at the least “desertcountry.”

It is, however, somewhat different from theBottom of the Bowl or even the valleys of theMojave. The elevation, for one thing, gives itanother character. The rise from bench tobench is very gradual, and to the ordinary observerhardly perceptible; but nevertheless whenthe foot-hills of the Santa Rita Mountains arereached, the altitude is four thousand feet ormore. There is a difference in light, sky,color, air; even some change in the surface ofthe earth. The fine sands of the lower desertand the sea-bed silts are missing; the mesas lieclose up to the mountains and receive the firstcoarse wash from the sides; the barrancas onthe mountain-sides are choked with greatmasses of fallen rock, with bowlders of granite,with blocks of blackened lava. The arroyosthat carry the wash from the mountains—mereditches and trenches cut through the mesas—arefilled with rounded stones, coarse sands,glittering scales of mica, bits of quartz, breaks(196)of agate and carnelian. The mesas themselvesare made up of sand and gravel, sometimeslong shelvings of horizontal rocks, sometimespatches of terra-cotta, rifts of copper shale,or beds of parti-colored clay.

There is more rain in this upland countryand consequently more vegetation than downbelow. Grease wood grows everywhere and isthe principal green thing in sight. So predominantis it that the term “grease woodplains” is not inappropriate to the whole region.Groves of sahuaro stand in the valleysand reach up and over the mountain-tops,chollas and nopals are on the flats; the mesquitegrows in miniature forests. But besidesthese there are bushes and trees not seen in thebasin. Palo fierro, palo blanco, cottonwoodlive along the dry river-beds, white and blacksage on the mesas, white and black oaks in thefoot-hills. Then, too, there are patches of paleyellow sun-dried grass covering many acres,great beds of evening primrose, and fields coveredwith the purple salt-bush. It is quite anothercountry when you come to examine itpiece by piece.

As you rise higher and higher to the ContinentalDivide the whole face of the mesa undergoes(197)a further change. It slips imperceptiblyinto a grass plain, stretching flat as far as theeye can see, covered with whitened grass, andmarked by clumps of yuccas slowly growinginto yucca palms. No rocks, trees, cacti, orgrease wood; no primrose, wild gourd, or verbena.Nothing but yucca palms, bleachedgrass, blue sky, and lilac mountains. It is stillin kind a desert country, and it is still called amesa or table-land; but its character is changedinto something like the great flat lands of Nebraskaor the broken plateau country of Montana.

In the spring, when the snows have meltedand the rains have fallen, these plains turngreen with young grass and are spattered withgreat patches of wild-flowers; but the drouthand heat of early summer soon fade the grassesto a bright yellow, and in the fall the yellowbleaches to a dead white. There is little wildlife left upon these plains. The bush-birdsneed more cover than is to be found here, whilethe ground-birds need more open roadway.In the spring, when the prairie pools are filledwith water, there are geese and cranes in abundance;but they soon pass on north. Thesegreat grass tracts were once the home of countless(198)bands of antelope, for it is just such anopen country as the antelope loves; but theyhave passed on, too. In their place roamherds of cattle, and the gray wolf, the coyote,and the buzzard follow the herds.

The grease wood and the grass plains of Arizonaand New Mexico are typical of all the flatcountries lying up from the deserts; and yetthere are many tracts of small acreage in thissame region that show distinctly different features.Sometimes there are small beds of flatalkali dust, sometimes beds of soda and gypsum,sometimes beds of salt. Then occasionally thereis a broad plain sown broadcast far and widewith blocks of lava—the remnants of a greatlava-stream sent forth many centuries ago; andagain flat reaches strewn thick with blocks ofporphyry that have been washed down from themountains no one knows just when or how.You are always riding into the unexpected inthese barren countries, stumbling upon strangephenomena, seeing strange sights.

And yet as you ascend from the valley of theColorado moving to the northeast, the landsand the sights become even stranger. For nowyou are rising to the Great Plateau and theGrand Canyon country—the region of the butte,(199)the vast escarpment, the dome, the cliff, thegorge. It is a more mountainous land thanthat lying to the south, and it is deeper cutwith river-beds and canyons. Yet still youhave no trouble in finding even here the flatspaces peculiar to all the desert-bordering territory.There are grease wood plains as at thesouth and great bare benches that seem endlessin their sweep. There are, too, spaces coveredwith lava-blocks and beds of soda and salt.More rain falls here than at the south or west;and in certain sections the grass grows rank, theyuccas become trees, and higher up toward AshFork the hills are covered with a growth of juniper.Flowers and shrubs are more abundant,birds and animals come and go across your pathway,and there are green valleys with waterrunning upon the surface of the ground. Andyet not twenty miles from the green valley youmay enter upon the most barren plain imaginable—aplace like the Painted Desert, perhaps,where in spots not a living thing of any kind isseen, where there is nothing but dry rock in themountains and dry dust in the valley. Theseareas of utter desolation are of frequent enoughoccurrence in all the regions lying immediatelyto the north and the east of the Mojave to remind(200)you that you are still in a desert land, andthat the bench and the arid plain are really apart of the great waste itself.

Nature never designed more fascinating countryto ride over than these plains and mesaslying up and back from the desert basin. Youmay be alone without necessarily being lonesome.And everyone rides here with the feelingthat he is the first one that ever broke intothis unknown land, that he is the original discoverer;and that this new world belongs tohim by right of original exploration and conquest.Life becomes simplified from necessity.It begins all over again, starting at the primitivestage. There is a reversion to the savage. Civilization,the race, history, philosophy, art—howvery far away and how very useless, evencontemptible, they seem. What have they to dowith the air and the sunlight and the vastness ofthe plateau! Nature and her gift of buoyant lifeare overpowering. The joy of mere animal existence,the feeling that it is good to be aliveand face to face with Nature’s self, drives everythingelse into the background.

And what air one breathes on these plains—whatwonderful air! It is exhilarating to thewhole body; it brightens the senses and sweetens(201)the mind and quiets the nerves. And howclear it is! Leagues away needle and spine andmountain-ridge still come out clear cut againstthe sky. Is it the air alone that makes possiblesuch far-away visions, or has the light somewhatto do with it? What penetrating, all-pervading,wide-spread light! How silently it fallsand how like a great mirror the plain reflects itback to heaven!

Light and air—what means wherewith toconjure up illusions and deceive the senses!We think we see far away a range of low hills,but, as we ride on, buttes and lomas seem todetach and come toward us. There is no rangeahead of us; there are only scattered groups ofhills many miles apart. Far away to the lefton a little rise of ground is a wild horse watchingus, his head high in air, his nostrils sniffingfor our scent upon the breeze. How colossal heseems! Doubtless he is the last of some uplandband, the leader of the troop who through greatsize and strength was best fitted to survive.But no; he is only a common little Indianpony distorted to huge proportions by the heatedatmosphere. We are riding into the sunset.Ahead of us every notch in the hills, every littlevalley has a shaft of golden light streaming(202)through it. But turn in your saddle and lookto the east, and the hills we have left behindus are surrounded by veilings of lilac. Againthe omnipresent desert air! We see thewestern hills as through an amber glass, butlooking to the east the glass is changed to paleamethyst.

How delicately beautiful are the hills thatseem to gather in little groups along the waste!They are not sharp-edged in their ridges likethe higher mountains. Wind, rain, and sandhave done their work upon them until there ishardly a rough feature left to them. All theirlines are smooth and flow from one into another;and all the parti-colors of their rocks and soilsare blended into one tone by the light and theair. With surfaces that catch and reflect light,and little depressions that hold shadows, howvery picturesque they are! Indeed as youwatch them breaking the horizon-line you aresurprised to see how easily they compose intopictures. If you tried to put them upon canvasyour surprise would probably be greater tofind how very little you could make of them.The desert is not more paintable than the Alps.Both are too big.

These hills—they are usually called lomas—that(203)one meets with in the plateau region arenot of the same make-up as the clay buttes ofWyoming or the gravel hills of New England.They have a core of rock within them and arenothing less than washed-down foot-hills. Youwill often see a chain of them receding from therange toward the plain, and growing smaller asthey recede, until the last one is a mound onlya few feet in height. They are flattening downto the level of the plain—sinking into thesandy sea.

Usually the lomas are seen against a backgroundof dark mountains of which they areor have been at one time a constituent part.For the lomas are the outliers from the foot-hillsas the foot-hills from the mountains proper.They are the most worn because they are thelowest down in the valley—in fact the bottomsteps which receive not only their own wash butthat of all the other steps besides. The mountainspour their waters and loose stones uponthe foot-hills, the foot-hills cast them off uponthe lomas, and the lomas in turn thrust themupon the plains. But the casting off effort becomesweaker at each step as the sides of thehill become less of a declivity. When the littlehill is reached the sand-wash settles about the(204)base, and in time the whole mass rises on itssides and sinks somewhat in the centre, untila mere rise of ground is all that remains. Soperish the hills that we are accustomed to speakof as “everlasting.” It is merely another illustrationof Nature’s method in the universe.She is as careless of the individual hill or mountainas of the individual man, animal, or flower.All are beaten into dust. But the species ismore enduring, better preserved. Year by yearNature is tearing down, washing down, pullingto pieces range after range; but year by yearshe is also heaving up stupendous mountainslike the Alps, and crackling with a mightysqueeze the earth’s crust into the ridges of theRockies and the Andes.

The foot-hills are just what their name indicates—thehills that lie at the foot of the mountains.They are not usually detached from themain range like so many of the lomas, but are apart of it; and while not exactly the buttressesof the mountains, yet they remind one of thosearchitectural supports of cathedral walls. Thefoot-hills themselves are perhaps as firmly supportedas the mountains for very often theystretch down from the mountains in a longridge like a spine, and from the spine are(205)thrown out supporting ribs that trail away intothe valleys. In a granite country these foot-hillsare usually very smooth, and are made uplargely, as regards their surfaces, of the grit andgrind of the rocks. The rocks themselves areusually wind worn, rounded by rain and sand,and sometimes fantastic in shape. Often thesoft granite wears through in seams and leaveslozenge-like blocks linked together like beadsupon a string; often the whole rock-crown ofthe hill is honey-combed by the wind until itlooks as soft as a sponge. The foot-hills ofporphyry are more jagged and rough in everyway. The stone is much harder and while itsplits like granite and falls along the mountain-sidein a talus it does not readily disintegrate.The last bit of it remains a hard kernel, andthe porphyry foot-hill is usually a keen-edgedmountain in miniature.

The hills have a desert vegetation of greasewood, cactus, and sage, with occasional trees likethe palo verde and the lluvia d’oro; but theirgeneral appearance is not very different fromthe mesas. Where the altitude is high—sayfive thousand feet and over—there may be amore radical change in vegetation; for now theoak begins to appear, and if it is open country(206)the grasses and flowers show everywhere. Sometimesthe foot-hills are covered with a densechaparral made up of many low trees andbushes; but this growth is more peculiar tothe Californian hills west of the Coast Rangethan to Arizona. Many of the ranges in theCanyon country are almost as bare of vegetationas an ancient lake-bed. And sometimesaltitude seems to have little to do with thekinds of growths. Cacti and the salt-bushflourish at six thousand feet as readily as downin the Salton Basin three hundred feet belowsea-level. The most dangerous and difficultthing to set up about anything in this desertworld is the general law or common rule. Theexception—the thing that is perhaps uncommon—comesup at every turn to your undoing.

Even the mountains of Arizona that have anelevation of from five to eight thousand feetare often quite bare of timber. The sahuaro,the nopal, the palo verde may grow to theirvery peaks and still make only a scanty covering.Seen from a distance the southern exposureof the mountain looks perfectly bare;but if you travel around it to the north sidewhere the sunlight does not fall except for a(207)few hours of the day, you will find a growth ofbushes, small trees, vines, and grasses that, takentogether, form something of a thicket—thatis for a desert. And here, too, on the northernexposure you will find the abrupt walls of thepeak stained with great fields of orange andgray lichens that lend a color quality to thewhole top.

But through the bushes and grasses andlichens the wine-red of the porphyry comescropping out to tell you that the mountain is amass of rock, that it holds little or no soil onits sides, that it has not a suspicion of water;and that whatever grows upon it, does so, notby favor of circ*mstance, but through sheerdesert stubbornness. The vegetation is a thindisguise that is penetrated in a few moments.The arid character of the mountain says plainlyenough that we are not yet out of the regionof sands and burning winds and fiery sun-shafts.The whole of the Arizona country as far eastas the Continental Divide, in spite of its occasionalgreen valleys and few high mountain-rangeswith timbered tops, is a slope leadingup and out from the desert by gradual if brokensteps which we have called mesas or benches.It is a bare, dry land. Its name would imply(208)that the early Spaniards had found it that andcalled it arida zona for cause.[8]

Yet at times it is a land of heavy cloud-burstsand wash-outs. In the summer months it frequentlyrains on the mesas in torrents. Thebare surface of the country drains this water almostlike the roof of a house because there areno grasses or bushes of consequence to checkthe water and allow it to soak into the ground.The descent from the Divide to the ColoradoRiver is quite steep. The flood of waters rushesdown the steps of the mesas and over the bareground with terrific force. It quickly cutschannels in the low places down which arehurled sand, gravel, and bowlders. The cuttingof the channel during the heavy rains is somethingextraordinary, partly because the streamhas great volume and fall, and partly becausethe channel-bed is usually of soft rock and easilycut. In a few dozen years the arroyo of a mesathat carries off the water from the mountain-rangehas cut a river-bed many feet deep; in a(209)few hundred years the valley-bed changes intoa gorge with five hundred feet of sheer rock-wall;in a few thousand years perhaps the restlesswearing water of the great river has sunkits bed five thousand feet below the surface andmade the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

The Canyon country is well named, for it hasplenty of wash-outs and gorges. Almost anywhereamong the mountain-ranges you can findthem—not Grand Canyons, to be sure, but onesof size sufficient to be impressive without beingstupendous. Walls of upright rock several hundredfeet in height have enough bulk and bodyabout them to impress anyone. The mass isreally overpowering. It is but the crust ofthe earth exposed to view; but the gorge at Niagaraand the looming shaft of the Matterhornare not more. The imagination strains at suchmagnitude. And all the accessories of thegorge and canyon have a might to them thatadds to the general effect. The sheer precipices,the leaning towers, the pinnacles and shafts, therecesses and caves, the huge basins roundedout of rock by the waterfalls are all touchedby the majesty of the sublime.

And what could be more beautiful than thedeep shadow of the canyon! You may have(210)had doubts about those colored shadows whichpainters of the plein-air school talked so muchabout a few years ago. You may have thoughtthat it was all talk and no reality; but now thatyou are in the canyon, and in a shadow, lookabout you and see if there is not plenty of colorthere, too. The walls are dyed with it, thestones are stained with it—all sorts of colorsfrom strata of rock, from clays and slates, fromminerals, from lichens, from mosses. Thestones under your feet have not turned blackor brown because out of the sunlight. If youwere on the upper rim of the canyon lookingdown, the whole body of air in shadow wouldlook blue. And that strange light coming fromabove! You may have had doubts, too, aboutthe intense luminosity of the blue sky; but lookup at it along the walls of rock to where itspreads in a thin strip above the jaws of thecanyon. Did you ever see such light comingout of the blue before! See how it flashes fromthe long line of tumbling water that pitches overthe rocks! White as an avalanche, the waterslips through the air down to its basin of stone;and white, again, as the snow are the foam andfroth of the pool.

Stones and water in a gorge, wastes of rock(211)thrust upward into mountains, long vistas ofplain and mesa glaring in the sunlight—whatthings are these for a human being to fall inlove with? Doctor Johnson, who occasionallywent into the country to see his friends, butnever to see the country, who thought a mandemented who enjoyed living out of town; andwho cared for a tree only as firewood or lumber,what would he have had to say about thedesert and its confines? In his classic time,and in all the long time before him, the earthand the beauty thereof remained comparativelyunnoticed and unknown. Scott, Byron, Hugo,—notone of the old romanticists ever knewNature except as in some strained way symbolicof human happiness or misery. Even when thenaturalists of the last half of the nineteenthcentury took up the study they were impressedat first only with the large and more apparentbeauties of the world—the Alps, the Niagaras,the Grand Canyons, the panoramic views frommountain-tops. They never would have toleratedthe desert for a moment.

But the Nature-lover of the present, who hastaken so kindly to the minor beauties of theworld, has perhaps a little wider horizon thanhis predecessors. Not that his positive knowledge(212)is so much greater, but rather where helacks in knowledge he declines to condemn.He knows now that Nature did not give all herenergy to the large things and all her weaknessto the small things; he knows now that sheworks by law and labors alike for all; he knowsnow that back of everything is a purpose, andif he can discover the purpose he cannot choosebut admire the product.

That is something of an advance no doubt—agrasp at human limitations at least—but thereis no reason to think that it will lead to anylofty heights. Nature never intended that weshould fully understand. That we have stumbledupon some knowledge of her laws was moreaccident than design. We have by some strangechance groped our way to the Gate of the Garden,and there we stand, staring through theclosed bars, with the wonder of little children.Alas! we shall always grope! And shall weever cease to wonder?

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CHAPTER XII
MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS

The character of the land lying along thewestern boundaries of the deserts is very differentfrom that of the Arizona canyon country.Moving toward the Pacific you meet with nomesas of consequence, nor do you traverse manyplateaus or foot-hills. The sands extend up tothe bases of the Coast Range and then stopshort. The mountains rise abruptly from thedesert like a barrier or wall. Sometimes theylift vertically for several thousand feet, butmore often they present only a steep roughgrade. There are cracks in the wall calledpasses, through which railways lead on to thePacific; and there are high divides and saddles—dipsin the top of the wall—through which inthe old days the Indians trailed from desert tosea, and which are to-day known only to theinquisitive few.

From the saddles—and better still from thetopmost peaks—there are wonderful sights to(214)be seen. You will never know the vast reachof the deserts until you see them from a pointof rock ten thousand feet in air. Then you arestanding on the Rim of the Bowl and can seethe yellow ocean of sand within and the blueocean of water without. The ascent to thathigh point is, however, not easy, especially ifundertaken from the desert side. But nothingcould be more interesting in quick change andnew surprise than the rise from the hot wasteat the bottom to the cold white-capped peaks ofthe top. It is not often that you find mountainswith their feet thrust into tropic sandsand their heads thrust into clouds of snow.

Before you start to climb, before you reachthe foot of the mountains, you are struck bythe number of dry washes leading down fromthe sides and gradually losing themselves in thesands. As the eyes trace these arroyos up themountain-side they are seen to turn into greenstreaks and finally, near the peak, into whitestreaks. You know what that means and yetcan hardly believe that those white lines aresnow-banks packed many feet deep in the canyons;that from them run streams whichlower down become green lines because of thegrasses, bushes, and trees growing on their(215)banks; and that finally the streams, afterplunging through canyons, fall into the arroyosand are drunk up by the desert sands beforethey have left the mountain-bases. It seemsincredible that a stream should be born; run itscourse through valley, gorge, and canyon; andthen disappear forever in the sands, all withina few miles. Yet not one but many of thesemountain-streams have that brief history.

And at one time they must have been larger,or there were slips of glaciers or avalanches onthe mountains; for the arroyos are piled withgreat blocks of granite and there are rows ofbowlders on either side which might have beenrolled there by floods or pushed there by an ice-sheet.As you draw nearer, the bowlders cropout in large fields and beds. They surroundthe rock bases like a deposit rather than a talus,and over them one must pass on his way up themountain-side.

If you ascend by the bed of the arroyo it isnot long before you begin to note the presenceof underground water. It is apparent in thegreen of the vegetation. The grasses are seengrowing first in bunches and then in sods,little blue flowers are blooming beside thegrasses; alders, willows, and young sycamores(216)are growing along the banks, and live-oaks arein the stream-bed among the bowlders. As youmove up and into the mountain the bed becomesmore of a rocky floor, the earth-depositsgrow thinner, and presently little water-pocketsbegin to show themselves. At first you seethem in pot-holes and worn basins in the rock,then water begins to show in small pools undercut banks, and then perhaps there is a littleglassy slip of light over a flat rock in a narrowsection of the bed. Gradually the slip grows inlength and joins the pools, until at last yousee the stream come to life, as it were, out ofthe ground.

The banks begin to rise. As you advancethey lift higher and higher, they grow intoabrupt walls of rock; the strata of granite cropout in ragged ledges. The trees and grassesdisappear, and in their place come cold paleflowers growing out of beds of moss, or clingingin rock-niches where all around the grayand orange lichens are weaving tapestries uponthe walls. The bed of the stream seems to havesunken down, but in reality it is rising by stepsand falls ever increasing in size. The streamitself has grown much larger, swifter, morenoisy. You move slowly up and around the(217)falls, each one harder to surmount than the last,until finally you are in the canyon.

The walls are high, the air is damp, the lightis dim. The glare and heat of the desert havevanished and in their place is the shadow of thecave. You toil on far up the chasm, creepingalong ledges and rising by niches, until a greatpool, a basin hewn from the rock, is beforeyou; and the hewer is seen waving and flashingin the air a hundred feet as it falls into thepool. Around you and ahead of you is a sheerpitch of rock curved like a horseshoe. It isinsurmountable; there is no thoroughfare.You will not gain the peak by way of the canyon.The water-ousel on the basin edge—soletenant of the gorge—seems to laugh at yourignorance of that fact. Let us turn back and trythe ridges.

Up the faces of the spurs and thus by thebackbones and saddles to the summit is noteasy travelling. At first desert vegetation surroundsyou, for the cacti and all their companionscreep up the mountain-side as far as possible.The desert does not give up its dominioneasily. Bowlders are everywhere, vines andgrasses are growing under their shade; and, asyou advance, the bushes arise and gradually(218)thicken into brush, and the brush runs into achaparral. The manzanita, the lavender, andwhite lilac, the buckthorn, the laurel, the sumac,all throw out stiff dry arms that tear atyour clothing. The mountain-covering thatfrom below looked an ankle-deep of grasses andweeds—a velvety carpet only—turns out to bea dense tangle of brush a dozen feet high. Itis not an attractive place because the only successfulmethod of locomotion through it is onthe hands and knees. That method of movingis peculiar to the bear, and so for that matteris the chaparral through which you are tearingyour way. It is one of the hiding-places of thegrizzly. And there are plenty of grizzlies stillleft in the Sierra Madre. To avoid the chaparral(and also the bear) you would better keepon the sunny side of the spurs where theground is more open.

You are at the top of one of the outlying spursat last and you find there a dim trail made bydeer and wolves leading along the ridge, acrossthe saddle, and up to the next spur. As youfollow this you presently emerge from the brushand come face to face with a declivity, coveredby broken blocks of stone that seem to havebeen slipping down the mountain-side for centuries.(219)It is an old talus of one of the spurs.You wind about it diagonally until differentground is reached, and then you are once moreupon a ridge—higher by a spur than before.

Again the scene changes. An open park-likecountry appears covered with tall grass,the sunlight flickers on the shiny leaves of live-oaks,and dotted here and there are tall yuccasin bloom—the last of the desert growths tovanish from the scene. Flowers strange to thedesert are growing in the grass—clumps of yellowviolets, little fields of pink alfileria, purplelilies, purple nightshades, red paint-brushes,and flaming fire-rods. And there are birds in thetrees that know the desert only as they fly—bluebirds with red breasts as in New England, blue-jayswith their chatter as in Minnesota, blue-backedwoodpeckers with their tapping on deadlimbs as in Pennsylvania. And here was oncethe stamping-ground of the mule-deer. Herein the old days under the shade of the live-oakhe would drowse away the heat of the day andat night perhaps step down to the desert. Hewas safe then in the open country, but to-dayhe knows danger and skulks in the depths ofthe chaparral, from which a hound can scarcelydrive him.

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Onward and upward through the oaks untilyou are on the top of another ridge. Did youthink it was the top because it hid the peak?Ah no; the granite crags are still far aboveyou. And there, yawning at your very feet, isanother canyon whose existence you neversuspected. How steep and broad and ragged thewalls look to you! And down in the bottomof the canyon—almost a mile down it seems—arehuge masses of rock, fallen towers andledges, great frost-heaved strata lying piled inconfusion among trees and vines and heavybrush. Here and there down the canyon’slength appear disconnected flashes of silverylight showing where a stream is dashing itsway under rocks and through tangled brushdown to the sandy sea. And far above you tothe right where the canyon heads is a streak ofdirty-looking snow. There is nothing for itbut to get around the head of the canyon abovethe snow-streak, for crossing the canyon itselfis unprofitable, not to say impossible.

How odd it seems after the sands to see thesnow. The long wedge lying in the barrancaunder the shadowed lee of an enormous spur isnot very inviting looking. It has melted downand accumulated dust and dirt until it looks almost(221)like a bed of clay. But the little streamrunning away from its lowest part is pure; andit dashes through the canyon, tumbles into littlepools, and slips over shelving precipices like athing of life. Could the canyon have been cutout of the solid rock by that little stream? Whoknows! Besides, the stream is not always sosmall. The descent is steep, and bowlders carrieddown by great floods cut faster than water.

It is dangerous travelling—this crossing ofsnow-banks in June. You never know howsoft they may be nor how deep they may dropyou. Better head the snow-bank no matter howmuch hard brush and harder stones there maybe to fight against. The pines are above youand they are beginning to appear near you. Besideyou is a solitary shaft of dead timber, itsbranches wrenched from it long ago and itstrunk left standing against the winds. And onthe ground about you there are fallen trunks,crumbled almost to dust, and near them youngpines springing up to take the place of the fallen.Manzanita and buckthorn and lilac are here,too; but the chaparral is not so dense as lowerdown. You pass through it easily and press onupward, still upward, in the cool mountain-air,until you are above the barranca of snow and under(222)the lee of a vast escarpment. The wall isperpendicular and you have to circle it lookingfor an exit higher up. For half an hour youmove across a talus of granite blocks, and thenthrough a break in the wall you clamber up tothe top of the escarpment. You are on a highspur which leads up a pine-clad slope. You arecoming nearer your quest.

The pines!—at last the pines! How giganticthey seem, those trees standing so calm andmajestic in their mantles of dark green—howgigantic to eyes grown used to the little paloverde or the scrubby grease wood! All classesof pines are here—sugar pines, bull pines, whitepines, yellow pines—not in dense numbersstanding close together as in the woods of Oregon,but scattered here and there with openaisles through which the sunshine falls in broadbars. Many small bushes—berry bushes mostof them—are under the pines; and with themare grasses growing in tufts, flowers growing inbeds, and bear-clover growing in fields. Aimlessand apparently endless little streams wandereverywhere, and ferns and mosses go with them.Bowlder streams they are, for the rounded bowlderis still in evidence—in the stream, on thebank, and under the roots of the pine.

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The beautiful mountain-quail loves to scrambleover these stones, especially when they arein the water; and the mountain-quail is here.This is his abiding-place, and you are sure tosee him, for he has a curiosity akin to that ofthe antelope and must get on a bowlder or a logto look at you. And this is the home of hundredsof woodpeckers that seem to spend theirentire lives in pounding holes in the pine-treesand then pounding acorns into the holes. Itis a very thrifty practice and provides againstwinter consumption, only the squirrels consumethe greater part of the acorns if the blue-jaysdo not get ahead of them. For here lives theordinary blue-jay and also his mountain cousin,the crested jay, with a coat so blue that it mightbetter be called indigo. A beautiful bird, butwith a jangling note that rasps the air with discord.His chief occupation seems to be climbingpine-trees as by the rungs of a ladder.There are sweeter notes from the warblers, thenuthatches, and the chickadees. But no desert-birdcomes up so high; and as for the commonlawn and field birds like the robin and thethrush, they do not fancy the pines.

Upward, still upward, under the spreadingarms of the pines! How silent the forest save(224)for the soughing of the wind through the pineneedles and the jangle of the jays! And howthin and clear the mountain-air! How white thesunlight falling upon the moss-covered rocks! Itmust be that we have risen out of the dust-ladenatmosphere of the desert. And out ofits heat too. The air feels as though blown tous from snow-banks, and indeed, they are in thegullies lying on either side of us. For now weare coming close to the peak. The bushes havebeen dwindling away for some time past, andthe pines have been growing thinner in body,fewer in number, smaller in size. A dwarf pinebegins to show itself—a scraggly tempest-fightingtree, designed by Nature to grow among thebowlders of the higher peaks and to be the firstto stop the slides of snow. The hardy grassesfight beside it, and with them is the little snow-bird,fighting for life too.

Upward, still upward, until great spaces beginto show through the trees and the groundflattens and becomes a floor of rock. In thebarrancas on the north side the snow still lies inbanks, but on the south side, where the sun fallsall day, the ground is bare. You are now abovethe timber line. Nothing shows but wreckedand shattered strata of rock with patches of(225)stunted grass. The top is only barren stone.The uppermost peak, which you have perhapsseen from the desert a hundred miles away lookinglike a sharp spine of granite shot up in theair, turns out to be something more of a domethan a spine—a rounded knob of gray granitewhich you have no difficulty in ascending.

At last you are on the peak and your firstimpulse is to look down. But no. Look up!You have read and heard many times of the“deep blue sky.” It is a stock phrase in narrativeand romance; but I venture to doubt ifyou have ever seen one. It is seen only fromhigh points—from just such a place as you arenow standing upon. Therefore look up first ofall and see a blue sky that is turning into violet.Were you ten thousand feet higher in the airyou would see it darkened to a purple-violetwith the stars even at midday shining throughit. How beautiful it is in color and how wonderfulit is in its vast reach! The dome insteadof contracting as you rise into it, seems toexpand. There are no limits to its uttermostedge, no horizon lines to say where it begins.It is not now a cup or cover for the world, butsomething that reaches to infinity—somethingin which the world floats.

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And do you notice that the sun is no longeryellow but white, and that the light that comesfrom it is cold with just the faintest shade ofviolet about it? The air, too, is changed.Look at the far-away ridges and peaks, some ofthem snow-capped, but the majority of thembare; and see the air how blue and purple itlooks along the tops and about the slopes. Peakupon peak and chain upon chain disappear tothe north and south in a mysterious veil of gray,blue, and purple. Green pine-clad spurs of thepeaks, green slopes of the peaks themselves,keep fading away in blue-green mazes andhazes. Look down into the canyons, into theshadowed depths where the air lies packed in amass, and the top of the mass seems to reflectpurple again. This is a very different air fromthe glowing mockery that dances in the basinof Death Valley. It is mountain-air and yethas something of the sea in it. Even at thisheight you can feel the sea-breezes moving alongthe western slopes. For the ocean is near athand—not a hundred miles away as the crowflies. From the mountain-top it looks like aflat blue band appended to the lower edge ofthe sky, and it counts in the landscape only asa strip of color or light.

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Between the ocean and the mountain you arestanding upon lies the habitable portion ofSouthern California, spread out like a reliefmap with its broken ranges, its chaparral-coveredfoot-hills, and its wide valleys. How fairit looks lying under the westering sun withthe shadows drawing in the canyons, and thevalleys glowing with the yellow light fromfields of ripened barley! And what a contrastto the yellow of the grain are the darkgreen orchards of oranges and lemons scatteredat regular intervals like the squares ofa checker-board! And what pretty spots oflight and color on the map are the orchardsof prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, the patchesof velvety alfalfa, the groves of eucalyptus andMonterey cypress, the long waving green linesof cottonwoods and willows that show whererun the mountain-streams to the sea!

Yet large as they are, these are only spots.The cultivated portion of the land is but aflower-garden beside the unbroken foot-hillsand the untenanted valleys. As you look downupon them the terra-cotta of the graniteshows through the chaparral of the hills; andthe sands of the valleys have the glitter of thedesert. You know intuitively that all this(228)country was planned by Nature to be desert.Down to the water-edge of the Pacific she oncecarried the light, air, and life of the Mojaveand the Colorado.

But man has in measure changed the desertconditions by storing the waste waters of themountains and reclaiming the valleys by irrigation.His success has been phenomenal. Outof the wilderness there have sprung farms,houses, towns, cities with their wealth and luxury.But the cultivated conditions are maintainedonly at the price of eternal vigilance.Nature is compelled to reap where she has notsown; and at times she seems almost human inthe way she rebels and recurs to former conditions.Two, three; yes, at times, four yearsin succession she gives little rain. A greatdrouth follows. Then the desert breaks inupon the valley ranches, upon the fields of barley,the orchards of prunes and peaches andapricots. Then abandoned farms are quite asplentiful as in New England; and once abandoned,but a few years elapse before the deserthas them for its own. Nature is always drivenwith difficulty. Out on the Mojave she fightsbarrenness at every turn; here in SouthernCalifornia she fights fertility. She is determined(229)to maintain just so much of desert withjust so much of its hardy, stubborn life. Whenshe is pleased to enhance it or abate it she willdo so; but in her own good time and way.

Come to the eastern side of the peak andlook out once more upon the desert while yetthere is time. The afternoon sun is drivingits rays through the passes like the sharp-cutshafts of search-lights, and the shadows of themountains are lengthening in distorted silhouetteupon the sands below. Yet still the SanBernardino Range, leading off southeast to theColorado River, is glittering with sunlight atevery peak. You are above it and can see overits crests in any direction. The vast sweep ofthe Mojave lies to the north; the Coloradowith its old sea-bed lies to the south. Faraway to the east you can see the faint forms ofthe Arizona mountains melting and minglingwith the sky; and in between lie the long pinkrifts of the desert valleys and the lilac traceryof the desert ranges.

What a wilderness of fateful buffetings!All the elemental forces seem to have turnedagainst it at different times. It has been sweptby seas, shattered by earthquakes and volcanoes,beaten by winds and sands, and scorched(230)by suns. Yet in spite of all it has endured. Itremains a factor in Nature’s plan. It maintainsits types and out of its desolation it bringsforth increase that the species may not perishfrom the face of the earth.

And yet in the fulness of time Nature designsthat this waste and all of earth with itshall perish. Individual, type, and species, allshall pass away; and the globe itself become asdesert sand blown hither and yon throughspace. She cares nothing for the individualman or bird or beast; can it be thought thatshe cares any more for the individual world?She continues the earth-life by the death of theold and the birth of the new; can it be thoughtthat she deals differently with the planetaryand stellar life of the universe? Whence comethe new worlds and their satellites unless fromthe dust of dead worlds compounded with theenergy of nebulæ? Our outlook is limited indeed,but have we not proof in our own moonthat worlds do die? Is it possible that itsbleached body will never be disintegrated, willnever dissolve and be resolved again into somenew life? And how came it to die? Whatwas the element that failed—fire, water, or atmosphere?Perhaps it was water. Perhaps it(231)died through thousands of years with the slowevaporation of moisture and the slow growth ofthe—desert.

Is then this great expanse of sand and rockthe beginning of the end? Is that the way ourglobe shall perish? Who can say? Natureplans the life, she plans the death; it must bethat she plans aright. For death may be theculmination of all character; and life but theprocess of its development. If so, then not invain these wastes of sand. The harsh destiny,the life-long struggle which they have imposedupon all the plants and birds and animals havebeen but as the stepping-stones of character. Itis true that Nature taxed her invention to theutmost that each might not wage unequal strife.She gave cunning, artifice, persistence, strength;she wished that each should endure and fulfilto its appointed time. But it is not the armorthat develops the wearer thereof. It is thestruggle itself—the hard friction of the fight.Not in the spots of earth where plenty breedsindolence do we meet with the perfected type.It is in the land of adversity, and out of muchpain and travail that finally emerges the highestmanifestation.

Not in vain these wastes of sand. And this(232)time not because they develop character in desertlife, but simply because they are beautifulin themselves and good to look upon whetherthey be life or death. In sublimity—the superlativedegree of beauty—what land can equalthe desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains,and its expanding canopy of sky! Youshall never see elsewhere as here the dome, thepinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fireat sunrise and sunset; you shall never see elsewhereas here the sunset valleys swimming in apink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateausfading into blue distance, the gorges and canyonsbanked full of purple shadow. Neveragain shall you see such light and air and color;never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, suchfiery twilight. And wherever you go, by landor by sea, you shall not forget that which yousaw not but rather felt—the desolation and thesilence of the desert.

Look out from the mountain’s edge oncemore. A dusk is gathering on the desert’s face,and over the eastern horizon the purple shadowof the world is reaching up to the sky. Thelight is fading out. Plain and mesa are blurringinto unknown distances, and mountain-rangesare looming dimly into unknown heights. Warm(233)drifts of lilac-blue are drawn like mists acrossthe valleys; the yellow sands have shifted intoa pallid gray. The glory of the wilderness hasgone down with the sun. Mystery—that hauntingsense of the unknown—is all that remains.It is time that we should say good-night—perhapsa long good-night—to the desert.

Transcriber’s Notes

Sidenotes have been moved to the beginning of the corresponding paragraph.

Footnotes have been moved to the end of the chapter.

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been correctedafter careful comparison with other occurrences within the text andconsultation of external sources. Except for those changes noted below,all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, havebeen retained.

The following corrections have been applied to the text: