Prof. John C. Van Dyke

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Books by Professor J. C. Van Dyke

ART FOR ART'S SAKE.

University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of
Painting. With 24 Illustrations. 12mo. $1.50.

NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE.

First Studies in Natural Appearances. With Por-
trait. 12nno. $1.50.

TEXT BOOK OF THE HISTORY OF PAINTING.
With 110 Illustrations. 12mo. $1.50.

OLD DUTCH AND FLEMISH MASTERS.

With Tinnothy Cole's Wood -engravings. Super-
royal 8vo. $7.50.

MODERN FRENCH MASTERS.

Written by American Artists and edited by Pro-
fessor Van Dyke. With 66 full-page Illustrations.
Super-royal 8vo. $10.00.

THE DESERT

THE DESERT

FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL
APPEARANCES

JOHN OVVAN DYKE^ i^r^a^^^^

AUTHOR OF "NATURE FOR ITS OWN 8AKB,"
"ART FOR art's SAKB," ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1901

Copyright, 1901, bt
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1901.

TROW DIRECTORY

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY

NEW YORK

^cioft Library

PREFACE-DEDICATION

Co
A. M. C.

After the making of Eden came a serpent,
and after the gorgeous furnishing of the world,
a human being. Why the existence of the de-
stroyers ? What monstrous folly, think you,
ever led Nature to create her one great enemy
— man ! Before his coming security may have
been ; but how soon she learned the meaning of
fear when this new (Edipus of her brood was
brought forth ! And how instinctively she
taught the fear of him to the rest of her chil-
dren ! To-day, after centuries of association,
every bird and beast and creeping thing — the
wolf in the forest, the antelope on the plain,
the wild fowl in the sedge — fly from his ap-
proach. They know his civilization means their
destruction. Even the grizzly, secure in the
chaparral of his mountain home, flinches as he
crosses the white man^s trail. The boot mark

VIU PREFACE-DEDICATION

in the dust smells of blood and iron. The
great annihilator has come and fear travels
with him.

" Familiar facts/^ you will say. Yes ; and not
unfamiliar the knowledge that with the coming
of civilization the grasses and the wild flowers
perish, the forest falls and its place is taken
by brambles, the mountains are blasted in the
search for minerals, the plains are broken by
the plow and the soil is gradually washed into
the rivers. Last of all, when the forests have
gone the rains cease falling, the streams dry up,
the ground parches and yields no life, and the
artificial desert — the desert made by the tramp
of human feet — begins to show itself. Yes ;
everyone must have cast a backward glance and
seen Nature^s beauties beaten to ashes under
the successive marches of civilization. The
older portions of the earth show their desolation
plainly enough, and the ascending smoke and
dust of the ruin have even tainted the air and
dimmed the sunlight.

Indeed, I am not speaking figuratively or
extravagantly. We have often heard of " Sunny
Italy'' or the ^^ clear light'' of Egypt, but be-
lieve me there is no sunlight there compared
with that which falls upon the upper peaks of

PREFACE-DEDICATION IX

the Sierra Madre or the uninhabitable wastes of
the Colorado Desert. Pure sunlight requires for
its existence pure air, and the Old World has
little of it left. When you are in Eome again
and stand upon that hill where all good roman-
ticists go at sunset, look out and notice how
dense is the atmosphere between you and St.
Peter^s dome. That same thick air is all over
Europe, all around the Mediterranean, even
over in Mesopotamia and by the banks of the
Ganges. It has been breathed and burned and
battle-smoked for ten thousand years. Eide up
and over the high table-lands of Montana — one
can still ride there for days without seeing a
trace of humanity — and how clear and scentless,
how absolutely intangible that sky-blown sun-
shot atmosphere ! You breathe it without feel-
ing it, you see through it a hundred miles and
the picture is not blurred by it.

It is just so with Nature^s color. True
enough, there is much rich color at Venice, at
Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not
be denied ; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical
color, caused by the disintegration of matter —
the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from
the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after
a poor fashion — Nature subordinated to the will

PEEFACE-DEDICATION

of man. Once more ride over the enchanted
mesas of Arizona at sunrise or at sunset, with
the ragged mountains of Mexico to the south of
you and the broken spurs of the great sierra
round about you ; and all the glory of the old
shall be as nothing to the gold and purple and
burning crimson of this new world.

You will not be surprised then if, in speaking
of desert, mesa and mountain I once more take
you far beyond the wire fence of civilization to
those places (unhappily few now) where the
trail is unbroken and the mountain peak un-
blazed. I was never over-fond of park and
garden nature-study. If we would know the
great truths we must seek them at the source.
The sandy wastes, the arid lands, the porphyry
mountain peaks may be thought profitless
places for pilgrimages ; but how often have you
and I, and that one we both loved so much,
found beauty in neglected marshes, in wintry
forests, and in barren hill-sides ! The love of
Nature is after all an acquired taste. One be-
gins by admiring the Hudson-Kiver landscape
and ends by loving the desolation of Sahara.
Just why or how the change would be difficult
to explain. You cannot always dissect a taste
or a passion. Nor can you pin Nature to a

PREFACE-DEDICATION XI

board and chart her beauties with square and
compasses. One can give his impression and
but little more. Perhaps I can tell you some-
thing of what I have seen in these two years of
wandering; but I shall never be able to tell
you the grandeur of these mountains, nor the
glory of color that wraps the burning sands at
their feet. We shoot arrows at the sun in vain ;
yet still we shoot.

And so it is that my book is only an excuse
for talking about the beautiful things in this
desert world that stretches down the Pacific
Coast, and across Arizona and Sonora. The
desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise
these many years. It never had a sacred poet ;
it has in me only a lover. But I trust that you,
and the nature-loving public you represent, will
accept this record of the Colorado and the
Mojave as at least truthful. Given the facts
perhaps the poet with his fancies will come

hereafter.

John C. Van Dyke.

La Nokia Verde
February, 1901.

CONTENTS

Chapter I. The Approach. — Desert mountain ranges
— Early morning approach — Air illusions — Sand forms —
The winds — Sun-shafts — Sunlight — Desert life — Ante-
lope— The Lost Mountains — The ascent — Deer trails —
Footprints — The stone path — Defensive walls — The sum-
mit— The fortified camp — Nature's reclamations — The
mountain dwellers — Invading hosts — Water and food
supplies — The aborigines — Historic periods — The open
desert — Perception of beauty — Sense of beauty — Moun-
tain "view" of the desert — Desert colors — The land of
fire — Drouth and heat — Sand and gypsum — Sand- whirls —
Desert storms — Drift of sands — Winter cold in the basin
— Snow on desert — Sea and sand—Grim desolation — Love
for the desert — The descent — The Padres in the desert —
The light of the cross — Aboriginal faith 1

Chapter II. The Make of the Desert. — The sea of
sand — Mountain ranges on desert— Plains, valleys, and
mesas — Effect of drouth — The rains — Harshness of des-
ert— A gaunt land — Conditions of life — Incessant strife
— Elemental warfare — Desert vegetation — Protruding
edges — Shifting sands — Desert winds— Radiation of heat
— Prevailing winds — Wear of the winds — Erosion of
mountains — Rock-cutting — Fantastic forms — Wash-outs
— Sand- lines in caves — Cloud-bursts — Canyon waters —
Desert floods — Power of water — Water-pockets — No
ziii

XIV CONTENTS

surface-streams — Oases in the waste — Catch-basins —
Old sea-beds — Volcanic action — Lava-flows — Geological
ages — Kinds of rock — Glaciers — Land slips — Movement
of stones—The talus — Stages of the talus— Desert floors
— Sandstone blocks — Salt-beds — Sand-beds — Mountain
vegetation — Withered grasses — Barren rock— Mountain
colors — Saw-toothed ridges — Seen from the peaks — The
Sun-fire kingdom 23

Chapter IIL The Bottom of the BowL—'EBxly geo-
logical days — The former Gulf — Sea-beaches on desert —
Harbors and reefs — Indian remains — The Cocopas— The
Colorado Kiver— The delta dam— The inland lake— The
first fall— Springs and wells in the sea-bed — The New
River — New beaches — The second fall — The third beach
— The failing water — Evaporation— Bottom of the Bowl
— Drying out of the sea-bed— Advance of the desert— Be-
low sea-level — Desolation of the basin — Beauty of the
sand-dunes — Cactus and salt-bush — Desert animals —
Birds — Lizards and snakes — Mirage — The water illusion
— Decorative landscapes — Sensuous qualities in Nature
— Changing the desert— Irrigation in the basin — Changing
the climate — Dry air — Value of the air supply — ^Value of
the desert — Destruction of natural beauty — Effects of
mining, lumbering, agriculture — Ploughing the prairies —
'^Practical men*' — Fighting wind, sand, and heat — Na-
ture eternal — Return of desolation 44

Chapter IV. The Silent River, — Rise of the Colora-
do— In the canyon— On the desert — The lower river —
Sluggish movement — Stillness of the river — The river's
name — Its red color — Compared with the Nile — The
blood hue — River changes — Red sands and silt — River-
banks — ''Bottom" lands — Green bordering bands —
Bushes and flowers— Soundless water — ^Wild fowl — Her-

CONTENTS XV

ons and bitterns— Snipe — Sadness of bird-life — The for-
saken shores — Solitude — Beauty of the river — Its maj-
esty— The delta — Disintegration — The river in flood —
The "bore" — Meeting of river and sea — The blue tomb
—Shores of Gulf 63

Chapter V. Lights Air^ and Color, — Popular ideas
—Sunlight on desert — Glare and heat — Pure sunlight —
Atmospheric envelope — Vapor particles in air — Clear air
— Dust particles — Hazes — Seeing the desert air — Sea-
breezes on desert — Colored air — Different hues — Pro-
ducing color — Refracted rays — Cold colors, how produced
— Warm colors — Sky colors — Color produced by dust —
Effect of heat — Effect of winds — Sand-storms — Reflec-
tions upon sky — Blue, yellow, and pink hazes — The dust-
veil — Summer coloring— Local hues — Greens of desert
plants — Color of the sands — Sands in mirage — Color of
mountain walls — Weather staining — Influence of the air
— Peak of Baboquivari — Buttes and spires — Sun-shafts
through canyons — Complementary hues in shadow — Col-
ored shadows — Blue shadows upon salt-beds — How light
makes color — Desert sunsets 77

Chapter VI. Desert Sky and Clouds, — Common-
place things of Nature — The blue sky — Changes in the
blue — Dawns on the desert — Blue as a color — Sky from
mountain heights — Blackness of space — Bright sky-col-
ors— Horizon skies — Spectrum colors — Bands of yellow
— The orange sky — Desert-clouds— Rainfall — Effect of
the nimbus — Cumuli — Heap-clouda at sunset — Strati —
Cirri— Ice- clouds— Fire-clouds — The celestial tapestry —
The desert moon — Rings and rainbows — Moonlight —
Stars — The midnight sky — Alone in the desert — The mys-
teries—Space and immensity — The silences — The cry of
the human 95

XVI CONTENTS

Chapter VII. Illusions. — Reality and appearance —
Preconceived impressions — Deception by sunlight — Dis-
torted forms and colors — Changed appearance of moun-
tains— Changes in line and light — False perspective —
Abnormal foreshortening — Contradictions and denials —
Deceptive distances — Dangers of the desert — Immensity
of valley-plains — Shadow illusions — Color-patches on
mountains- -Illusions of lava-beds — Appearance of cloud-
shadows — Mirage — Need of explanation — Refraction of
light-rays — Dense air-strata — Illustration of camera-lens
— Bent light-rays — Ships at sea and upside down —
Wherein the illusion — '^ Looming " of vessels, cities, and
islands — Reversed image of mountains — Horses and cattle
in mirage — Illusion of rising buttes — Other causes of
mirage — Water-mirage — The lake appearance — How pro-
duced— Objects in water — Confused mirage — The swim-
ming wolf — Colors and shadows m mirage — Trembling
air — Beauty of mirage 109

Chapter VIII. Cactus and Grease Wood. — Views of
Nature — Growth and decay — Nature's plan— The law of
change — ^Nature foiling her own plans — Attack and
drouth — Preservation of species — Means of preservation
— Maintaining the status quo — The plant-struggle for life
— Fighting heat and drouth — Prevention of evaporation —
Absence of large leaves — Exhaust of moisture — Gums
and varnishes of bushes — The ocatilla — Tap roots — Un-
derground structure — Feeding the top growth — Storage
reservoirs below ground-^Reservoirs above ground —
Thickened barks — Gathering moisture — Attacks upon des-
ert plants — Browsing animals — Weapons of defence —
The spine and thorn— The crucifixion thorn— The sting
of flowers — Fierceness of the plant— Odors and juices —
Saps astringent and cathartic— Expenditure of energy —
The desert covering — Use of desert plants — Their beauty

CONTENTS XVU

— Beauty in character — Forms of the yucca and maguey —
The Uuvia d'oro — Grotesque forms — Abnormal colors —
Blossoms and flowers — Many varieties — Wild flowers —
Salt-bush — The grasses and lichens — The continuous
struggle 128

Chapter IX. Desert Animals, — Meeting desert re-
quirements— Peculiar desert character — Desert Indians
— Life without water — Endurance of the jack-rabbit
— Prairie dogs and water — Water famine — Coyotes
and wild-cats living without water— Lean, gaunt life —
Fierceness of animals — Attack and escape — The wild-
cat— Spring of the cat — Mountain lion — His habits —
The gray wolf — Home of the wolf — The coyote — His
cleverness— His subsistence — His background — The fox
— The prey — Devices for escape — Senses of the rabbit —
Speed of the jack-rabbit — His endurance — The '* cotton-
tail " — Squirrels and gophers— Desert antelope — His eyes,
nose, and ears — His swiftness — The mule-deer — Deer
in flight — White-tailed deer — The reptiles — Defence of
poison— The fang and sting — The rattlesnake and his
poison — Spiders and tarantulas— Centipedes and scor-
pions— Lizards and swifts — The hydrophobia skunk — The
cutthroat band — The eternal struggle — Brute courage
and character — Beauty in character— Graceful forms of
animals — Colors of lizards — Mystery of motion 150

Chapter X. Winged Life,—Mv%t day's walk— Tracks
in the sand— Scarcity of birds — Dangers of bird-life — No
cover for protection — Food problem — Heat and drouth
again — A bird's temperature — Innocent-looking birds —
The road-runner- Wrens and fly-catchers — Develop-
ment of special characteristics — Birds of the air — The
vulture— His hunting and sailing — The southern buzzard
—The crow— The great condor— Eagles and hawks— Bats

XVm CONTENTS

and owls — The burrowing owl — Ground-birds — The road-
runner's swiftness — The vicious beak — The desert-quail
— Wings of the quail— Travelling for water — Habits of
the quail— His strong legs — Bush-birds — Woodpeckers
and cactus — Finches and mocking-birds — Humming-birds
— Doves and grosbeaks — The lark and flickers — Jays and
magpies — Water fowl — Beetles and worms — Fighting de-
struction by breed — Blue and green beetles — Butterflies —
Design and character — Beauty of birds— Beauty also of
reptiles— Nature's work all purposeful — Precious jewel
of the toad 174

Chapter XL Mesas and Foot- Hills Flat steps of

the desert — Across Southern Arizona — Rising from the
desert — The great mesas — ''Grease wood plains" — Up-
land vegetation — Grass plains — Spring and summer on the
plains — Home of the antelope — Beds of soda and gypsum
— Riding into the unexpected — The Grand Canyon
country — Hills covered with juniper — The Painted Desert
— Riding on the mesas — The reversion to savagery — The
thin air again — The light and its deceptions — Distorted
proportions — Changed colors — The little hills— Painting
the desert— Worn - down mountains — Mountain wash —
Flattening down the plain — Mountain making — The foot-
hills— Forms of the foot-hills — Mountain plants — Bare
mountains — The southern exposures — Gray lichens — Still
in the desert — Arida Zona — Cloud-bursts in the mesas —
Wash of rains — Gorge cutting — In the canyons — ^Walls
of rock— Color in canyon shadows — Blue sky — Desert
landscape — Knowledge of Nature — Nature-lovers —
Human limitations 194

Chapter XII. Mountain Barriers, — The western
mountains — Saddles and passes — View from mountain
top — Looking toward the peaks — Lost streams — Ava-

CONTENTS XIX

lanches and bowlder-beds — Ascent by the arroyo — Growth
of the stream— Kising banks— Waterfalls — Gorges— As-
cent by the ridges — The chaparral — Home of the grizzly
— Ridge trails — Among the live-oaks — Birds and deer —
Yawning canyons — Canyon streams — Snow — Water wear
— The pines — Barrancas and escarpments — Under the
pines — Bushes, ferns, and mosses — Mountain quail — In-
digo jays — Warblers — The mountain air — ^^The dwarf
pines — The summit — The look upward at the sky — The
dark-blue dome — White light — Distant views — The Pa-
cific— Southern California — The garden in the desert —
Reclaiming the valleys— Nature's fight against fertility —
The desert from the mountain top — The great extent of
desert— The fateful wilderness— All shall perish— The
death of worlds — The desert the beginning of the end
— Development through adversity — Sublimity of the
waste — Desolation and silence — Good-night to the
desert 213

THE DESERT

CHAPTEE I

THE APPROACH

It is the last considerable group of mountains
between the divide and the low basin of the
Colorado desert. For days I have been watch-
ing them change color at sunset — watching the
canyons shift into great slashes of blue and
purple shadow, and the ridges flame with edg-
ings of glittering fire. They are lonesome look-
ing mountains lying oif there by themselves on
the plain, so still, so barren, so blazing hot
under the sun. Forsaken of their kind, one
might not inappropriately call them the ^^ Lost
Mountains '^ — the surviving remnant no doubt
of some noble range that long centuries ago
was beaten by wind and rain into desert sand.
And yet before one gets to them they may prove
quite formidable heights, with precipitous sides
and unsurmountable tops. Who knows ? Not
those with whom I am stopping, for they have
1

Desert
moimtcnns.

THE DESERT

Unknown
ranges.

Early
morning on
the desert.

Air illu-
tions.

not been there. They do not even know the
name of them. The Papagoes leave them alone
because there is no game in them. Evidently
they are considered unimportant hills, no-
body^s hills, no man^s range ; but nevertheless
I am off for them in the morning at daylight.

I ride away through the thin mesquite and
the little adobe ranch house is soon lost to view.
The morning is still and perfectly clear. The
stars have gone out, the moon is looking pale,
the deep blue is warming, the sky is lightening
with the coming day. How cool and crystalline
the air ! In a few hours the great plain will be
almost like a fiery furnace under the rays of
the summer sun, but now it is chilly. And in
a few hours there will be rings and bands and
scarves of heat set wavering across the waste
upon the opalescent wings of the mirage ; but
now the air is so clear that one can see the
breaks in the rocky face of the mountain
range, though it is fully twenty miles away.
It may be further. Who of the desert has not
spent his day riding at a mountain and never
even reaching its base ? This is a land of illu-
sions and thin air. The vision is so cleared at
times that the truth itself is deceptive. But I
shall ride on for several hours. If, by twelve

THE APPEOACH

3

o^clock, the foot hills are not reached, I shall
turn back.

The summer heat has withered everything
except the mesquite, the palo verde,* the
grease wood, and the various cacti. Under foot
there is a little dry grass, but more often
patches of bare gravel and sand rolled in shal-
low beds that course toward the large valleys.
In the draws and flat places the fine sand lies
thicker, is tossed in wave forms by the wind,
and banked high against clumps of cholla or
prickly pear. In the wash-outs and over the
cut banks of the arroyos it is sometimes heaped
in mounds and crests like driven snow. It
blows here along the boundary line between
Arizona and Sonora almost every day ; and the
tailing of the sands behind the bushes shows
that the prevailing winds are from the Gulf
region. A cool wind ? Yes, but only by com-
parison with the north wind. When you feel
it on your face you may think it the breath of
some distant volcano.

How pale -blue the Lost Mountains look
under the growing light. I am watching their
edges develop into broken barriers of rock, and

* The use of Spanish names is compulsory. There are
no English equivalents.

Sand
forms in
the valleys.

Winds of
the desert

THE BESEET

Sun shafts.

The beauty
of sunlight.

even as I watch the tallest tower of all is struck
with a bright fawn color. It is the high point
to catch the first shaft of the sun. Quickly the
light spreads downward until the whole ridge is
tinged by it, and the abrupt sides of porphyry
begin to glow under it. It is not long before
great shafts of light alternating with shadow
stretch down the plain ahead of me. The sun
is streaming through the tops of the eastern
mountains and the sharp pointed pinnacles are
cutting shadows in the broad beam of light.

That beam of light ! Was there ever any-
thing so beautiful ! How it flashes its color
through shadow, how it gilds the tops of the
mountains and gleams white on the dunes of
the desert ! In any land what is there more
glorious than sunlight ! Even here in the
desert, where it falls fierce and hot as a rain of
meteors, it is the one supreme beauty to which
all things pay allegiance. The beast and the
bird are not too fond of its heat and as soon as
the sun is high in the heavens they seek cover
in the canyons ; but for all that the chief glory
of the desert is its broad blaze of omnipresent
light.

Yes, there is animal and bird life here though
it is not always apparent unless you look for it.

THE APPROACH

Wrens and linnets are building nests in the
cholla, and finches are singing from the top of
the sahnaro.* There are plenty of reptiles,
rabbits and ground squirrels quietly slipping
out of your way ; and now that the sun is up
you can see a long sun-burned slant-of-hair
trotting up yonder divide and casting an appre-
hensive head from side to side as he moves off.
It is not often that the old gray wolf shows
himself to the traveller. He is usually up in
the mountains before sunrise. And seldom
now does one see the desert antelope along the
mesas, and yet off to the south you can see
patches of white that come and go almost like
flashing mirrors in the sun. They are stragglers
from some band that have drifted up from cen-
tral Sonora. No; they are not far away. A
little mirage is already forming over that portion
of the mesa and makes them look more distant
than they are in reality. You can be deceived
on the desert by the nearness of things quite as
often as by their remoteness.

These desert mountains have a fashion of ap-
pearing distant until you are almost up to them.
Then they seem to give up the game of decep-
tion and come out of their hiding-places. It is
♦ Properly Saguaro.

Desert life.

Antelope.

The Lost
Mountains.

THE DESERT

Mountain
walls.

The ascent.

Deer trails.

just SO with the mountains toward which I am
riding. After several hours they seem to rise
up suddenly in front of me and I am at their
base. They are not high — perhaps fifteen
hundred feet. The side near me is precipitous
rock, weather-stained to a reddish-black. A
ride around the bases discloses an almost com-
plete perpendicular wall, slanting off half way
down the sides into sloping beds of bowlders
that have been shaken loose from the upper
strata. A huge cleft in the western side — half
barranca half canyon — seems to suggest a way
to the summit.

The walking up the mountain is not the best
in the world. It is over splintered rock, step-
ping from stone to stone, creeping along the
backbone of bowlders, and worrying over rows
of granite blocks. Presently the course seems
to slip into a diagonal — a winding up and
around the mountain — and ahead of me the
stones begin to look peculiar, almost familiar.
There seems to be a trail over the ledges and
through the broken blocks ; but what should
make a trail up that deserted mountain ?
Mule-deer travelling toward the summit to lie
down in the heat of the day ? It is possible.
The track of a band of deer soon becomes a

THE APPROACH

beaten path, and animals are just as fond of
a good path as humanity. By a strange coin-
cidence at this very moment the sharp-toed
print of a deer^s hoof appears in the ground
before me. But it looks a little odd. The im-
pression is so clear cut that I stoop to examine
it. It is with no little astonishment that I find
it sunk in stone instead of earth — petrified in
rock and overrun with silica. The bare sug-
gestion gives one pause. How many thousands
of years ago was that impression stamped upon
the stone ? By what strange chance has it
survived destruction ? And while it remains
quite perfect to-day — the vagrant hoof-mark of
a desert deer — what has become of the once
carefully guarded footprints of the Sargons,
the Pharaohs and the Caesars ? With what
contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival
of the least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his
shield !

Further up the mountain the deer-trail theory
is abandoned — at least so far as recent times are
concerned. The stones are worn too smooth,
the larger ones have been pushed aside by
something more intelligent than a mule-deer^s
hoof ; and in one place the trail seems to have
been built up on the descending side. There is

Footprints,

The stone
path.

THE DESEET

FoUovnng
the trail.

Defensive
walls.

The
summit.

not the slightest evidence, either by rub upon
the rocks, or overturned stones, or scrape in
the gravel, that any living thing has passed up
this pathway for many years ; and yet the trail
is a distinct line of lighter colored stone stretch-
ing ahead of me. It is a path worn in the
rocks, and there is no grass or vine or weed to
obliterate it. It leads on and up to the saddle
of the mountain. There is a crevasse or chasm
breaking through this saddle which might have
been bridged at one time with mesquite trunks,
but is now to be leaped if one would reach the
summit. It is narrow only in one place and
this is just where the trail happens to run.
Across it, on the upper side, there is a horse-
shoe shaped enclosure of stone. It is only
a few feet in diameter, and the upper layers of
stone have fallen ; but the little wall still stands
as high as one^s waist. Could this have been
a sentinel box used to guard the passage of the
trail at this place ?

Higher and still higher until at last the
mountain broadens into a flat top. I am so
eager to gain the height and am expecting so
much that at first I overlook what is before me.
Gradually I make out a long parapet of loose
stone on the trail side of the mountain which

THE APPROACH

9

joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. A
conclusion is instantly jumped at, for the im-
agination will not make haste slowly under such
circumstances. These are the ruins of a once
fortified camp.

I wander about the flat top of the mountain
and slowly there grows into recognizable form a
great rectangle enclosed by large stones placed
about two feet apart. There is no doubt about
the square and in one corner of it there seems
an elevated mound covered with high-piled
stones that would indicate a place for burials.
But not a trace of pottery or arrow-heads ; and
about the stones only faint signs of fire which
might have come from volcanic action as readily
as from domestic hearths. Upon the side of
one of the large rocks are some characters in
red ochre ; and on the ground near a pot-hole
in the rock, something that the imagination
might torture into a rude pestle for grinding
maize.

The traces of human activity are slight. Nat-
ure has been wearing them away and reclaim-
ing her own on the mountain top. Grease
wood is growing where once a floor was beaten
hard as iron by human feet ; out of the burial
mound rises a giant sahuaro whose branching

TheforHfied
camp.

Nature's
reclamO'
tions.

10

THE DESERT

Mountain
dwellers.

Invading
hosts.

arms give the look of the cross ; and beside
the sahuaro rests a tall yucca with four feet of
clustering bellflowers swinging from its top.

And who were they who built these stone walls,
these primitive entrenchments ? When and
where did they come from and what brought
them here ? The hands that executed this
rough work were certainly untrained. Indians ?
Very likely. Perhaps some small band that had
taken up a natural defence in the mountains
because too feeble in numbers to fight in the
open. Here from this lookout they could watch
the country for a hundred miles around. Here
the scouts could see far away the thin string of
foemen winding snake-like over the ridges of
the desert, could see them grow in size and
count their numbers, could look down upon
them at the foot of the mountain and yell back
defiance to the challenge coming up the steep
sides. Brave indeed the invaders that would
pluck the eagles from that eerie nest ! Climb-
ing a hill against a shower of arrows, spears,
and bowlders is to fight at a terrible disad-
vantage.

Starve them out ? Yes ; but the ones at the
bottom would starve as quickly as those at the
top. Cut off their water supply ? Yes ; but

THE APPKOACH

11

where did either besieged or besieger get water?
If there was ever a spring in the mountain it
long ago dried np, for there is no trace of it to-
day. Possibly the mountain-dwellers knew of
some arroyo where by digging in the sand they
could get water. And possibly they carried
it in ollas up the stone trail to their mountain
home where they stored it in the rocks against
the wrath of a siege to come. No doubt they
took thought for trouble, and being native to
the desert they could stand privation better
than their enemies.

How long ago did that aboriginal band come
trailing over these trackless deserts to find and
make a home in a barren mountain standing
in a bed of sand ? Who can tell ? A geologist
might make the remains of their fort an il-
lustration of the Stone Age and talk of un-
known centuries ; an iconoclast might claim
that it was merely a Mexican corral built to
hide stolen horses ; but a plain person of the
southwest would say that it was an old Indian
camp. The builders of the fortification and the
rectangle worked with stone because there was
no other material. The man of the Stone Age
exists to-day contemporary with civilized man.
Possibly he always did. And it may be that

Water and
food sup-
plies.

Theah<h
riginea.

12

THE DESERT

Historic
periods.

Hie open
desert.

Perception
of beauty.

some day Science will conclude that historic
periods do not invariably happen, that there is
not always a sequential evolution, and that the
white race does not necessarily require a flat-
headed mass of stupidity for an ancestor.

But what brought them to seek a dwelling
place in the desert ? Were they driven out from
the more fertile tracts ? Perhaps. Did they
find this a country where game was plentiful
and the conditions of life comparatively easy ?
It is possible. Or was it that they loved the
open country, the hot sun, the treeless wastes,
the great stretches of mesa, plain and valley ?
Ah ; that is more than likely. Mankind has
always loved the open plains. He is like an
antelope and wishes to see about him in all di-
rections. Perhaps, too, he was born with a pre-
dilection for ^^ the view,^^ but that is no easy
matter to prove. It is sometimes assumed that
humanity had naturally a sense and a feeling
for the beautiful because the primitives deco-
rated pottery and carved war-clubs and totem-
posts. Again perhaps ; but from war-clubs and
totem-posts to sunsets and mountain shadows
— the love of the beautiful in nature— is a very
long hark. The peons and Indians in Sonora
cannot see the pinks and purples in the moun-

THE APPROACH

13

tain shadows at sunset. They are astonished at
yonr question for they see nothing but moun-
tains. And you may vainly exhaust ingenuity
trying to make a Pagago see the silvery sheen
of the mesquite when the low sun is streaming
across its tops. He sees only mesquite — the
same dull mesquite through which he has
chased rabbits from infancy.

No ; it is not likely that the tribe ever chose
this abiding place for its scenery. A sensitive
feeling for sound, or form, or color, an impres-
sionable nervous organization, do not belong to
the man with the hoe, much less to the man
with the bow. It is to be feared that they are
indicative of some physical degeneration, some
decline in bone and muscle, some abnormal
development of the emotional nature. They
travel side by side with high civilization and
are the premonitory symptoms of racial decay.
But are we correct in assuming that because
the red man does not see a colored shadow
therefore he is blind to every charm and sub-
limity of nature ?

These mountain-dwellers, always looking out
from their height, must have seen and re-
marked the large features of the desert — the
great masses of form, the broad blocks of color.

Sense of
beauty.

Mountain

"'view.'''

14

THE DESERT

The desert
colors.

Looking
down to the
desert.

They knew the long undulations of the valley-
plain were covered with sharp, broken rock, but
from this height surely they must have noticed
how soft as velvet they looked, how smoothly
they rolled from one into another, how perfect-
ly they curved, how symmetrically they waved.
And the long lines of the divides, lessening to
the west — their ridges of grease wood showing
a peculiar green like the crests of sea-waves
in storm — did they not see them ? Did they
not look down on the low neighboring hills and
know that they were pink, terra-cotta, orange-
colored — all the strange hues that may be com-
pounded of clay and mineral — with here and
there a crowning mass of white quartz or a far-
extending outcrop of shale stained blue and
green with copper ? Doubtless, a wealth of
color and atmospheric effect was wasted upon
the aboriginal retina ; but did it not take note
of the deep orange sunsets, the golden fringed
heaps of cumulus, and the tongues of fire that
curled from every little cirrus cloud that lin-
gered in the western sky ?

And how often fchey must have looked out
and down to the great basin of the desert where
cloud and sky, mountain and mesa, seemed to
dissolve into a pink mist ! It was not an un-

THE APPEOACH

16

known 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 np every
morning on the wind, scorching and burning
the brown faces of the mountain-dwellers !
Fire ! — he dwelt in fire. Whence came all the
fierce glow of sunset down over that desert if it
was not the refiection 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 rivers
were still visible in the lava streams. Were
there not also great flames beneath the sands
that threw up hot water and boiled great vol-
canoes of mud ? And along the base of many
a cliff were there not jets of steam and smoke
blown out from the heart of the mountains ?

It was a land of fire. No food, no grass, no
water. There were places in the canyons where
occasionally a little stream was found forcing
itself up through the rock; but frequently it
was salt or, worse yet, poisoned with copper or
arsenic. How often the tribe had lost from its
numbers — slain by the heat and drought in
that waste ! More than once the bodies had
been found by crossing bands and always the
same tale was told. The victims were half

Th9 land of
fire.

Drought
and heat.

16

THE DESERT

Desert
mystery.

Sand and
gypsum.

Sand-
whirls.

buried in sand, not decayed, but withered like
the grass on the lomas.

Mystery — a mystery as luminous and yet as
impenetrable as its own mirage — seemed always
hanging over that low-lying waste. It was a
vast pit dug under the mountain bases. The
mountains themselves were bare crags of fire in
the sunlight, and the sands of the pit grew
only cactus and grease wood. There were tracts
where nothing at all grew — miles upon miles of
absolute waste with the pony's feet breaking
through an alkaline crust. And again, there
were dry lakes covered with silt ; and vast beds
of sand and gypsum, white as snow and fine as
dust. The pony's feet plunged in and came
out leaving no trail. The surface smoothed over
as though it were water. Fifty miles away one
could see the desert sand- whirls moving slowly
over the beds in tall columns two thousand
feet high and shining like shafts of marble in
the sunlight. How majestically they moved,
their feet upon earth, their heads towering
into the sky !

And then the desert winds that raised at
times such furious clouds of sand ! All the
air shone like gold dust and the sun turned
red as blood. Ah ! what a stifling sulphureous

THE APPEOACH

17

air I Even on the mountain tops that heavy
air could be felt, and down in the desert itself
the driving particles of sand cut the face and
hands like blizzard-snow. The ponies could
not be made to face it. They turned their
backs to the wind and hung their heads be-
tween their fore feet. And how that wind
roared and whistled through the thin grease
wood ! The scrubby growths leaned and bent
in the blast, the sand piled high on the trunks ;
and nothing but the enormous tap-roots kept
them from being wrenched from the earth.

And danger always followed the high winds.
They blew the sands in clouds that drifted full
and destroyed the trails. In a single night
they would cover up a water hole, and in a few
days fill in an arroyo where water could be got
by digging. The sands drove like breakers on
a beach, washing and wearing everything up
to the bases of the mountains. And the fine
sand reached still higher. It whirled up the
canyons and across the saddles, it eddied around
the enormous taluses, it even flung itself upon
the face walls of the mountain and left the
smoothing marks of its fingers upon the sharp
pinnacles of the peak.

It was iu wmter when the winds were fiercest.

Desert
storms.

Drift of
sand.

18

THE DESERT

Winter cold.

Snow on
desert.

Sea and
sand.

With them at times came a sharp cold, the
more biting for the thin dry air of the desert.
All the warmth seemed blown out of the basin
with a breath, and its place filled by a storm-
wind from the north that sent the condor
wheeling down the blast and made the coyote
shiver on the hill. How was it possible that
such a furnace could grow so cold ! And once
or more each winter, when the sky darkened
with clouds, there was a fall of snow that for
an hour or so whitened the desert mountains
and then passed away. At those times the
springs were frozen, the high sierras were
snow-bound, and down in the desert it seemed
as though a great frost-sheet had been let down
from above. The brown skins for all their
deer-hide clothing were red with cold, and the
breath blown from the pony^s nostrils was
white as smoke.

A waste of intense heat and cold, of drouth
and cloud-bursts, of winds and lightning, of
storm and death, what could make any race of
hunters or band of red men care for it ? What
was the attraction, wherein the fascination ?
How often have we wondered why the sailor
loves the sea, why the Bedouin loves the sand !
What is there but a strip of sky and another

THE APPROACH

19

strip of sand or water ? But there is a sim-
plicity about large masses — simplicity in
breadth, space and distance — that is inviting
and ennobling. And there is something very
restful about the horizontal line. Things that
lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peace-
ful with them. Furthermore, the waste places
of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts for-
saken of men and given over to loneliness, have
a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird
solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation,
are the very things with which every desert
wanderer eventually falls in love. You think
that very strange perhaps ? Well, the beauty
of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but to-day
people admit its truth ; and the grandeur of
the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the
desert gives it proof.

But the sun-tanned people who lived on this
mountain top never gave thought to masses,
or horizontal lines, or paradoxes. They lived
here, it may be from necessity at first, and then
stayed on because they loved the open wind-
blown country, the shining orange-hued sands,
the sweeping mesas, the great swing of the
horizontal circle, the flat desolation, the un-
broken solitude. Nor ever knew why they

Grim des-
olation.

Love for
the desert.

20

THE DESEBT

The descent.

The Padres.

loved it. They were content and that was
enough.

What finally became of them ? Who knows ?
One by one they passed away, or perhaps were
all slaughtered in a night by the fierce band
newly come to numbers called the Apaches.
This stone wall stands as their monument, but
it tells no date or tale of death. As I descend
the trail of stone the fancy keeps harping on
the countless times the bare feet must have
rubbed those blocks of syenite and porphyry
to wear them so smooth. Have there been no
others 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 the
thought is of the heroism, the self-abnega-
tion, the undying faith of those followers of
Loyola and Xavier who came into this waste so
many years ago. How idle seem all the specious
tales of Jesuitism and priestcraft. The Padres
were men of soul, unshrinking faith, and a per-
severance almost unparalleled in the annals of
history. The accomplishments of Columbus,
of Cortez, of Coronado were great ; but what
of those who first ventured out upon these sands
and erected missions almost in the heart of the
desert, who single-handed coped with dangers

THE APPEOACH

21

from man and nature, and who lived and died
without the slightest hope of reward here on
earth ? Has not the sign of the cross cast more
men in heroic mould than ever the glitter of
the crown or the flash of the sword ?

And thinking such thoughts I turn to take a
final view of the mountain ; and there on the
fortified top something rears itself against the
sky like the cross-hilt of a sword. It is the
giant sahuaro with its rising arms, and beside
it the cream- white bloom of the yucca shining
in the sunlight seems like a lamp illuminating
it. The good Padres have gone and their mis-
sion churches are crumbling back to the earth
from which they were made ; but the light of
the cross still shines along the borders of this
desert land. The flame, that through them the
Spirit kindled, still burns ; and in every Indian
village, in every Mexican adobe, you will see on
the wall the wooden or grass-woven cross. On
the high hills and at the cross-roads it stands,
roughly hewn from mesquite and planted in a
cone of stones. It is now always weather-stained
and sun-cracked, but still the sign before which
the peon and the Indian bow the head and whis-
per words of prayer. The dwellers beside the
desert have cherished what the inhabitants of

Light of
the cross.

AborigiTMl
faith.

22

THE DESERT

the fertile plains have thrown away. They and
their forefathers have never known civilization,
and never suffered from the blight of doubt.
Of a simple nature, they have lived in a simple
way, close to their mother earth, beside the
desert they loved, and (let us believe it !) nearer
to the God they worshipped.

CHAPTER II

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

The first going -down into the desert is
always something of a surprise. The fancy
has pictured one thing ; the reality shows quite
another thing. Where and how did we gain
the idea that the desert was merely a sea of
sand ? Did it come from that geography of our
youth with the illustration of the sand-storm,
the flying camel, and the over-excited Bedouin ?
Or have we been reading strange tales told by
travellers of perfervid imagination — the Marco
Polos of to-day ? There is, to be sure, some
modicum of truth even in the statement that
misleads. There are ^' seas " or lakes or ponds
of sand on every desert ; but they are not so
vast, not so oceanic, that you ever lose sight of
the land.

What land ? Why, the mountains. The

desert is traversed by many mountain ranges,

some of them long, some short, some low, and

some rising upward ten thousand feet. They

23

Sea of sand.

Mountain
ranges on
the desert.

24

I'HE DESERT

Plains, val-
leys, and
mesas.

Efect of
drought.

are always circling you with a ragged horizon,
dark-hned, bare-faced, barren — just as truly
desert as the sands which were washed down
from them. Between the ranges there are
wide-expanding plains or valleys. The most
arid portions of the desert lie in the basins of
these great valleys — flat spaces that were once
the beds of lakes, but are now dried out and
left perhaps with an alkaline deposit that pre-
vents vegetation. Through these valleys run
arroyos or dry stream- beds — shallow channels
where gravel and rocks are rolled during cloud-
bursts and where sands drift with every wind.
At times the valleys are more diversified, that is,
broken by benches of land called mesas, dotted
with small groups of hills called lomas, crossed
by long stratified faces of rock called escarp-
ments.

With these large features of landscape com-
mon to all countries, how does the desert differ
from any other land ? Only in the matter of
water — the lack of it. If Southern France
should receive no more than two inches of rain
a year for twenty years it would, at the end of
that time, look very like the Sahara, and the
flashing Khone would resemble the sluggish
yellow Nile. If the Adirondack region in New

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

26

York were comparatively rainless for the same
length of time we should have something like
the Mojave Desert, with the Hudson changed
into the red Colorado. The conformations of
the lands are not widely different, but their
surface appearances are as unlike as it is pos-
sible to imagine.

For the whole face of a land is changed by
the rains. With them come meadow-grasses
and flowers, hillside vines and bushes, fields of
yellow grain, orchards of pink-white blossoms.
Along the mountain sides they grow the forests
of blue-green pine, on the peaks they put white
caps of snow; and in the valleys they gather
their waste waters into shining rivers and flash-
ing lakes* This is the very sheen and sparkle
— the witchery — of landscape which lend allure-
ment to such countries as New England, France,
or Austria, and make them livable and lovable
lands.

But the desert has none of these charms.
Nor is it a livable place. There is not a thing
about it that is " pretty, ^^ and not a spot upon
it that is ^^ picturesque^^ in any Berkshire- Val-
ley sense. The shadows of foliage, the drift of
clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound
of running waters — all the gentler qualities of

The effect of
rains.

Harshness
of the desert.

26

THE DESERT

A gaunt
land.

Conditions
of life.

nature that minor poets love to juggle with —
are missing on the desert. It is stern, harsh,
and at first repellent. But what tongue shall
tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it,
the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sub-
limity of its lonely desolation ! And who shall
paint the splendor of its light ; and from the
rising up of the sun to the going down of the
moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its
wondrous coloring ! It is a gaunt land of
splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies.
And at every step there is the suggestion of the
fierce, the defiant, the defensive. Everything
within its borders seems fighting to maintain
itself against destroying forces. There is a war
of elements and a struggle for existence going
on here that for ferocity is unparalleled else-
where in nature.

The feeling of fierceness grows upon you as
you come to know the desert better. The sun-
shafts are falling in a burning shower upon
rock and dune, the winds blowing with the
breath of far-off fires are withering the bushes
and the grasses, the sands drifting higher and
higher are burying the trees and reaching up as
though they would overwhelm the mountains,
the cloud-bursts are rushing down the moun-

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

27

tain's side and through the torn arroyos as
though 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 and
reptile. At every turn one feels the presence of
the barb and thorn, the jaw and paw, the beak
and talon, the sting and the poison thereof.
Even the harmless Gila monster flattens his
body on a rock and hisses a ^^Don^t step on
me/' There is no living in concord or brother-
hood here. Everything is at war with its
neighbor, and the conflict is unceasing.

Yet this conflict is not so obvious on the face
of things. You hear no clash or crash or snarl.
The desert is overwhelmingly silent. There
is not a sound to be heard ; and not a thing
moves save the wind and the sands. But you
look up at the worn peaks and the jagged bar-
rancas, you look down at the wash-outs and
piled bowlders, you look about at the wind-
tossed, half-starved bushes ; and, for all the
silence, you know that there is a struggle for
life, a war for place, going on day by day.

How is it possible under such conditions for
much vegetation to flourish ? The grasses are
scanty, the grease wood and cactus grow in
patches, the mesquite crops out only along the

The inces-
sant
struggle.

Elemental
warfare.

Desert
vegetation.

THE DESERT

Protruding
edges.

Shifting
sands.

dry river-beds. All told there is hardly enough
covering to hide the anatomy of the earth.
And the winds are always blowing it aside.
You have noticed how bare and bony the hills
of New England are in winter when the trees
are leafless and the grasses are dead ? You have
seen the rocks loom up harsh and sharp, the
ledges assume angles, and the backbone and ribs
of the open field crop out of the soil ? The
desert is not unlike that all the year round.
To be sure there are snow-like drif tings of sand
that muffle certain edges. Valleys, hills, and
even mountains are turned into rounded lines
by it at times. But the drift rolled high in
one place was cut out from some other place ;
and always there are vertebrce showing — elbows
and shoulders protruding through the yellow
byssus of sand.

The shifting sands ! Slowly they move, wave
upon wave, drift upon drift ; but by day and
by night they gather, gather, gather. They
overwhelm, they bury, they destroy, and then
a spirit of restlessness seizes them and they
move off elsewhere, swirl upon swirl, line upon
line, in serpentine windings that enfold some
new growth or fill in some new valley in the
waste. So it happens that the surface of the

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

desert is far from being a permanent affair.
There is hardly enough vegetation to hold the
sands in place. With little or no restraint upon
them they are transported hither and yon at
the mercy of the winds.

Yet the desert winds hardly blow where they
list. They follow certain channels or *' draws ''
through the mountain ranges ; and the reason
for their doing so is plain enough. During the
day the intense heat of the desert, meeting with
only a thin dry air above it, rises rapidly sky-
ward leaving a vast vacuum below that must be
filled with a colder air from without. This
colder air on the southern portion of the Colo-
rado Desert comes in from the Gulf region.
One can feel it in the passes of the mountains
about Baboquivari, rushing up toward the
heated portions of Arizona around Tucson.
And the hotter the day the stronger the inward
rush of the wind. Some days it will blow at
the rate of fifty miles an hour until sunset, and
then with a cessation of radiation the wind
stops and the night is still.

On the western portions of the Colorado the
wind comes from the Pacific across Southern
California. The hot air from the desert goes
up and out over the Coast Range, reaching sea-

Desert
winds.

Radiation
of heat.

30

THE DESEET

Prevailing
winds.

Wear of
the vrinds.

ward. How far out it goes is nnknown, but
when it has cooled oif it descends and flows
back toward the land as the daily sea-breeze.
It re-enters the desert through such loop holes
in the Coast Range as the San Gorgonio Pass —
the old Puerta de San Carlos — above Indio.
The rush of it through that pass is quite vio-
lent at times. For wind is very much like
water and seeks the least obstructed way. Its
goal is usually the hottest and the lowest place
on the desert — such a place, for example, as
Salton, though I am not prepared to point out
the exact spot on the desert that the winds
choose as a target. On the Mojave Desert at
the north their action is similar, though there
they draw down from the Mount Whitney re-
gion as well as from the Pacific.

In open places these desert winds are some-
times terrific in force though usually they are
moderate and blow with steadiness from certain
directions. As you feel them softly blowing
against your cheek it is hard to imagine that they
have any sharp edge to them. Yet about you
on every side is abundant evidence of their
works. The sculptor^s sand-blast works swifter
but not surer. Granite and porphyry cannot
withstand them, and in time they even cut

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

31

throngh the glassy surface of lava. Their wear
is 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 at
the bases and along the face-walls of the great
sierras. Grain by grain, the vast foundations,
the beetling escarpments, the high domes in air
are crumbled away and drifted into the valleys.
Nature heaved up these mountains at one time
to fulfil a purpose : she is now taking them
down to fulfil another purpose. If she has
not water to work with here as elsewhere she is
not baffled of her purpose. Wind and sand an-
swer quite as well.

But the cutting of the wind is not always
even or uniform, owing to the inequalities in
the fibre of rock ; and often odd effects are pro-
duced by the softer pieces of rock wearing away
first and leaving the harder section exposed to
view. Frequently these remainders take on
fantastic shapes and are likened to things hu-
man, such as faces, heads, and hands. In the
San Gorgonio Pass the rock-cuttings are in
parallel lines, and occasionally a row of gar-
nets in the rock will make the jewel-pointed
fingers of a hand protruding from the parent

Erosion of
mountains.

Bock-
cutting.

32

THE DESERT

Fantastic
forms.

Wash-outs.

Sand-lines
in caves.

body.* Again shafts of hard granite may make
tall spires and turrets npon a mountain peak, a
vein of quartz may bulge out in a white or yel-
low or rose-colored band ; and a ridge of black
lava, reaching down the side of a foot-hill, may
creep and heave like the backbone of an enor-
mous dragon.

Perhaps the greatest erosion is in the passes
through which the winds rush into the desert.
Here they not only eat into the ledges and cut
away the rock faces, but they make great wash-
outs in the desert itself. These trenches look
in every respect as though caused by water. In
fact the effects of wind and water are often so
inextricably mixed that not even an expert geol-
ogist would be able to say where the one leaves
off and the other begins. The shallow caves of
the mountains — too high up for any wave action
from sea or lake, and too deep to be reached
by rains — have all the rounded appearance of
water-worn receptacles. One can almost see
the water-lines upon the walls. But the sand-
heaped floor suggests that the agent of erosion
was the wind.

Yes ; there is some water on the deserts, some

* Professor Blake of the University of Arizojja hi^s
palled m^ attention to tliia,

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

33

rainfall each year. Even Sahara gets its occa-
sional showers, and the Colorado and the Mo-
jave show many traces of the cloud-burst. The
dark thunder-clouds that occasionally gather
over the desert seem at times to reserve all their
stores of rain for one place. The fall is usually
short-lived but violent ; and its greatest force
is always on the mountains. There is no sod,
no moss, to check or retard the flood ; and the
result is a great rush of water to the low places.
In the canyons the swollen streams roll down
bowlders that weigh tons, and in the ravines
many a huge barranca is formed in a single
hour by these rushing waters. On the lomas
and sloping valleys they are not less destructive,
running in swift streams down the hollows, and
whirling stones, sand, and torn bushes into the
old river-beds.

In a very short time there is a great torrent
pouring down the valley — a torrent composed
of water, sand, and gravel in about equal parts.
It is a yellow, thick stream that has nothing but
disaster for the man or beast that seeks to swim
it. Many a life has been lost there. The great
onset of the water destroys anything like buoy-
ancy, and the tendency is to drag down and
roll the swimmer like a bowlder. Even the

ClOUdr

bursts.

Canyon
streams.

DeBert
floods.

34

THE DESERT

No running
streams.

enormous strength of the grizzly bear has been
known to fail him in these desert rivers. They
boil and seethe as though they were hot ; and
they rush on against banks, ripping out the
long roots of mesquite, and swirling away tons
of undermined gravel as though it were only so
much snow. At last after miles of this mill-
racing the force begins to diminish, the streams
reach the flat lake-beds and spread into broad,
thin sheets ; and soon they have totally van-
ished, leaving scarce a rack behind.

The desert rainfall comes quickly and goes
quickly. The sands drink it up, and it sinks
to the rock strata, where, following the ledges, it
is finally shelved into some gravel-bed. There,
perhaps a hundred feet under the sand, it slow-
ly oozes away to the river or the Gulf. There
is none of it^ remains upon the surface except
perhaps a pool caugKt in a clay basin, or a
catch of water in a rocky bowl of some canyon.
Occasionally one meets with a little stream
where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from
below forces up some of the water ; but these
springs are of very rare occurrence. And they
always seem a little strange. A brook that ran
on the top of the ground would be an anomaly
here ; and after one liv^s many months on the

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

35

desert and returns to a well- watered country,
the last thing he becomes accustomed to is the
sight of running water.

In every desert there are isolated places
where water stands in pools, fed by under-
ground springs, where mesquite and palms
grow, and where there is a show of coarse
grass over some acres. These are the so-called
oases in the waste that travellers have pictured
as Gardens of Paradise, and poets have used
for centuries as illustrations of happiness sur-
rounded by despair. To tell the truth they
are wretched little mud-holes ; and yet because
of their few trees and their pockets of yellow
brackish water they have an appearance of un-
reality. They are strange because bright-green
foliage and moisture of any kind seem out of
place on the desert.

Yet surely there was plenty of water here at
one time. Everywhere you meet with the dry
lake-bed — its flat surface devoid of life and of-
ten glimmering white with salt. These beds
are no doubt of recent origin geologically, and
were never more than the catch-basins of sur-
face water ; but long before ever they were
brought forth the whole area of the desert
was under the sea. To-day one may find on

Oases in the
waste.

Catch-
basins,

36

THE DESERT

the high table-lands sea-shells in abundance.
The petrified clams are precisely like the live
clams that one picks up on the western coast
of Mexico. The corals, barnacles, dried sponge
forms, and cellular rocks do not differ from
those in the Gulf of California. The change
from sea to shore, and from shore to table-land
and mountain, no doubt took place very slow-
ly. Just how many centuries ago who shall
say ? Geologists may guess and laymen may
doubt, but the Keeper of the Seals says noth-
ing.

Nor is it known just when the porphyry
mountains 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 wind
and water. The whole country has a burnt
and scorched look proceeding from something
more fiery than sunlight. Volcanoes have left
their traces everywhere. You can still see the
streams of lava that have chilled as they ran.
The blackened cones with their craters exist ;
and about them, for many miles, there are
great 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

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

37

chips and breaks of lava, showing that at one
time there must have been quantities of it
belched out of the volcanoes.

There were convulsions in those days when
the sea washed close to the bases of the moun-
tains. Through the crevasses and fissures in the
rocks the water crept into the fires of the earth,
and explosions — volcanic eruptions — were the
result. Wandering over these stony tracks you
might fancy that all strata and all geological
ages were blown into discord by those explo-
sions. For here are many kinds of splintered
and twisted rocks — rocks aqueous and igne-
ous, gritstones, conglomerates, shales, slates,
syenite, basalt. And everywhere the white
coatings of carbonate of lime that look as
though they were run hot from a puddling fur-
nace ; and the dust of sulphur, copper, and
iron blown upon granite as though oxidized by
fire.

The evidence for glaciers is not so convinc-
ing. There is no apparent sign of an ice age.
Occasionally one sees scratches upon mountain
walls that are suspicious, or heaps of sand and
gravel that look as though pushed into the
small valleys by some huge force. And again
there are places on the Mojave where windrows

Geological
ages.

Kinds of
rock.

Glaciers.

38

THE DESERT

Land slips.

Movement
of stones.

The talus.

of heavy bowlders are piled on either side of
mountain water-courses, looking as though ice
may have caused their peculiar placing. But
there is no certainty about any of these. Land
slips may have made the windrows as easily as
ice slips ; and water can heap mounds of sand
and gravel as readily as glaciers. One cannot
trace the geological ages with such facility.
Things sometimes ^^ just happen/^ in spite of
scientific theories.

Besides, the movement of the stones into the
valleys is going on continuously, irrespective of
glaciers. They are first broken from the peaks
by erosion, and then they fall into what is called
a talus — a great slope of stone blocks beginning
half way down the mountain and often reaching
to the base or foot. Many of them, of course,
are rolled over steep declivities into the canyons
and thence carried down by flood waters ; but
the talus is the more uniform method for bowl-
ders reaching the plain.

In the first stage of the talus the blocks are
ragged-edged and as large as a barrel. !N"othing
whatever grows upon the slope. It is as bare as
the side of a volcanic crater. And just as diffi-
cult to walk over. The talus is added to at the
top by the falling rock of the face-wall, and it

THE MAKE OP THE DESERT

39

is losing at the bottom by the under blocks
grinding away to stone and gravel. The flat-
tening out at the bottom, the breaking up of
the blocks, and the push-out of the mountain
foot upon the plain is the second stage of the
talus. In almost all the large valleys of the
desert the depressed talus extends, sometimes
miles in length, out from the foot of the moun-
tain range. When it finally slips down into the
valley and becomes a flat floor it has entered
upon its third and last stage. It is then the
ordinary valley-bed covered with its cactus and
cut by its arroyos. Yet this valley-floor instead
of being just one thing is really many things —
or rather made up of many different materials
and showing many different surfaces.

You may spend days and weeks studying the
make-up of these desert-floors. Beyond Yuma
on the Colorado there are thousands of acres of
mosaic pavement, made from tiny blocks of
jasper, carnelian, agate — a pavement of pebbles
so hard that a horse^s hoof will make no im-
pression upon it — wind-swept, clean, compact
as though pressed down by a roller. One can
imagine it made by the winds that have cut
and drifted away the light sands and allowed
the pebbles to settle close together until they

Stages of
the talus.

Desert-
floors.

40

THE DESERT

Sandstone
blocks.

Salt beds.

Sand-beds.

have become wedged in a solid surface. For no
known reason other portions of the desert are
covered with blocks of red-incrusted sandstone
— the incrustation being only above the sand-
line. In the lake-beds there is usually a surface
of fine silt. It is not a hard surface though it
often has a crust upon it that a wildcat can
walk upon, but a horse or a man would pound
through as easily as through crusted snow.
The salt-beds are of sporadic appearance and
hardly count as normal features of the desert.
They are often quite beautiful in appearance.
The one on the Colorado near Salton is hard as
ice, white, and after sunset it often turns blue,
yellow, or crimson, dependent upon the sky
overhead which it reflects. Borax and gypsum-
beds are even scarcer than the salt-beds. They
are also white and often very brilliant reflectors
of the sky. The sand-beds are, of course, more
frequently met with than any others ; and yet
your horse does not go knee-deep in sand for
any great distance. It is too light, and is
drifted too easily by the winds. Bowlders,
gravel, and general mountain wash is the most
common flooring of all.

The mountains whence all the wash comes,
are mere ranges of rock. In the canyons, where

THE MAKE OF THE DESERT

41

there is perhaps some nndergronnd water, there
are occasionally found trees and large bushes,
and the very high sierras have forests of pine
belted about their tops ; but usually the desert
ranges are barren. They never bore fruit. The
washings from them are grit and fry of rock
but no vegetable mould. The black dirt that
lies a foot or more in depth upon the surface of
the eastern prairies, showing the many years
accumulations of decayed grasses and weeds, is
not known anywhere on the desert. The slight
vegetation that grows never has a chance to turn
into mould. And besides, nothing ever rots or
decays in these sands. Iron will not rust, nor
tin tarnish, nor flesh mortify. The grass and
the shrub wither and are finally cut into pieces
by flying sands. Sometimes you may see small
particles of grass or twigs heaped about an ant-
hill, or find them a part of a bird's nest in a
cholla ; but usually they turn to dry dust and
blow with the wind — at the wind^s will.

The desert mountains gathered in clusters
along the waste, how old and wrinkled, how set
and determined they look ! Somehow they
remind you of a clinched hand with the
knuckles turned skyward. They have strength
and bulk, the suggestion of quiescent force.

Mountain
vegetation.

Withered
grasses.

42

THE DESERT

Barren
rock.

Mountain
colors.

Saw- toothed
ridges.

Barren rock and nothing more ; but what could
better epitomize power ! The heave of the
enormous 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 the
impression of things deep-based — veritable isl-
ands of porphyry bent upward from a yellow
sea. They are so weather-stained, so worn,
that they are not bright in coloring. Usually
they assume a dull garnet-red, or the red of
peroxide of iron ; but occasionally at sunset
they warm in color and look fire-red through
the pink haze.

The more abrupt ranges that appear younger
because of their saw-toothed ridges and broken
peaks, are often much finer in coloring. They
have needles that are lifted skyward like Mos-
lem minarets or cathedral spires ; and at even-
ing, if there is a yellow light, they shine like
brazen spear-points set against the sky. It is
astonishing that dull rock can disclose such
marvellous coloring. The coloring is not local
in the rock, nor yet again entirely reflected.
Desert atmosphere, with which we shall have to
reckon hereafter, has much to do with it.

And whether at sunset, at sunrise, or at mid-
night, how like watch-towers these mountains

THE MAKE OF THE DESEKT

43

stand above the waste ! One can almost fancy
that behind each dome and rampart there are
cloud-like Genii — spirits of the desert — keeping
guard over this kingdom of the sun. And what
a far-reaching kingdom they watch ! Plain upon
plain leads up and out to the horizon — far as the
eye can see — in undulations of gray and gold ;
ridge upon ridge melts into the blue of the
distant sky in lines of lilac and purple ; fold
upon fold over the mesas the hot air drops its
veilings of opal and topaz. Yes ; it is the
kingdom of sun-fire. For every color in the
scale is attuned to the key of flame, every air-
wave comes with the breath of flame, every
sunbeam falls as a shaft of flame. There is
no questioning who is sovereign in these do-

minions.

Seen from
the peaks.

Sun-fire
kingdom.

CHAPTEE III

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

Early

geological

days.

The former
Gulf.

Ik the ancient days when the shore of the
Pacific was young, when the white sierras had
only recently been heaved upward and the des-
ert itself was in a formative stage, the ocean
reached much farther inland than at the pres-
ent time. It pushed through many a pass and
flooded many a depression in the sands, as its
wave-marks upon granite bases and its numer-
ous beaches still bear witness. In those days
that portion of the Colorado Desert known as
the Salton Basin did not exist. The Gulf of
California extended as far north as the San
Bernardino Eange and as far west as the Pass
of San Gorgonio. Its waters stood deep where
now lies the road-bed of the Southern Pacific
railway, and all the country from Indio almost
to the Colorado Kiver was a blue sea. The
Bowl was full. 'No one knew if it had a bot-
tom or imagined that it would ever be emptied
of water and given over to the drifting sands.
44

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

45

No doubt the tenure of the sea in this Salton
Basin was of long duration. The sand-dunes
still standing along the northern shore — fifty
feet high and shining like hills of chalk —
were not made in a month ; nor was the long
shelving beach beneath them — still covered
with sea-shells and pebbles and looking as
though washed by the waves only yesterday —
formed in a day. Both dunes and beach are
plainly visible winding across the desert for
many miles. The southwestern shore, stretch-
ing under a spur of the Coast Eange, shows the
same formation in its beach -line. The old
bays and lagoons that led inland from the sea,
the river-beds that brought down the surface
waters from the mountains, the inlets and nat-
ural harbors are all in place. Some of them
are drifted half full of sand, but they have not
lost their identity. And out in the sea-bed
still stand masses of cellular rock, honeycombed
and water- worn (and now for many years wind-
worn), showing the places where once rose the
reefs of the ancient sea.

These are the only records that tell of the
sea's occupation. The Indians have no tra-
dition about it. Yet when the sea was there
the Indian tribes were there also. Along the

Sea-beaches
on desert.

Harbors
and reefs.

46

THE DESERT

Indian
remains.

The
Cocopas.

The

Colorado
Kiver.

bases of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto
Ranges there are indications of cave-dwelling,
rock-built squares that doubtless were fortified
camps, heaps of stone that might have been
burial-mounds. Everywhere along the ancient
shores and beaches you pick up pieces of pot-
tery, broken ollas, stone pestels and mortars,
axe - heads, obsidian arrow - heads, flint spear-
points, agate beads. There is not the slightest
doubt that the shores were inhabited. It was
a warm nook, accessible to the mountains and
the Pacific; in fact, just the place where
tribes would naturally gather. Branches of
the Yuma Indians, like the Cocopas, overran
all this country when the Padres first crossed
the desert ; and it was probably their fore-
fathers who lived by the shores of this Upper
Gulf. No doubt they were fishermen, traders
and fighters, like their modern representatives
on Tiburon Island ; and no doubt they fished
and fought and were happy by the shores of
the mountain-locked sea.

But there came a time when there was a dis-
turbance of the existing conditions in the Up-
per Gulf. Century after century the Colorado
River had been carrying down to the sea its
burden of sedimental sand and silt. It had

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

47

been entering the Gulf far down on the eastern
side at an acute angle. Gradually its deposits
had been building up, banking up ; and grad-
ually the river had been pushing them out and
across the Gulf in a southwesterly direction.
Finally there was formed a delta dam stretch-
ing from shore to shore. The tides no longer
brought water up and around the bases of the
big mountains. Communication with the sea
was cut off and what was once the top of the
Gulf changed into an inland lake. It now had
no water supply from below, it lay under a
burning sun, and day by day evaporation car-
ried it away.

No one knows how many days, how many
years, elapsed before the decrease of the water
became noticeable. Doubtless the lake shrunk
away slowly from the white face of the sand-
dunes and the red walls of the mountains.
The river-mouths that opened into the lake
narrowed themselves to small stream -beds.
The shelving beaches where the waves had
fallen lazily year after year, pushing themselves
over the sand in beautiful water-mirrors, shone
bare and dry in the sunlight. The ragged
reefs, over which the chop sea had tumbled
and tossed so long, lifted their black hulks out

The delta
dam.

The inland
lake.

48

THE DESERT

The first
fall.

Springs
and wells in
the sea-bed.

The New
Eiver.

of the water and with their hosts of barnacles
and sea-life became a part of the land.

The waters of the great inland lake fell per-
haps a hundred feet and then they made a pause.
The exposed shores dried out. They baked hard
in the sun, and were slowly ground down to sand
and powdered silt by the action of the winds.
The waters made a long pause. They were re-
ceiving reinforcements from some source. Pos-
sibly there was more rainfall in those days than
now, and the streams entering the lake from
the mountains were much larger. Again there
may have been underground springs. There
are flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed —
wells that cast up water Salter than the sea it-
self. No one knows their fountain-head. Per-
haps by underground channels the water creeps
through from the Gulf, or comes from mountain
reservoirs and turns saline by passing through
beds of salt. These are the might-bes ; but it
is far more probable that the Colorado Kiver at
high water had made a breach of some kind in
the dam of its own construction and had poured
overflow water into the lake by way of a dry
channel called the New Eiver. The bed of this
river runs northward from below the boundary-
I line of Lower California ; and in 1893, during

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

49

a rise in the Colorado, the waters rushed in and
flooded the whole of what is called the Salton
Basin. When the Colorado receded, the basin
soon dried out again.

It was undoubtedly some accident of this
kind that called the halt in the original reces-
sion. During the interim the lake had time to
form new shores where the waves pounded and
washed on the gravel as before until miles upon
miles of new beach — pebbled, shelled, and slop-
ing downward with great uniformity — came into
existence. This secondary beach is intact to-
day and looks precisely like the primary except
that it is not quite so large. Across the basin,
along the southern mountains, the second water-
tracery is almost as apparent as the first. The
rocks are eaten in long lines by wave-action,
and are honeycombed by the ceaseless energies
of the zoophite.

Nor was the change in beach and rock alone.
JSTew bays and harbors were cut out from where
the sea had been, new river - channels were
opened down to the shrunken lake, new lagoons
were spread over the flat places. Nature evi-
dently made a great effort to repair the damage
and adapt the lake to its new conditions. And
the Indians, too, accepted the change. There

New
beaches.

The second
/all.

50

THE DESERT

The third
becich.

The failing
water.

are many indications in broken pottery, arrow-
heads, and mortars that the aboriginal tribes
moved down to the new beach and built wick-
iups by the diminished waters. And the old
fishing-foraging-fighting life was probably re-
sumed.

Then once more the waters went down, down,
down. Step by step they receded until the sec-
ondary beach was left a hundred feet above the
water level. Again there was a pause. Again
new beaches were beaten into shape by the
waves, new bays were opened, new arroyos cut
through from above. The whole process of
shore-making — the fitting of the land to the
shrunken proportions of the lake — was gone
through with for the third time ; while the
water supply from the river or elsewhere was
maintained in decreased volume but with some
steadiness of flow. Possibly the third halt of
the receding water was not for a great length of
time. The tertiary beach is not so large as its
predecessors. There never was any strong wave-
action upon it, its pebbles are few, its faults
and breaks are many. The water supply was
failing, and finally it ceased altogether.

What fate for a lake in the desert receiving
no supplies from river or sea — what fate save

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

51

annihilation ? The hot breath of the wind blew
across the cramped water and whipped its sur-
face into little waves ; and as each tiny point
of spray rose on the crest and was lifted into
the air the fiery sunbeam caught it^ and in a
twinkling had evaporated and carried it up-
ward. Day by day this process went on over
the whole surface until there was no more sea.
The hollow reefs rose high and dark above the
bed, the flat shoals of silt lifted out of the ooze,
and down in the lowest pools there was the
rush and plunge of monster tortuabas, sharks
and porpoises, caught as it were in a net and
vainly struggling to get out. How strange must
have seemed that landscape when the low ridges
were shining with the slime of the sea, when
the beds were strewn with algce, sponges, and
coral, and the shores were whitening with salt !
How strange, indeed, must have been the first
sight of the Bottom of the Bowl!

But the sun never relaxed its fierce heat nor
the wind its hot breath. They scorched and
burned the silt of the sea-bed until it baked
and cracked into blocks. Then began the wear
of the winds upon the broken edges until the
blocks were reduced to dry fine powder. Fi-
nally the desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of

Evapo-
ration.

Bottom of
the Bowl.

Drying out
of the sea-
bed.

52

THE DESERT

Advance of
desert.

Below
sea-level.

Desolation
of the basin.

sand blown through the valleys settled in the
empty basin; gravel and bowlder-wash came
down from the mountains ; the grease wood,
the salt-bush, and the so-called pepper-grass
sprang up in isolated spots. Slowly the desert
fastened itself upon the basin. Its heat became
too intense to allow the falling rain to reach
the earth, its surface was too salt and alkaline
to allow of much vegetation, it could support
neither animal nor bird life ; it became more
deserted than the desert itself.

And thus it remains to this day. When you
are in the bottom of it you are nearly three
hundred feet below the level of the sea. Cir-
cling about you to the north, south, and west
are sierras, some of them over ten thousand feet
in height. These form the Eim of the Bowl.
And off to the southwest there is a side broken
out of the Bowl through which you can pass
to the river and the Gulf. The basin is perhaps
the hottest place to be found anywhere on the
American deserts. And it is also the most for-
saken. The bottom itself is, for the great part
of it, as flat as a table. It looks like a great
plain leading up and out to the horizon — a
plain that has been ploughed and rolled smooth.
The soil is drifted silt — the deposits made by

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

63

the washings from the mountains — and is
almost as fine as flour.

The long line of dunes at the north are just
as desolate, yet they are wonderfully beautiful.
The desert sand is finer than snow, and its
curves and arches, as it builds its succession of
drifts out and over an arroyo, are as graceful as
the lines of running water. The dunes are al-
ways rhythmical and flowing in their forms;
and for color the desert has nothing that sur-
passes them. In the early morning, before the
sun is up, they are air-blue, reflecting the sky
overhead ; at noon they are pale lines of daz-
zling orange-colored light, waving and undulat-
ing in the heated air ; at sunset they are often
flooded with a rose or mauve color ; under a
blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in
the northern seas.

But neither the dunes nor the flats grow
vegetation of consequence. About the high
edges, up near the mountain slopes, you find
growths of mesquite, palo verde, and cactus ;
but down in the basin there are many miles
where no weed or grass breaks the level uni-
formity. Not even the salt-bush will grow in
some of the areas. And this is not due to
poverty of soil but to absence of water and

Beauty of
the sand-
dunes.

Oactits and
salt-bush.

54

THE DESERT

Desert
animals in
the basin.

Birds.

Lizards
and snakes.

intense heat. Plants cannot live by sunlight
alone.

Nor will the desert animals inhabit an abso-
lute waste. The coyote and the wildcat do not
relish life in this dip in the earth. They care
little for heat and drouth, but the question of
food appeals to them. There is nothing to eat.
Even the abstemious jack-rabbit finds living
here something of a difficulty. Many kinds of
tracks are found in the uncrusted silt — tracks
of coyotes, gray wolves, sometimes mountain
lions — but they all run in straight trails, show-
ing the animals to be crossing the basin to the
mountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too,
you will occasionally find birds — linnets, bobo-
links, mocking-birds, larks — but they are seen
one at a time, and they look weary/^ike land
birds far out at sea that seek a resting-place on
passing vessels. They do not belong to the
desert and are only stopping there temporarily
on some long flight. Snakes and lizards are not
particular about their abiding-place, and yet
they do not care to live in a land where there
is no bush or stone to creep under. You meet
with them very seldom. Practically there is no
life of any kind that is native to the place.

Is there any beauty, other than the dunes,

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

65

down in this hollow of the desert ? Yes.
From a picturesque point of view it has the
most wonderful light, air, and color imaginable.
You will not think so until you see them
blended in that strange illusion known as
mirage. And here is the one place in all the
world where the water-mirage appears to per-
fection. It does not show well over grassy or
bushy ground, but over the flat lake-beds of the
desert its appearance is astonishing. Down in
the basin it is accompanied by a second illusion
that makes the first more convincing. You
are below sea-level, but instead of the ground
about you sloping up and out, it apparently
slopes down and away on every side. You are
in the centre of a disk or high point of ground,
and around the circumference of the disk is
water — palpable, almost tangible, water. It
cannot be seen well from your horse, and fifty
feet up on a mountain side it would not be
visible at all. But dismount and you see it
better ; kneel down and place your cheek to the
ground and now the water seems to creep up to
you. You could throw a stone into it. The
shore 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

Mirage^

The water
illitsion.

56

THE DESERT

Decorative
landscapes.

Sensuous
qualities in
nature.

horizon ; it sometimes reaches up and blends
into the sky without any point of demarcation.
Through the heated air you see faint outlines of
mountains, dim glimpses of foot-hills, sugges-
tions of distance ; but no more. Across them
is drawn the wavering veil of air, and the red
earth at your feet, the blue sky overhead, are
but bordering bands of flat color.

And there you have the most decorative land-
scape in the world, a landscape all color, a dream
landscape. Painters for years have been trying
to put it upon canvas — this landscape of color,
light, and air, with form almost obliterated,
merely suggested, given only as a hint of the
mysterious. Men like Corot and Monet have
told us, again and again, that in painting, clearly
delineated forms of mountains, valleys, trees,
and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of the
picture. The great struggle of the modern
landscapist is to get on with the least possible
form and to suggest everything by tones of color,
shades of light, drifts of air. Why ? Because
these are the most sensuous qualities in nature
and in art. The landscape that is the simplest
in form and the finest in color is by all odds the
most beautiful. It is owing to just these feat-
ures that this Bowl of the desert is a thing of

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

57

beauty instead of a dreary hollow in the hills.
Only one other scene is comparable to it, and
that the southern seas at sunset when the calm
ocean reflects and melts into the color-glory of
the sky. It is the same kind of beauty. Form
is almost blurred out in favor of color and air.

Yet here is more beauty destined to destruc-
tion. It might be thought that this forsaken
pot-hole in the ground would never come under
the dominion of man, that its very worthlessness
would be its safeguard against civilization, that
none would want it, and everyone from necessity
would let it alone. But not even the spot de-
serted by reptiles shall escape the industry or the
avarice (as you please) of man. A great company
has been formed to turn the Colorado Eiver
into the sands, to reclaim this desert basin, and
make it blossom as the rose. The water is to
be brought down to the basin by the old channel
of the New Eiver. Once in reservoirs it is to be
distributed over the tract by irrigating ditches,
and it is said a million acres of desert will thus
be made arable, fitted for homesteads, ready for
the settler who never remains settled.

A most laudable enterprise, people will say.
Yes ; commercially no one can find fault with
it. Money made from sand is likely to be clean

Changing
the deatrt.

Irrigation
in the basin.

58

THE DESERT

Changing
the climate.

Dry air.

money, at any rate. And economically these
acres will produce large supplies of food. That
is commendable, too, even if those for whom it
is produced waste a good half of what they
already possess. And yet the food that is pro-
duced there may prove expensive to people
other than the producers. This old sea-bed is,
for its area, probably the greatest dry-heat
generator in the world because of its depression
and its barren, sandy surface. It is a furnace
that whirls heat up and out of the Bowl, over
the peaks of the Coast Eange into Southern
California, and eastward across the plains to
Arizona and Sonora. In what measure it is re-
sponsible for the general climate of those States
cannot be accurately summarized ; but it cer-
tainly has a great influence, especially in the
matter of producing dry air. To turn this
desert into an agricultural tract would be to
increase humidity, and that would be practi-
cally to nullify the finest air on the continent.

And why are not good air and climate as es-
sential to human well-being as good beef and
good bread ? Just now, when it is a world too
late, our Government and the forestry societies
of the country are awakening to the necessity
of preserving the forests. National parks are

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

69

being created wherever possible and the cutting
of timber within them is prohibited. Why is
this being done ? Ostensibly to preserve the
trees, but in reality to preserve the water sup-
ply, to keep the fountain-heads pure, to main-
tain a uniform stage of water in the rivers.
Very proper and right. The only pity is that
it was not undertaken forty years ago. But
how is the water supply, from an economic and
hygienic stand-point, any more important than
the air supply ?

Grasses, trees, shrubs, growing grain, they,
too, may need good air as well as human lungs.
The deserts are not worthless wastes. You
cannot crop all creation with wheat and alfal-
fa. Some sections must lie fallow that other
sections may produce. Who shall say that the
preternatural productiveness of California is
not due to the warm air of its surrounding des-
erts ? Does anyone doubt that the healthful-
ness of the countries lying west of the Mississ-
ippi may be traced directly to the dry air and
heat of the deserts. They furnish health to
the human ; why not strength to the plant ?
The deserts should never be reclaimed. They
are the breathing-spaces of the west and should
be preserved forever.

Value of the
air supply.

Value of the
deserts.

60

THE DESERT

Destruction
of natural
beauty.

JSJfects of
mining,
lumbering,
agriculture.

To speak about sparing anything because it
is beautiful is to waste one^s breath and incur
ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense —
the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear,
and the imagination — is just as important a
factor in the scheme of human happiness as
the corporeal sense of eating and drinking ; but
there has never been a time when the world
would admit it. The *^ practical men/' who
seem forever on the throne, know very well
that beauty is only meant for lovers and young
persons — stuff to suckle fools withal. The
main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if
there is any money in cutting the throat of
Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat. That
is what the ^^ practical men'' have been doing
ever since the world began. It is not necessary
to dig up ancient history ; for have we not
seen, here in California and Oregon, in our
own time, the destruction of the fairest valleys
the sun ever shone upon by placer and hy-
draulic mining ? Have we not seen in Minne-
sota and Wisconsin the mightiest forests that
ever raised head to the sky slashed to pieces
by the axe and turned into a waste of tree-
stumps and fallen timber ? Have we not seen
the Upper Mississippi, by the destruction of

THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL

61

the forests, changed from a broad, majestic
river into a shallow, muddy stream ; and the
beantifnl prairies of Dakota turned under by
the plough and then allowed to run to weeds ?
Men must have coal though they ruin the val-
leys and blacken the streams of Pennsylvania,
they must have oil though they disfigure half
of Ohio and Indiana, they must have copper
if they wreck all the mountains of Montana
and Arizona, and they must have gold though
they blow Alaska into the Behring Sea. It is
more than possible that the ^^ practical men^^
have gained much practice and many dol-
lars by flaying the fair face of these United
States. They have stripped the land of its
robes of beauty, and what have they given in
its place ? Weeds, wire fences, oil-derricks,
board shanties and board towns — things that
not even a ^' practical man ^^ can do less than
curse at.

And at last they have turned to the desert !
It remains to be seen what they will do with it.
Keclaiming a waste may not be so easy as break-
ing a prairie or cutting down a forest. And
Nature will not always be driven from her
purpose. Wind, sand, and heat on Sahara
have proven hard forces to fight against ; they

Ploughing
thepraines.

*' Practical
men''

Fighting
wind, sand^
and heat.

62

THE DESERT

Nature
eternal.

Return of
desolation.

may prove no less potent on the Colorado.
And sooner or later Nature will surely come to
her own again. Nothing human is of long du-
ration. Men and their deeds are obliterated,
the race itself fades ; but Nature goes calmly
on with her projects. She works not for man^s
enjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and her
own glory. She made the fat lands of the
earth with all their fruits and flowers and fo-
liage ; and with no less care she made the des-
ert with its sands and cacti. She intended
that each should remain as she made it. When
the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and
grasses will return to the valley; when man
is gone, the sand and the heat will come back
to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom
will live again, and down in the Bottom of
the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver
skyward on wings of light, serene in its sol-
itude, though no human eye sees nor human
tongue speaks its loveliness.

CHAPTER IV
THE SILENT EIVER

The career of the Colorado, from its rise in
the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming to its
final disappearance in the Gulf of California,
seems almost tragic in its swift transitions. It
starts out so cheerily upon its course ; it is so
clear and pure, so sparkling with sunshine and
spirit. It dashes down mountain valleys, gur-
gles under bowlders, swirls over waterfalls,
flashes through ravines and gorges. With its
sweep and glide and its silvery laugh it seems to
lead a merry life. But too soon it plunges into
precipitous canyons and enters upon its fierce
struggle with the encompassing rock. Now it
boils and foams, leaps and strikes, thunders and
shatters. For hundreds of miles it wears and
worries and undermines the rock to its destruc-
tion. During the long centuries it has cut
down into the crust of the earth five thousand
feet. But ever the stout walls keep casting it
back, keep churning it into bubbles, beating it
63

Rise of the
Colorado.

In the
canyon.

64

THE DESERT

On the
desert.

The lower
river.

into froth. At last, its canyon course run, ex-
hausted and helpless, it is pushed through the
escarpments, thrust out upon the desert, to find
its way to the sea as best it can. Its spirit is
broken, its vivacity is extinguished, its color is
deepened to a dark red — the trail of blood that
leads up to the death. Wearily now it drifts
across the desert without a ripple, without a
moan. Like a wounded snake it drags its length
far down the long wastes of sand to where the
blue waves are flashing on the Calif ornian Gulf.
And there it meets — obliteration.

After the clash and roar of the conflict in the
canyons how impressive seems the stillness of
the desert, how appalling the unbroken silence
of the lower river ! Day after day it moves sea-
ward, but without a sound. You start at its
banks to find no waves, no wash upon gravel
beaches, no rush of water over shoals. Instead
of the soothing murmur of breaking falls there
is at times the boil of currents from below —
waters flung up sullenly and soon flattened
into drifting nothingness by their own weight.

And how heavily the stream moves ! Its load
of silt is gradually settling to the bottom, yet
still the water seems to drag upon the shores.
Every reef of sand, every island of mud, every

THE SILENT RIVER

65

overhanging willow or cottonwood or handful
of arrow- weed holds out a restraining hand.
But slowly, patiently, winding about obstruc-
tions, cutting out new channels, creeping where
it may not run, the bubbleless water works its
way to the sea. The night-winds steal along its^
shores and pass in and out among its sedges,
but there are no whispering voices ; and the stars
emerge and shine upon the flat floor of water,
but there is no lustre. The drear desolation of
it ! The blare of morning sunlight does not
lift the pall, nor the waving illusions of the
mirage break the stillness. The Silent Eiver
moves on carrying desolation with it ; and at
every step the waters grow darker, darker with
the stain of red — red the hue of decay.

It was not through paucity of imagination
that the old Spaniards gave the name — Col-
orado.* During the first fifty years after its
discovery the river was christened many times,
but the name that finally clung to it was the
one that gave accurate and truthful description.

* Colorado is said to be the Spanish translation of the
Piman name buqui aquimuti, according to the late Dr.
Elliot Coues ; but the Spanish word was so obviously
used to denote the red color of the stream, that any trans-
lation from the Indian would seem superfluous.

Sluggish
movement.

Stillness of
river.

The river' 9i
name.

66

THE DESEET

Its red
color.

Compared
with the
Nile.

You may see on the face of the globe numer-
ous muddy Missouris, blue Ehones, and yellow
Tibers ; but there is only one red river and that
the Colorado. It is not exactly an earthy red,
not the color of shale and clay mixed ; but the
red of peroxide of iron and copper, the sang-du-
hceuf red of oriental ceramics, the deep insistent
red of things time-worn beyond memory. And
there is more than a veneer about the color. It
has a depth that seems luminous and yet is sadly
deceptive. You do not see below the surface
no matter how long you gaze into it. As well
try to see through a stratum of porphyry as
through that water to the bottom of the river.

To call it a river of blood would be exaggera-
tion, and yet the truth lies in the exaggeration.
As one walks along its crumbling banks there is
the thought of that other river that changed its
hue under the outstretched rod of the prophet.
How weird indeed must have been the ensan-
guined flow of the Nile, with its little waves
breaking in crests of pink foam ! How strange
the shores where the receding waters left upon
sand and rock a bordering line of scarlet froth !
But the Colorado is not quite like that — not
so ghastly, not so unearthly. It may suggest
at times the heavy welling flow of thickening

THE SILENT RIVER

67

blood which the sands at every step are trying
to drink up ; but this is suggestion only^ not
realization. It seems to hint at blood, and
under starlight to resemble it ; but the resem-
blance is more apparent than real. The Colo-
rado is a red river but not a scarlet one.

It may be thought odd that the river should
change so radically from the clear blue-green
of its fountain-head to the opaque red of its
desert stream, but rivers when they go wander-
ing down to the sea usually leave their moun-
tain purity behind them. The Colorado rush-
ing through a thousand miles of canyons, cuts
and carries seaward with it red sands of shale,
granite, and porphyry, red rustings of iron, red
grits of carnelian, agate and garnet. All the
tributaries come bearing their tokens of red
copper, and with the rains the whole red sur-
face of the watershed apparently washes into
the smaller creeks and thus into the valleys.
When the river reaches the desert carrying its
burden of silt, it no longer knows the bowlder-
bed, the rocky shores, the breaking waterfalls
that clarify a stream. And there are no large
pools where the water can rest while the silt
settles to the bottom. Besides, the desert
itself at times pours into the river an even

The blood
hue.

River
changes.

Red sands
and silt.

68

THE DESERT

Eiver-
banks.

''Bottom'
lands.

deeper red than the canyons. And it does this
not through arroyos alone, but also by a wide
surface drainage.

Often the slope of the desert to the river is
gradual for many miles — sometimes like the
top of a huge table slightly tilted from the
horizontal. When the edge of the table is
reached the mesa begins to break into terraces
(often cut through by small gullies), and the
final descent is not unlike the steps of a Eoman
circus leading down into the arena. During
cloud-bursts the waters pour down these steps
with great fury and the river simply acts as
a catch-basin for all the running color of the
desert.

The ^^ bottom '' lands, forming the immediate
banks of the river, are the silt deposits of
former years. Often they are several miles in
width and are usually covered with arrow-weed,
willows, alders, and cottonwoods. The growth
is dense if not tall and often forms an almost
impenetrable jungle through which are scat-
tered little openings where grass and flowers
grow and Indians build reed wickiups and raise
melons and corn in season. The desert terraces
on either side (sometimes there is a row of sand-
dunes) comedown to meet these ^'bottom^^ lands.

THE SILENT RIVER

and the line where the one leaves off and the
other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of
a knife. Seen from the distant mountain tops
the river moves between two long ribbons of
green, and the borders are the gray and gold
mesas of the desert.

Afloat and drifting down between these lines
of green your attention is perhaps not at first
attracted by the water. You are interested in
the thickets of alders and the occasional bursts
of white and yellow flowers from among the
bushes. They are very commonplace bushes,
very ordinary flowers ; but how lovely they look
as they seem to drift by the boat ! How silent
again are these clumps of alder and willow !
There may be linnets and sparrows among them
but they do not make their presence obtrusive
in song. A hawk wheels along over the arrow-
weed looking for quail, but his wings cut the
air without noise. How deathly still everything
seems ! The water wears into the soft banks,
the banks keep sloughing into the stream, but
again you hear no splashing fall.

And the water itself is just as soundless.
There is never a sunken rock to make a little
gurgle, never a strip of gravel beach where a
wave could charm you with its play. The beat

The green
bands.

Bushes and
Jlowers.

Soundless
water.

70

THE DESERT

Wild fowl.

Herons and
hitterns.

of oars breaks the air with a jar, but breaks no
bubbles on the water. Yon look long at the
stream and fall to wondering if there can be
any life in it. What besides a polywog or a
bnllhead could live there ? Obviously, and in
fact — nothing. Perhaps there are otter and
beaver living along the pockets in the banks ?
Yes ; there were otter and beaver here at one
time, but they are very scarce to-day. But
there are wild fowl ? Yes ; in the spring and
fall the geese and ducks follow the river in
their flights, but they do not like the red water.
What proof ? Because they do not stop long in
any one place. They swing into a bayou or
slough late at night and go out at early dawn.
They do not love the stream, but wild fowl on
their migratory flights must have water, and
this river is the only one between the Kockies
and the Pacific that runs north and south.

The blue herons and the bitterns do not mind
the red mud or the red water, in fact they
rather like it ; but they were always solitary
people of the sedge. They prowl about the
marshes alone and the swish of oars drives them
into the air with a guttural ^^Quowk.^^ And
there are snipe here, bands of them, flashing
their wings in the sun as they wheel over the

THE SILENT RIVEK

71

red waters or trip along the muddy banks
singly or in pairs. They are quite at home on
the bars and bayou flats, but it seems not a very
happy home for them — that is judging by the
absence of snipe talk. The little teeter flies
ahead of you from point to point, but makes no
twitter, the yellow-leg seldom sounds his mellow
three-note call, and the kill-deer, even though
you shoot at him, will not cry '' Kill-deer ! "
^^Kill-deer!^^

It may be the season when birds are mute, or
it may merely happen so for to-day, or it may
be that the silence of the river and the desert is
an oppressive influence ; but certainly you have
never seen bird-life so hopelessly sad. Even
the kingfisher, swinging down in a blue line
from a dead limb and skimming the water,
makes none of that rattling clatter that you
knew so well when you were a child by a New
England mill-stream. And what does a king-
fisher on such a river as this ? If it were filled
with fish he could not see them through that
thick water.

The voiceless river ! From the canyon to the
sea it flows through deserts, and ever the seal of
silence is upon it. Even the scant life of its
borders is dumb — birds with no note, animals

Snipe.

Sad
bird-life.

72

THE DESERT

The

forsaJcen.

Solitude.

Beauty of
the river.

with no cry, human beings with no voice. And
so forsaken ! The largest river west of the
mountains and yet the least known. There are
miles upon miles of mesas stretching upward
from the stream that no feet have ever trodden,
and that possess not a vestige of life of any
kind. And along its banks the same tale is
told. You float for days and meet with no
traces of humanity. When they do appear it is
but to emphasize the solitude. An Indian
wickiup on the bank, an Indian town ; yes, a
white man^s town, what impression do they
make upon the desert and its river ? You drift
by Yuma and wonder what it is doing there.
Had it been built in the middle of the Pacific
on a barren rock it could not be more isolated,
more hopelessly ^^ at sea/^

After the river crosses the border-line of
Mexico it grows broader and flatter than ever.
And still the color seems to deepen. For all its
suggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color.
On the contrary, that deep red contrasted with
the green of the banks and the blue of the sky,
makes a very beautiful color harmony. They
are hues of depth and substance — hues that
comport excellently well with the character of
the river itself. And never a river had more

THE SILENT RIVER

73

character than the Colorado. You may not
fancy the solitude of the stream nor its sugges-
tive coloring, but you cannot deny its majesty
and its nobility. It has not now the babble of
the brook nor the swift rush of the canyon
water ; rather the quiet dignity that is above
conflict, beyond gayety. It has grown old, it
is nearing its end ; but nothing could be calmer,
simpler, more sublime, than the drift of it down
into the delta basin.

The mountains are receding on every side,
the desert is flattening to meet the sea, and the
ocean tides are rising to meet the river. Half
human in its dissolution, the river begins to
break joint by joint. The change has been
gradually taking place for miles and now mani-
fests itself positively. The bottom lands widen,
many channels or side-sloughs open upon the
stream, and the water is distributed into the
mouths of the delta. There is a break in the
volume and mass — a disintegration of forces.
And by divers ways, devious and slow, the
crippled streams well out to the Gulf and never
come together again.

It is not so when the river is at its height with
spring freshets. Then the stream is swollen
beyond its banks. All the bottom lands for

Its majesty.

The delta,

Disintegror
Hon.

74

THE DESERT

The river

during

floods.

The ''bore.'

Meeting of
river arid
sea.

miles across, up to the very terraces of the
mesas, are covered ; and the red flood moves
like an ocean current, vast in width, ponderous
in weight, irresistible in strength. All things
that can be uprooted or wrenched away, move
with 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 the
moon, when the Gulf waters come in like a
tidal wave, and the waters of the north meet
the waters of the south, there is a mighty con-
flict of opposing forces. The famous ^^bore^'
of the river-mouth is the result. When the
forces first meet there is a slow push-up of the
water which rises in the shape of a ridge or
wedge. The sea-water gradually proves itself
the greater and the stronger body, and the ridge
breaks into a crest and pitches forward with a
roar. The undercut of the river sweeps away
the footing of the tide, so to speak, and flings
the top of the wave violently forward. The red
river rushes under, the blue tide rushes over.
There is the flash and dash of parti-colored
foam on the crests, the flinging of jets of spray
high in air, the long roll of waves breaking not
upon a beach, but upon the back of the river,

THE SILENT RIVER

75

and the shaking of the ground as though an
earthquake were passing. After it is all done
with and gone, with no trace of wave or foam
remaining, miles away down the Gulf the red
river slowly rises in little streams through the
blue to the surface. There it spreads fan-like
over the top of the sea, and finally mingles with
and is lost in the greater body.

The river is no more. It has gone down to
its blue tomb in the Gulf — the fairest tomb that
ever river knew. Something of serenity in the
Gulf waters, something of the monumental in
the bordering mountains, something of the un-
known and the undiscovered over all, make it a
fit resting-place for the majestic Colorado. The
lonely stream that so shunned contact with
man, that dug its bed thousands of feet in the
depths of pathless canyons, and trailed its length
across trackless deserts, sought out instinctively
a point of disappearance far from the madding
crowd. The blue waters of the Gulf, the
beaches of shell, the red, red mountains standing
with their feet in the sea, are still far removed
from civilization's touch. There are no towns
or roads or people by those shores, there are no
ships upon those seas, there are no dust and
smoke of factories in those skies. The Indians

The blue
tomb.

Shores of
the Qui/.

76

THE DESERT

are there as undisturbed as in the days of
Coronado, and the white man is coming but
has not yet arrived. The sun still shines on
unknown bays and unexplored peaks. There-
fore is there silence — something of the hush of
the deserts and the river that flows between.

CHAPTEE V

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

These deserts, cut through from north to
south by a silent riyer and from east to west by
two noisy railways, seem remarkable for only a
few commonplace things, according to the con-
sensus of public opinion. All that one hears
or reads about them is that they are very hot,
that the sunlight is very glaring, and that there
is a sand-storm, a thirst, and death waiting
for every traveller who ventures over the first
divide.

There is truth enough, to be sure, in the heat
and glare part of it, and an exceptional truth in
the other part of it. It is intensely hot on the
desert at times, but the sun is not responsible
for it precisely in the manner alleged. The
heat that one feels is not direct sunlight so
much as radiation from the receptive sands ;
and the glare is due not to preternatural bright-
ness in the sunbeam, but to there being no re-
liefs for the eye in shadows, in dark colors, in
77

Popular
ideas of the
desert.

Sunlight on
desert.

78

THE DESERT

Glare
and heat.

Pure
sunlight.

heavy foliage. The vegetation of the desert is
so slight that practically the whole surface of
the sand acts as a reflector ; and it is this, rather
than the snn^s intensity, that causes the great
body of light. The white roads in Southern
France, for the surface they cover, are more
glaring than any desert sands ; and the sunlight
upon snow in Minnesota or New England is
more dazzling. In certain spots where there
are salt or soda beds the combination of heat
and light is bewildering enough for anyone ;
but such places are rare. White is something
seldom seen on desert lands, and black is an
unknown quantity in my observations. Even
lava, which is popularly supposed to be as black
as coal, has a reddish hue about it. Everything
has some color — even the air. Indeed, we shall
not comprehend the desert light without a mo-
mentary study of this desert air.

The circumambient medium which we call
the atmosphere is to the earth only as so much
ground-glass globe to a lamp — something that
breaks, checks, and diffuses the light. We have
never known, never shall know, direct sunlight
— that is, sunlight in its purity undisturbed by
atmospheric conditions. It is a blue shaft fall-
ing perfectly straight, not a diffused white or

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

79

yellow light ; and probably the life of the earth
would not endure for an hour if submitted to
its unchecked intensity. The white or yellow
light, known to us as sunlight, is produced by
the ground-glass globe of air, and it follows
readily enough that its intensity is absolutely
dependent upon the density of the atmosphere
— the thickness of the globe. The cause for
the thickening of the aerial envelope lies in the
particles of dust, soot, smoke, salt, and vapor
which are found floating in larger or smaller
proportions in all atmospheres.

In rainy countries like England and Holland
the vapor particles alone are sufficiently numer-
ous to cause at times great obscurity of light,
as in the case of fog ; and the air is only com-
paratively clear even when the skies are all blue.
The light is almost always whitish, and the
horizons often milky white. The air is thick,
for you cannot see a mountain fifteen miles
away in any sharpness of detail. There is a
mistiness about the rock masses and a vague-
ness about the outline. An opera-glass does
not help your vision. The obscurity is not in
the eyes but in the atmospheric veil through
which you are striving to see. On the contrary,
in the high plateau country of Wyoming, where

Atmospher-
ic envelope.

Vapor
particles.

80

THE DESERT

Clear air.

Dust

particles.

Hazes,

the quantities of dust and vapor in the air are
comparatively small, the distances that one can
see are enormous. A mountain seventy miles
away often appears sharp-cut against the sky,
and at sunset the lights and shadows upon its
sides look only ten miles distant.

But desert air is not quite like the plateau
air of Wyoming, though one can see through it
for many leagues. It is not thickened by moist-
ure particles, for its humidity is almost noth-
ing ; but the dust particles, carried upward by
radiation and the winds, answer a similar pur-
pose. They parry the sunshaf t, break and color
the light, increase the density of the envelope.
Dust is always present in the desert air in some
degree, and when it is at its maximum with the
heat and winds of July, we see the air as a blue,
yellow, or pink haze. This haze is not seen so
well at noonday as at evening when the sun^s
rays are streaming through canyons, or at dawn
when it lies in the mountain shadows and re-
flects the blue sky. Nor does it muffle or ob-
scure so much as the moisture-laden mists of
Holland, but it thickens the air perceptibly and
decreases in measure the intensity of the light.
I Yet despite the fact that desert air is dust-
I laden and must be thickened somewhat, there

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

81

is something almost inexplicable about it. It
seems so thin, so rarefied ; and it is so scent-
less— I had almost said breathless — that it is
like no air at all. Yon breathe it without feel-
ing it, you look through it without being con-
scious of its presence. Yet here comes in the
contradiction. Desert air is very easily recog-
nized by the eyes alone. The traveller in Cal-
ifornia when he wakes in the morning and
glances out of the car- window at the air in the
mountain canyons, knows instantly on which
side of the Tehachepi Eange the train is mov-
ing. He knows he is crossing the Mojave.
The lilac-blue veiling that hangs about those
mountains is as recognizable as the sea air of
the Massachusetts shore. And, strange enough,
the sea breezes that blow across the deserts all
down the Pacific coast have no appreciable ef-
fect upon this air. The peninsula of Lower
California is practically surrounded by water,
but through its entire length and down the
shores of Sonora to Mazatlan, there is nothing
but that clear, dry air.

I use the word '^ clear " because one can see
so far through this atmosphere, and yet it is
not clear or we should not see it so plainly,
There is the contradiction again. Is it perhaps

Seeing the
desert air.

Sea breezes
on desert.

82

THE DESERT

Colored air.

Different
hues.

Producing
color.

the coloring of it that makes it so apparent ?
Probably. Even the clearest atmosphere has
some coloring about it. Usually it is an inde-
finable blue. Air-blue means the most delicate
of all colors — something not of surface depth
but of transparency, builded up by superim-
posed strata of air many miles perhaps in
thickness. This air-blue is seen at its best in
the gorges of the Alps, and in the mountain
distances of Scotland ; but it is not so apparent
on the desert. The coloring of the atmosphere
on the Colorado and the Mojave is oftener
pink, yellow, lilac, rose-color, sometimes fire-
red. And to understand that we must take up
the ground-glass globe again.

It has been said that our atmosphere breaks,
checks, and diffuses the falling sunlight like
the globe of a lamp. It does something more.
It acts as a prism and breaks the beam of sun-
light into the colors of the spectrum. Some of
these colors it deals with more harshly than
others because of their shortness and their
weakness. The blue rays, for instance, are the
greatest in number ; but they are the shortest
in length, the weakest in travelling power of
any of them. Because of their weakness, and
because of their affinity (as regards size) with

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

83

the small dust particles of the higher air re-
gion, great quantities of these rays are caught,
refracted, and practically held in check in the
upper strata of the atmosphere. We see them
massed together overhead and call them the
^^blue sky/"* After many millions of these
blue rays have been eliminated from the sun-
light the remaining rays come down to earth
as a white or yellow or at times reddish light,
dependent upon the density of the lower atmos-
phere.

Now it seems that an atmosphere laden with
moisture particles obstructs the passage earth-
ward of the blue rays, less perhaps than an
atmosphere laden with dust. In consequence,
when they are thus allowed to come down into
the lower atmosphere in company with the
other rays, their vast number serves to dom-
inate the others, and to produce a cool tone of
color over all. So it is that in moist countries
like Scotland you will find the sky cold-blue
and the air tinged gray, pale-blue, or at twi-
light in the mountain valleys, a chilly purple.
A dust-laden atmosphere seems to act just the
reverse of this. It obstructs all the rays in
proportion to its density, but it stops the blue
rays first, holds them in the upper air, while

Eefracted
rays.

Cold colors,

how

produced.

84

THE DESERT

Warm
colors.

Sky colors.

the stronger rays of red and yellow are only
checked in the lower and thicker air-strata
near the earth. The result of this is to pro-
duce a warm tone of color over all. So it is
that in dry countries like Spain and Morocco
or on the deserts of Africa and America, you
will find the sky rose-hued or yellow, and the
air lilac, pink, red, or yellow.

I mean now that the air itself is colored. Of
course countless quantities of light-beams and
dispersed rays break through the aerial envelope
and reach the earth, else we should not see
color in the trees or grasses or flowers about
us ; but I am not now speaking of the color of
objects 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 tint-
ed atmosphere. And what of the bright-hued
horizon skies at sunrise and sunset, the rosy-
yellow skies of Indian summer ! They are only
tinted atmospheres again. Banked up in great
masses, and seen at long distances, the air-color
becomes palpably apparent. Why then should
it not be present in shorter distances, in moun-
tain canyons, across mesas and lomas, and over
the stretches of the desert plains ?

The truth is all air is colored, and that of

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

85

the desert is deeper dyed and warmer liued than
any other for the reasons just given. It takes
on many tints at different times, dependent
upon the thickening of the envelope by heat
and dust-diffusing winds. I do not know if it
is possible for fine dust to radiate with heat
alone ; but certain it is that, without the aid of
the wind, there is more dust in the air on hot
days than at any other time. When the ther-
mometer rises above 100° F., the atmosphere is
heavy with it, and the lower strata are dancing
and trembling with phantoms of the mirage at
every point of the compass. It would seem as
though the rising heat took up with it countless
small dust-particles and that these were respon-
sible for the rosy or golden quality of the air-
coloring.

There is a more positive tinting of the air
produced sometimes by high winds. The lighter
particles of sand are always being drifted here
and there through the aerial regions, and even
on still days the whirlwinds are eddying and
circling, lifting long columns of dust skyward
and then allowing the dust to settle back to
earth through the atmosphere. The stronger
the wind, and the more of dust and sand, the
brighter the coloring. The climax is reached

Color prO'
duced by
dust.

Effect of
heat.

Ufect of
tuinds.

86

THE DESERT

Sand-
storms.

Reflections
upon sky.

in the dramatic sand-storm — a veritable sand-
fog which often turns half the heavens into a
luminous red, and makes the sun look like a
round ball of fire.

The dust-particle in itself is sufficient to ac-
count for the warmth of coloring in the desert
air — sufficient in itself to produce the pink, yel-
low, and lilac hazes. And yet I am tempted to
suggest some other causes. It is not easy to
prove that a reflection may be thrown upward
upon the air by the yellow face of the desert
beneath it — a reflection similar to that produced
by a fire upon a night sky — yet I believe there
is something of the desert's air-coloring derived
from that source. Nor is it easy to prove that
a reflection is cast by blue, pink, and yellow
skies, upon the lower air-strata, yet certain
effects shown in the mirage (the water illu-
sion, for instance, which seems only the reflec-
tion of the sky from heated air) seem to suggest
it. And if we put together other casual obser-
vations they will make argument toward the
same goal. For instance, the common blue
haze that we may see any day in the moun-
tains, is always deepest in the early morning
when the blue sky over it is deepest. At noon
when the sky turns gray -blue the haze turns

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

87

gray-blue also. The yellow haze of the desert
is 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 part
in coloring by reflection the lower layers of
desert air.

Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt
about the effect. The desert air is practically
colored air. Several times from high mountains
I have seen it lying below me like an enormous
tinted cloud or veil. A similar veiling of pink,
lilac, or pale yellow is to be seen in the gorges
of the Grand Canyon ; it stretches across the
Providence Mountains at noonday and is to be
seen about the peaks and packed in the valleys
at sunset; it is dense down in the Coahuila
Basin ; it is denser from range to range across
the hollow of Death Valley ; and it tinges the
whole face of the Painted Desert in Arizona.
In its milder manifestations it is always present,
and during the summer months its appearance
is often startling. By that I do not mean that
one looks through it as through a highly colored
glass. The impression should not be gained
that this air is so rose-colored or saffron-hued
that one has to rub his eyes and wonder if he is
awake. The average unobservant traveller looks

Blue,

yellow, and
pink hazes.

The dust'
veil.

Summer
coloring.

88

THE DESERT

Local hues.

Greens qf

desert

plants.

through it and thinks it not different from
any other air. But it is different. In itself,
and in its effect upon the landscape, it is per-
haps responsible for the greater part of what
everyone calls ^^the wonderful color '^ of the
desert.

And this not to the obliteration of local hue
in sands, rocks, and plants. Quite independent
of atmospheres, the porphyry mountains are
dull red, the grease wood is dull green, the vast
stretches of sand are dull yellow. And these
large bodies of local color have their influence in
the total sum-up. Slight as is the vegetation
upon the desert, it is surprising how it seems
to bunch together and count as a color-mass.
Almost all the growths are ^^ evergreen.^^ The
shrubs and the trees shed their leaves, to be sure,
but they do it so slowly that the new ones are
on before the old ones are off. The general
appearance is always green, but not a bright
hue, except after prolonged rains. Usually it
is an olive, bordering upon yellow. One can
hardly estimate what a relieving note this thin
thatch of color is, or how monotonous the
desert might be without it. It is welcome, for
it belongs to the scene, and fits in the color-
scheme of the landscape as perfectly as the

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

dark-green pines in the mountain scenery of
Norway.

The sands, again, form vast fields of local
color, and, indeed, the beds of sand and gravel,
the dunes, the ridges, and the mesas, make up
the most widespread local hue on the desert.
The sands are not *^ golden, ^^ except under
peculiar circumstances, such as when they are
whirled high in the air by the winds, and then
struck broadside by the sunlight. Lying quietly
upon the earth they are usually a dull yellow.
In the morning light they are often gray, at
noon frequently a bleached yellow, and at sun-
set occasionally pink or saff ron-hued. Wavering
heat and mirage give them temporary coloring
at times that is beautifully unreal. They then
appear to undulate slightly like the smooth
surface of a summer sea at sunset ; and the
colors shift and travel with the undulations.
The appearance is not common ; perfect calm,
a flat plain, and intense heat being apparently
the conditions necessary to its existence.

The rocks of the upper peaks and those that
make the upright walls of mountains, though
small in body of color, are perhaps more varied
in hue than either the sands or the vegetation,
and that, too, without primary notes as in the

Color of
aandt.

Sands in
mirage.

90

THE DESERT

Color of

mountain

walls.

Weather
staining.

Influence of
the air.

Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The reds are
always salmon-colored, terra-cotta, or Indian
red ; the greens are olive-hued, plum-colored,
sage-green; the yellows are as pallid as the
leaves of yellow roses. Fresh breaks in the
wall of rock may show brighter colors that
have not yet been weather-worn, or they may
reveal the oxidation of various minerals. Often
long strata and beds, and even whole mountain
tops show blue and green with copper, or
orange with iron, or purple with slates, or white
with quartz. But the tones soon become sub-
dued. A mountain wall may be dark red with-
in, but it is weather-stained and lichen-covered
without; long-reaching shafts of granite that
loom upward from a peak may be yellow at
heart but they are silver-gray on the surface.
The colors have undergone years of ^' toning
down ^' until they blend and run together like
the faded tints of an Eastern rug.

But granted the quantity and the quality of
local colors in the desert, and the fact still re-
mains that the air is the medium that influ-
ences if 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

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

91

topaz-yellow, sapphire-blue, bright lilac, rose-
red — yes, fire-red. During the heated months of
summer such colors are not exceptional. They
appear almost every evening. I have seen at
sunset, looking north from Sonora some twenty
miles, the whole tower-like shaft of Baboqui-
vari change from blue to topaz and from topaz
to glowing red in the course of half an hour. I
do not mean edgings or rims or spots of these
colors upon the peak, but the whole upper half
of the mountain completely changed by them.
The red color gave the peak the appearance of
hot iron, and when it finally died out the dark
dull hue that came after was like that of a
clouded garnet.

The high ranges along the western side of
Arizona, and the buttes and tall spires in the
Upper Basin region, all show these warm fire-
colors under heat and sunset light, and often in
the full of noon. The colored air in conjunc-
tion with light is always responsible for the
hues. Even when you are close up to the moun-
tains you can see the effect of the air in small
ways. There are edgings of bright color to the
hill-ridges and the peaks ; and in the canyons,
where perhaps a sunshaft streams across the
shadow, you can see the gold or fire-color of the

Peak of

Baboquir

vari.

Buttes
and spires.

92

THE DESERT

Sunshafts

through

canyons.

Comple-
mentary
hues in
shadow.

Colored
shadows.

air most distinctly. Very beautiful are these
golden sunshafts shot through the canyons.
And the red shafts are often startling. It
would seem as though the canyons were packed
thick with yellow or red haze. And so in real-
ity they are.

There is one marked departure from the uni-
form warm colors of the desert that should be
mentioned just here. It is the clear blue seen
in the shadows of western-lying mountains at
sunset. This colored shadow shows only when
there is a yellow or orange hued sunset, and it
is produced by the yellow of the sky casting its
complementary hue (blue) in the shadow. At sea
a ship crossing a yellow sunset will show a mar-
vellous blue in her sails just as she crosses the
line of the sun, and the desert mountains re-
peat the same complementary color with equal
facility and greater variety. It is not of long
duration. It changes as the sky changes, but
maintains always the complementary hue.

The presence of the complementary color in
the shadow is exceptional, however. The shad-
ows cast by such objects as the sahuaro and the
palo verde are apparently quite colorless ; and
so, too, are the shadows of passing clouds. The
colored shadow is produced by reflection from

LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR

the sky, mixed with something of local color in
the background, and also complementary color.
It is usually blue or lilac-blue, on snow for ex-
ample, when there is a blue sky overhead ; and
lilac when shown upon sand or a blue stone
road. Perhaps it does not appear often on the
Mo jave- Colorado because the surfaces are too
rough and broken with coarse gravel to make
good reflectors of the sky. The fault is not in
the light or in the sky, for upon the fine sands
of the dunes, and upon beds of fine gypsum
and salt, you can see your own shadow colored
an absolute indigo ; and often upon bowlders of
white quartz the shadows of cholla and grease
wood are cast in almost cobalt hues.

All color — local, reflected, translucent, com-
plementary— is, of course, made possible by
light and has no existence apart from it.
Through the long desert day the sunbeams are
weaving skeins of color across the sands, along
the sides of the canyons, and about the tops of
the mountains. They stain the ledges of cop-
per with turquoise, they burn the buttes to a
terra-cotta red, they paint the sands with rose
and violet, and they key the air to the hue of
the opal. The reek of color that splashes the
western sky at sunset is but the climax of the

Blue shad-
ows upon
salt-beds.

How licjht
makes color.

94

THE DESERT

Desert
sunsets.

sun^s endeavor. If there are clouds stretched
across the west the ending is usually one of ex-
ceptional brilliancy. The reds are all scarlet,
the yellows are like burnished brass, the oranges
like shining gold.

But the sky and clouds of the desert are of
such unique splendor that they call for a
chapter of their own.

CHAPTEK VI
DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS

How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by
out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilder-
ness ! How ^' the morning and the evening
make np the day '^ and the purple shadow slips
in between with a midnight all stars ! And
how day by day the interest grows in the long
overlooked commonplace things of nature ! In
a few weeks we are studying bushes, bowlders,
stones, sand-drifts — things we never thought of
looking at in any other country. And after a
time we begin to make mental notes on the
changes of light, air, clouds, and blue sky. At
first we are perhaps bothered about the inten-
sity of the sky, for we have always heard of the
^Meep blue ^' that overhangs the desert; and
we expect to see it at any and all times. But
we discover that it shows itself in its greatest
depth only in the morning before sunrise. Then
it is a dark blue, bordering upon purple ; and
for some time after the sun comes up it holds a
95

Common-
place things
of nature.

96

THE DESERT

The blue sky.

Changes in
the blue.

Dawns on
the desert.

deep blue tinge. At noon it has passed through
a whole gamut of tones and is pale blue, yel-
lowish, lilac-toned, or rosy ; in the late after-
noon it has changed again to pink or gold or
orange ; and after twilight and under the moon,
warm purples stretch across the whole reach of
the firmament from horizon to horizon.

But the changes in the blue during the day
have no constancy to a change. There is no
fixed purpose about them. The caprices of
light, heat, and dust control the appearances.
Sometimes the sky at dawn is as pallid as a snow-
drop with pearly grays just emerging from the
blue ; and again it may be flushed with saffron,
rose, and pink. When there are clouds and great
heat the effect is often very brilliant. The
colors are intense in chrome-yellows, golds, car-
mines, magentas, malachite-greens — a body of
gorgeous hues upheld by enormous side wings
of paler tints that encircle the horizon to the
north and south, and send waves of color far up
the sky to the cool zenith. Such dawns are sel-
dom seen in moist countries, nor are they usual
on the desert, except during the hot summer
months.

The prevailing note of the sky, the one of-
tenest seen, is, of course, blue — a color we may

DESEET SKY AND CLOUDS

97

not perhaps linger over because it is so com-
mon. And yet how seldom it is appreciated !
Our attention is called to it in art — in a haw-
thorn jar as large as a sugar-bowl, made in a
certain period, in a certain Oriental school.
The aesthetic world is perhaps set agog by
this ceramic blue. But what are its depth and
purity compared to the ethereal blue ! Yet the
color is beautiful in the jar and infinitely more
beautiful in the sky — that is beautiful in itself
and merely as color. It is not necessary that
it should mean anything. Line and tint do
not always require significance to be beautiful.
There is no tale or text or testimony to be tort-
ured out of the blue sky. It is a splendid body
of color ; no more.

You cannot always see the wonderful quality
of this sky-blue from the desert valley, because
it is disturbed by reflections, by sand-storms, by
lower air strata. The report it makes of itself
when you begin to gain altitude on a mountain's
side is quite different. At four thousand feet
the blue is certainly more positive, more intense,
than at sea-level ; at six thousand feet it begins
to darken and deepen, and it seems to fit in the
saddles and notches of the mountains like a
block of lapis lazuli ; at eight thousand feet it

Blue as a
color.

Sky from
mountain
heights.

98

THE DESEET

The night
sky.

Blackness
of space.

Bright sky-
colors.

has darkened still more and has a violet hue
about it. The night sky at this altitude is al-
most weird in its purples. A deep violet fits
up close to the rim of the moon, and the orb
itself looks like a silver wafer pasted upon the
sky.

The darkening of the sky continues as the
height increases. If one could rise to, say, fifty
thousand feet, he would probably see the sun
only as a shining point of light, and the firma-
ment merely as a blue-black background. The
diffusion of light must decrease with the grow-
ing thinness of the atmospheric envelope. At
what point it would cease and the sky become
perfectly black would be difficult to say, but
certainly the limit would be reached when our
atmosphere practically ceased to exist. Space
from necessity must be black except where the
straight beams of light stream from the sun and
the stars.

The bright sky-colors, the spectacular effects,
are not to be found high up in the blue of the
dome. The air in the zenith is too thin, too
free from dust, to take deep colorings of red
and orange. Those colors belong near the earth,
along the horizons where the aerial envelope is
dense. The lower strata of atmosphere are in

DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS

99

fact responsible for the gorgeous sunsets, the
tinted hazes, the Indian-summer skies, the hot
September glows. These all appear in their
splendor when the sun is near the horizon-line
and its beams are falling through the many
miles of hot, dust-laden air that lie along the
surface of the earth. The air at sunset after
a day of intense heat-radiation is usually so
thick that only the long and strong waves of
color can pass through it. The blues are al-
most lost, the neutral tints are missing, the
greens are seen but faintly. The waves of red
and yellow are the only ones that travel through
the thick air with force. And these are the
colors that tell us the story of the desert sunset.
Ordinarily the sky at evening over the desert,
when seen without clouds, shows the colors of
the spectrum beginning with red at the bottom
and running through the yellows, greens, and
blues up to the purple of the zenith. In
cool weather, however, this spectrum arrange-
ment seems swept out of existence by a broad
band of yellow-green that stretches half way
around the circle. It is a pale yellow fading
into a pale green, which in turn melts into a
pale blue. In hot weather this pallor is changed
to something much richer and deeper. A band

Horizon
skies.

Spectrum
colors.

Bands of
yellow.

100

THE DESERT

The orange
sky.

Desert
clouds.

of orange takes its place. It is a flame-colored or-
ange, and its hue is felt in reflection upon valley,
plain, and mountain peak. This indeed is the
orange light that converts the air in the moun-
tain canyons into golden mist, and is measur-
ably responsible for the yellow sunshafts that,
streaming through the pinnacles of the western
mountains, reach far across the upper sky in
ever-widening bands. This great orange belt is
lacking in that variety and vividness of coloring
that comes with clouds, but it is not wanting
in a splendor of its own. It is the broadest, the
simplest, and in many respects the sublimest
sunset imaginable — a golden dream with the
sky enthroned in glory and the earth at its feet
reflecting its lustre.

But the more brilliant sunsets are only seen
when there are broken translucent clouds in
the west. There are cloudy days even on
the desert. After many nights of heat, long
skeins of white stratus will gather along the
horizons, and out of them will slowly be woven
forms of the cumulus and the nimbus. And it
will rain in short squalls of great violence on
the lomas, mesas, and bordering mountains.
But usually the cloud that drenches a mountain
top eight thousand feet up will pass over an

DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS

101

intervening valley, pouring down the same flood
of rain, and yet not a drop of it reaching the
ground. The air is always dry and the rain-
drop that has to fall through eight thousand
feet of it before reaching the earth, never gets
there. It is evaporated and carried up to its
parent cloud again. During the so-called ^^ rainy
season " you may frequently see clouds all about
the horizon and overhead that are ^^ raining'^
— letting down long tails and sheets of rain that
are plainly visible; but they never touch the
earth. The sheet lightens, breaks, and dissi-
pates two thousand feet up. It rains, true
enough, but there is no water, just as there are
desert rivers, but they have no visible stream.
That is the desert of it both above and below.

With the rain come trooping almost all the
cloud-forms known to the sky. And the thick
ones like the nimbus carry with them a chilling,
deadening effect. The rolls and sheets of rain-
clouds that cover the heavens at times rob the
desert of light, air, and color at one fell swoop.
Its beauty vanishes as by magic. Instead of
colored haze there is gray gloom settling along
the hills and about the mesas. The sands lose
their lustre and become dull and formless, the
vegetation darkens to a dead gray, and the

Rain/all.

Efect of the
nimbus.

102

THE DE8EET

Cumuli.

Heap clouds
at sunset.

Strati.

mountains turn slate-colored, mouldy, unwhole-
some looking. A mantle of drab envelops the
scene, and the glory of the desert has departed.

All the other cloud-forms, being more or less
transparent, seem to aid rather than to obscure
the splendor of the sky. The most common
clouds of all are the cumuli. In hot summer
afternoons they gather and heap up in huge
masses with turrets and domes of light that reach
at times forty thousand feet above the earth.
At sunset they begin to show color before any
of the other clouds. If seen against the sun
their edges at first gleam silver-white and then
change to gold; if along the horizon to the
north 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 begin
to warm in color, turning yellow, pink, and rose.
Finally they darken into lilac and purple, then
sink and disappear entirely. The smaller forms
of cumulus that appear in the west at evening
are always splashes of sunset color, sometimes
being shot through with yellow or scarlet. They
ultimately appear floating against the night sky
as spots of purple and gray.

Above the cumuli and often flung across them
like bands of gauze, are the strati — clouds of

DESERT SKY AKD CLOUDS

103

the middle air region. This veil or sheet-cloud
might be called a twilight cloud, giving out as
it does its greatest splendor after the sun has
disappeared below the verge. It then takes all
colors and with singular vividness. At times it
will overspread the whole west as a sheet of
brilliant magenta, but more frequently it blares
with scarlet, carmine, crimson, flushing up and
then fading out, shifting from one color to
another ; and finally dying out in a beautiful
ashes of roses. When these clouds and all their
variations have faded into lilac and deep pur-
ples, there are still bright spots of color in the
upper sky where the cirri are receiving the last
rays of the sun.

The cirrus with its many feathery and fleecy
forms is the thinnest, the highest, and the most
brilliant in light of all the clouds. Perhaps its
brilliancy is due to its being an ice-cloud. It
seems odd that here in the desert with so much
heat rising and tempering the upper air there
should be clouds of ice but a few miles above it.
The cirrus and also the higher forms of the
cumulo-stratus are masses of hoar-frost, spicules
of ice floating in the air, instead of tiny glob-
ules of vapor.

There is nothing remarkable about the desert

Cirri.

Ice clouds.

104

THE DESERT

Clouds 0/
Ji/'e.

The celestial
tapestry.

The defert
moon.

clouds — that is nothing very different from the
clouds of other countries — except in light, color,
and background. They appear incomparably
more brilliant and fiery here than elsewhere on
the globe. The colors, like everything else on
the desert, are intense in their power, fierce in
their glare. They vibrate, they scintillate, they
penetrate and tinge everything with their hue.
And then, as though heaping splendor upon
splendor, what a wonderful background they
are woven upon ! Great bands of orange, green,
and blue that all the melted and fused gems
in the world could not match for translucent
beauty. Taken as a whole, as a celestial tapes-
try, as a curtain of flame drawn between night
and day, and what land or sky can rival it !

After the clouds have all shifted into purples
and the western sky has sunk into night, then
up from the east the moon — the misshapen
orange-hued desert moon. How large it looks !
And how it warms the sky, and silvers the edges
of the mountain peaks, and spreads its wide
light across the sands ! Up, up it rises, losing
something of its orange and gaining something
in symmetry. In a few hours it is high in the
heavens and has a great aureole of color about
it. Look at the ring for a moment and you will

DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS

105

see all the spectrum colors arranged in order.
Pale hues they are but they are all there. Eain-
bows by day and rainbows by night ! Radiant
circles of colored light — not one but many.
Arches above arches — not two or three but five
solar bows in the sky at one time ! What
strange tales come out of the wilderness ! But
how much stranger, how much more weird and
extraordinary the things that actually happen
in this desert land.

High in the zenith rides the desert moon.
What a flood of light comes from it ! What
pale, phosphorescent light ! Under it miles and
miles of cactus and grease wood are half re-
vealed, half hidden ; and far away against the
dark mountains the dunes of the desert shine
white as snow-clad hills in December. The
stars are forth, the constellations in their places,
the planets large and luminous, yet none of
them has much color or sparkle. The moon
dims them somewhat, but even without the
moon they have not the twinkle of the stars in
higher, colder latitudes. The desert air seems
to veil their lustre somewhat, and yet as points
of light set in that purple dome of sky how
beautiful they are !

Lying down there in the sands of the desert.

Rings and
rainbows.

Moonlight,

Stars.

106

THE DESERT

The mid-
night sky.

Alone in the
desert.

The
mysteries.

alone and at night, with a saddle for your pil-
low, and your eyes staring upward at the stars,
how incomprehensible it all seems ! The im-
mensity and the mystery are appalling; and
yet how these very features attract the thought
and draw the curiosity of man. In the pres-
ence of the unattainable and the insurmount-
able we keep sending a hope, a doubt, a query,
up through the realms of air to Saturn^s
throne. What key have we wherewith to un-
lock that door ? We cannot comprehend a tiny
flame of our own invention called electricity,
yet we grope at the meaning of the blazing
splendor of Arcturus. Around us stretches
the great sand-wrapped desert whose mystery
no man knows, and not even the Sphinx could
reveal ; yet beyond it, above it, upward still
upward, we seek the mysteries of Orion and
the Pleiades.

What is it that draws us to the boundless and
the fathomless ? Why should the lovely things
of earth — the grasses, the trees, the lakes, the
little hills — appear trivial and insignificant
when we come face to face with the sea or the
desert or the vastness of the midnight sky ? Is
it that the one is the tale of things known and
the other merely a hint, a suggestion of the un-

DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS

107

known? Or have immensity, space, magnitude
a peculiar beauty of their own ? Is it not true
that bulk and breadth are primary and essen-
tial qualities of the sublime in landscape ? And
is it not the sublime that we feel in immensity
and mystery ? If so, perhaps we have a partial
explanation of our love for sky and sea and
desert waste. They are the great elements.
We do not see, we hardly know if their boun-
daries are limited ; we only feel their immen-
sity, their mystery, and their beauty.

And quite as impressive as the mysteries are
the silences. Was there ever such a stillness as
that which rests upon the desert at night ! Was
there ever such a hush as that which steals
from star to star across the firmament ! You
perhaps think to break the spell by raising your
voice in a cry ; but you will not do so again.
The sound goes but a little way and then seems
to come back to your ear with a suggestion of
insanity about it.

A cry in the night ! Overhead the planets
in their courses make no sound, the earth is
still, the very animals are mute. Why then the
cry of the human ? How it jars the harmo-
nies ! How it breaks in discord upon the uni-
ties of earth and air and sky ! Century after

Space and
immensity.

Thesilences^

The cry of
the human.

108

THE DESERT

century that cry has gone up, mobbing high
heaven ; and always insanity in the cry, insan-
ity in the crier. What folly to protest where
none shall hear ! There is no appeal from the
law of nature. It was made for beast and bird
and creeping thing. Will the human never learn
that in the eye of the law he is not different
from the things that creep ?

CHAPTEK VII

ILLUSIONS

In our studies of landscape we are very fre-
quently made the victims of either illusion or
delusion. The eye or the mind deceives us,
and sometimes the two may join forces to our
complete confusion. We are not willing to
admit different reports of an appearance. The
Anglo-Saxon in us insists that there can be
only one truth, and everything else must be
error. It is known, for instance, that Castle
Dome, which looks down on the Colorado Kiver
from Western Arizona, is a turret of granite —
gray, red, brown, rock-colored, whatever color
you please. With that antecedent knowledge
in mind how difficult it is for us to believe the
report of our eyes which says that at sunset the
dome is amethystine, golden, crimson, or per-
haps lively purple. The reality is one thing,
the appearance quite another thing ; but why
are not both of them truthful ?

And how very shy people are about accepting
109

ReaZity and
appearance.

110

THE DESEET

Pre-
conceived
impressions.

Deception
by sunlight.

Distorted
forms and
colors.

a pink air, a blue shadow, or a field of yellow
grass — sunlit lemon-yellow grass ! They have
been brought up from youth to believe that air
is colorless, that shadows are brown or gray or
sooty black, and that grass is green — bottle-
green. The preconceived impression of the
mind refuses to make room for the actual im-
pression of the eyes, and in consequence we are
misled and deluded.

But do the eyes themselves always report the
truth ? Yes ; the truth of appearances, but as
regards the reality they may deceive you quite
as completely as the mind deceives you about
the apparent. And for the deception of the
eyes there is no wizard's cell or magician's cabi-
net so admirably fitted for jugglery as this bare
desert under sunlight. Its combination of
light and air seem like reflecting mirrors that
forever throw the misshapen image in unex-
pected places, in unexpected lights and colors.

What, for instance, could be more perplexing
than the odd distortions in the forms and col-
ors of the desert mountains ! A range of these
mountains may often look abnormally grand,
even majestic in the early morning as they
stand against the eastern sky. The outlines of
the ridges and peaks may be clear cut, the light

ILLUSIONS

111

and shade of the canyons and barrancas well
marked, the cool morning colors of the face-
walls and foot-hills distinctly placed and hold-
ing their proper value in the scene. But by
noon the whole range has apparently lost its
lines and shrunken in size. Under the beating
rays of the sun and surrounded by wavering
heated atmosphere its shadow masses have been
grayed down, neutralized, perhaps totally oblit-
erated ; and the long mountain surface appears
as flat as a garden wall, as smooth as a row of
sand-dunes. There is no indication of bar-
ranca or canyon. The air has a blue-steel glow
that muffles light and completely wrecks color.
Seen through it the escarpments show only
dull blue and gray. All the reds, yellows, and
pinks of the rocks are gone ; the surfaces wear
a burnt-out aspect as though fire had eaten into
them and left behind only a comb of volcanic
ash.

At evening, however, the range seems to re-
turn to its majesty and magnitude. The peaks
reach up, the bases broaden, the walls break
into gashes, the ridges harden into profiles.
The sun is westering, and the light falling
more obliquely seems to bring out the shadows
in the canyons and barrancas. Last of all the

Changed
appearance
of moun-
tains*

Changes in
line, light,
and color.

112

THE DESEET

colors come slowly back to their normal con-
dition, as the flush of life to one recovering
from a trance. One by one they begin to glow
on chasm, wall, and needled summit. The air,
too, changes from steel-blue to yellow, from yel-
low to pink, from pink to lilac, until at last
with the sun on the rim of the earth, the moun-
tains, the air, the clouds, and the sky are all
glowing with the tints of ruby, topaz, rose- dia-
mond— hues of splendor, of grandeur, of glory.
Suppose, if you please, a similar range of
mountains thirty miles away on the desert.
Even at long distance it shows an imposing
bulk against the sky, and you think if you were
close to it, wall and peak would loom colossal.
How surprised you are then as you ride toward
it, hour after hour, to find that it does not seem
to grow in size. When you reach the foot-hills
the high mountains seem little larger than when
seen at a distance. You are further surprised
that what appeared like a flat-faced range with
its bases touching an imaginary curb-stone for
miles, is in reality a group-range with retiring
mountains on either side that lead off on acute
angles. The group is round, and has as much
breadth as length. And still greater is your
surprise when you discover that the green top

ILLUSIONS

113

of the gray-based mountain, which has been
puzzling you for so many hours, does not be-
long to the gray base at all. It is a pine-clad
top resting upon another and more massive base
far back in the group. It is the highest and
most central peak of the range.

Such illusions are common, easily explained ;
and yet, after all, not so easily understood. They
are caused by false perspective, which in turn
is caused by light and air. On the desert, per-
spective is always erratic. Bodies fail to detach
themselves one from another, foreshortening is
abnormal, the planes of landscape are flattened
out of shape or telescoped, objects are huddled
together or superimposed one upon another.
The disturbance in aerial perspective is just
as bad. Colors, lights, and shadows fall into
contradictions and denials, they shirk and bear
false witness, and confuse the judgment of the
most experienced.

'No wonder amid this distortion of the natural,
this wreck of perspective, that distance is such
a proverbially unknown quantity. It is the one
thing the desert dweller speaks about with cau-
tion. It may be thirty or fifty miles to that
picacho — he is afraid to hazard a guess. If you
should go up to the top of your mountain range

False per-
spective.

Abnormal
foreshort-
ening.

Contradic-
tions and
denials.

Deceptive
diHances.

114

THE DESERT

Dangers of
the desert.

Immensity
of valley-
plains.

and look at the valley beyond it, the distance
across might seem very slight. Yon can easily
see to where another mountain range begins
and trails away into the distance. Perhaps you
fancy a few hours^ ride will take you over that
valley-plain to where the distant foot-hills are
lying soft and warm at the bases of the moun-
tains. You may be right and then again you
may be wrong. You may spend two days get-
ting to those foot-hills.

This deception of distance is not infrequently
accompanied by fatal consequences. The inex-
perienced traveller thinks the distance short, he
can 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 not
there, the slight supply of water is gone and
he is not there, his horse is gone and he himself
is going, but he is not there. The story and its
ending are familiar to those who live near the
desert, for every year some mining or explor-
ing party is lost. If there are any survivors
they usually make the one report : ^^ The dis-
tance seemed so short. ^' But there are no short
distances on the desert. Every valley-plain is
an immense wilderness of space.

There is another illusion — a harmless one —

ILLUSIONS

115

that has not to do with perspective but with
shadow and local color. The appearance is that
of shadows cast down along the mountain's side
by the ridges or hogbacks. Any little patch of
shadow is welcome on the desert, particularly
upon the mountains which are always so strongly
flooded with light. But this is only a counter-
feit presentment. The ridges have no vegetation
upon them to hold in place the soil and rocks
and these are continually breaking away into
land-slips. The slips or slides expose to view
streaks of local color such as may be seen in
veins of iron and copper, in beds of lignite or
layers of slate. It is these streaks and patches
of dark color that have broken away and slipped
down the mountain side under the ridges that
give the appearance of shadows. They have
the true value in light, and are fair to look upon
even though they are deception. The weather-
beaten rocks of a talus under a peak may create
a similar illusion, but the shadow effect loses a
velvety quality which it has when seen under
the ridges.

The illusion of a cloud-shadow resting upon
the foot-hills or in the valley, is frequently pro-
duced by the local color of lava-beds. Lava
may be of almost any color, but when seen close

Shadow
illusions.

Color-
patches on
mountains.

116

THE DESEBT

Illusion of
lava-beds.

Appearance
of cloud-
shadows.

Mirage,

Definition.

to view it is usually a reddish-black. At a dis-
tance, however, and as a mass, its beds have the
exact value of a cloud-shadow. Any eye would
be deceived by it. The great inundations of
lava that have overrun the plains and oozed
down the foot-hills and around the lomas (par-
ticularly on the Mojave) look the shadow to the
very life. The beds are usually hedged about
on all sides by banks of fine sand that seem to
stand for sunlight surrounding the shadow, and
thus the deception is materially augmented.
Many times I have looked up at the sky to be
sure there was no cloud there, so palpable is this
lava shadow-illusion.

But perhaps the most beautiful deception
known to the desert is the one oftenest seen
— mirage. Everyone is more or less familiar
with it, for it appears in some form wherever
the air is heated, thickened, or has strata of
different densities. It shows on the water, on
the grass plains, over ploughed fields or gravel
roads, on roadbeds of railways ; but the bare
desert with its strong heat-radiation is pri-
marily its home. The cause of its appearance
— or at least one of its appearances — is familiar
knowledge, but it may be well to state it in
dictionary terms : ^^ An optical illusion due to

iLLrsiOKS

117

excessive bending of light-rays in traversing
adjacent layers of air of widely different densi-
ties, whereby distorted, displaced, or inverted
images are produced/^ *

This is no doubt the true explanation of that
form of mirage in which people on Sahara see
caravans in the sky trailing along, upside down,
like flies upon the ceiling ; or on the ocean see
ships hanging in the air, masts and sails down-
ward. But the explanation is very general and
is itself in some need of explanation. Perhaps
then I may be pardoned for trying to illustrate
the theory of mirage in my own way.

The rays of light that come from the sun to
the earth appear to travel in a straight line,
but they never do. As soon as they meet with
and pass into the atmospheric envelope they are
bent or deflected from their original direction
and reach the earth by obtuse angles or in long
descending curves like a spent rifle ball. This
bending of the rays is called refraction, which
must not be confounded with reflection — a some-
thing quite different. Now refraction is, of
course, the greatest where the atmosphere is the
densest. The thicker the air the more acute the
bending of the light-ray. Hence the thick lay-
* Century Dictionary.

Need of ex-
planation.

Refraction
of light-
rays.

118

THE DESERT

Dense air-
strata.

Illustration
of camera
lens.

ers of air lying along or a few feet above the
surface of the earth on a hot day are peculiarly
well-fitted to distort the light-ray, and conse-
quently well-fitted to produce the effect of mir-
age. These layers of air are of varying densi-
ties. Some are thicker than others ; and in
this respect the atmosphere bears a resemblance
to an ordinary photographic or telescopic lens.
Let us use the lens illustration for a moment
and perhaps it will aid comprehension of the
subject.

You know that the lens, like the air, is of
varying thicknesses or densities, and you know
that in the ordinary camera the rays of light,
passing through the upper part of the lens,
are refracted or bent toward the perpendicular
so that they reach the ground-glass " finder "
at the bottom ; and that the rays passing
through the lower part of the lens go to the top
of the ^^finder.^^ The result is that you have
on the ^' finder " or the negative something re-
versed— things upside down. That, so far as
the reversed image goes, is precisely the case in
mirage. The air-layers act as a lens and bend
the light-rays so that when seen in our ^^ finder "
— the eye — the bottom of a tree, for example,
goes to the top and the top goes to the bottom.

ILLUSIONS

119

But there is something more to mirage than
this reversed image. The eyes do not see things
'^ in their place/' but see them hanging in the
air as in the case of ships and caravans. To
explain this, in the absence of a diagram, we
shall have to take up another illustration. Sup-
pose a light-ray so violently bent by the heat
lying above a sidewalk that it should come to
us around a street corner, and thereby we should
see a man coming up a side street that lies at
right angles to us. He would appear to our
eyes to be coming up, not the side street, but
the street we are standing in. The man, to all
appearances, would not be "in his place." We
should see him where he is not.

Now suppose again instead of the light-rays
bending to right or left (as in the street-corner
illustration), we consider them as bending sky-
ward or earthward. Suppose yourself at sea
and that you are looking up into the sky above
the horizon. You see there a ship " out of its
place/' hanging in the air in an impossible
manner — something which is equivalent, or at
least analogous, to looking down the street and
seeing the image of the man around the comer.
You are looking straight into the sky, yet see-
ing a ship below the verge. The light-rays

The lent
light-ray.

Ships at

120

THE DESERT

Ships up-
side doivn.

coming from the ship on the water describe an
obtuse angle or curve in reaching the eye. The
rays from the bottom of the ship, lying in a
dense part of the air-lens, are more acutely
bent than those from the masts, and hence they
go to the top of the photographic plate or your
field of vision, whereas the rays from the ship's
masts, being in a thinner atmosphere, are less
violently bent, and thus go to the bottom of your
field of vision. The result is the ship high in
air above the horizon-line and upside down.

The illusion or deception consists in this :
We usually see things in flat trajectory, so to
speak. Light comes to us in comparatively
straight rays. The mind, therefore, has formu-
lated a law that we see only by straight rays.
In the case of mirage the light comes to us on
curved, bent, or angular rays. The eyes recog-
nize this, but the mind refuses to believe it and
hence is deceived. We think we see the ship
in the air by the straight ray, but in reality we
see the ship on the water by the bent ray. It
is thus that ships are often seen when far below
the horizon-line, and that islands in the sea be-
low the ocean's rim, and so far away as a hun-
dred miles, are seen looming in the air. ^^ Loom-
ing " is the word that describes the excessive

Wherein the
illusion.

ILLUSIONS

121

apparent elevation of the object in the sky and
is more striking on sea than land. Captains of
vessels often tell strange tales of how high in
the air, ships and towns and coasts are seen.
The report has even come back from Alaska of
a city seen in the sky that is supposed to be the
city of Bristol. In tropical countries and over
warm ocean-currents there are often very acute
bendings of the light-rays. Why may it not be
so in colder lands with colder currents ?

The form of mirage that gives us the reversed
image is seen on the desert as well as on the
sea ; but not frequently — at least not in my ex-
perience. There is an illusion of mountains
hanging peak downward from the sky, but one
may wander on the deserts for months and
never see it. The reality and the phantom
both appear in the view — the phantom seeming
to draw up and out of the original in a dis-
torted, cloud-like shape. It is almost always
misshapen, and as it rises high in air it seems
to be detached from the original by currents of
air drifted in between. More familiar sights
are the appearances of trees, animals, houses,
wagons, all hanging in the air in enlarged and
elongated shapes and, of course, reversed. I
have seen horses hitched to a wagon hanging

''Looining''
of vessels,
islands,
and cities.

Reversed
image of
mountains.

122

THE DESERT

Horses and
cattle in
mirage.

Illusion of

rising

huttes.

high up in the air with the legs of the horses
twenty feet long and the wagon as large as a
cabin. The stilted antelope ^^ forty feet high
and upside down^^ is as seldom seen in the
sky as upon the earth ; but desert cattle in
bunches of half a dozen will sometimes walk
about on the aerial ceiling in a very astonishing
way.

Yet these, too, are infrequent appearances.
Nor is the illusion of buttes rising from the
plain in front of you often seen. It happens
only when there are buttes at one side or the
other, and, I presume, this mirage is caused by
the 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 one
and then another, until there is a range of them
that holds the appearance of reality perhaps for
hours, and then gradually fades out like a stere-
opticon picture — the bases going first and the
tops gradually melting into the sky. When
seen at sunset against a yellow sky the effect is
magnificent. The buttes, even in illusion, take
on a wonderful blue hue (the complementary
color of yellow), and they seem to drift upon the
sky as upon an open sea.

The bending of the light-rays to either side

ILLUSIONS

133

instead of up or down, as following the perpen-
dicular, may or may not be of frequent occur-
rence. I do not even know if the butte appear-
ance is to be attributed to that. The opportunity
to see it came to me but once, and I had not
then the time to observe whether the buttes in
the mirage had sides the reverse of the originals.
Besides, it is certain that mirage is caused in
other ways than by the bending of light-rays.
The most common illusion of the desert is the
water-mirage and that is caused by reflection,
not refraction. Its usual appearance is that of
a lake or sea of water with what looks at a dis-
tance to be small islands in it. There are those
with somewhat more lively imagination than
their fellows who can see cows drinking in the
water, trees along the margin of the shore
(palms usually), and occasionally a farm-house,
a ship, or a whale. I have never seen any of
these wonderful things, but the water and
island part of the illusion is to be seen almost
anywhere in the desert basins during hot weath-
er. In the lower portions of the Colorado it
sometimes spreads over thousands of acres, and
appears not to move for hours at a stretch. At
other times the wavering of the heat or the
swaying of the air strata, or a change in the'

other
causes for
mirage.

Water-
mirage.

The lake
appearance.

124

THE DESERT

How pro-
duced.

Objects in
the water.

Confused
mirage.

density of the air will give the appearance of
waves or slight undulations on the water. In
either case the illusion is quite perfect. Water
lying in such a bed would reflect the exact color
of the sky over it ; and what the eyes really
see in this desert picture is the reflection of the
sky not from water but from strata of thick air.

This illusion of water is probably seen more
perfectly in the great dry lake-beds of the des-
ert where the ground is very flat and there is
no vegetation, than elsewhere. In the old Coa-
huila Valley region of the Colorado the water
comes up very close to you and the more you
flatten the angle of reflection by flattening your-
self upon the ground, the closer the water ap-
proaches. The objects in it which people im-
agine look like familiar things are certainly very
near. And these objects — wild-fowl, bushes,
tufts of swamp grass, islands, buttes — are fre-
quently bewildering because some of them are
right side up and some of them are not. Some
are reversed in the air and some are quietly
resting upon the ground.

It happens at times that the whole picture is
confused by the light-rays being both reflected
and refracted, and in addition that the rays
from certain objects come to us in a direct line.

ILLUSIONS

125

The ducks, reeds, and tufts of grass, for instance,
are only clods of dirt or sand-banked bushes
which are detached at the bottom by heavy drifts
of air. We see their tops right side up by look-
ing through the air-layer or some broken por-
tion of it. But in the same scene there may be
trees upside down, and mountains seen in re-
flection, drawn out to stupendous proportions.
In the Salton Basin one hot day in September a
startled coyote very obligingly ran through a
most brilliant water-mirage lying directly be-
fore me. I could only see his head and part of
his shoulders, for the rest of him was cut off
by the air-layer ; but the appearance was that of
a wolf swimming rapidly across a lake of water.
The illusion of the water was exact enough be-
cause it was produced by reflection, but there
was no illusion about the upper part of the
coyote. The rays of light from his head and
shoulders came to me unrefracted and unre-
flected — came as light usually travels from ob-
ject to eye.

But refracted or reflected, every feature of the
water-mirage is attractive. And sometimes its
kaleidoscopic changes keep the fancy moving at
a pretty pace. The appearance and disappear-
ance of the objects and colors in the mirage

The swim-
ming wo\f.

126

THE DESERT

Colors and
shadows in
mirage.

Trembling
air.

are often quite wonderful. The reversed moun-
tain peaks, with light and shade and color upon
them, wave in and out of the imaginary lake,
and are perhaps succeeded by undulations of
horizon colors in grays and pinks, by sunset
skies and scarlet clouds, or possibly by the
white cap of a distant sierra that has been
caught in the angle of reflection.

But with all its natural look one is at loss to
understand how it could ever be seriously ac-
cepted as a fact, save at the first blush. People
dying for water and in delirium run toward it
— at least the more than twice-told tales of trav-
ellers so report — but I never knew any healthy
eye that did not grow suspicious of it after the
first glance. It trembles and glows too much
and soon reveals itself as something intangible,
hardly of earth, little more than a shifting fan-
tasy. You cannot see it clear-cut and well-de-
fined, and the snap-shot of your camera does
not catch it at all.

Yet its illusiveness adds to, rather than de-
tracts from, its beauty. Kose-colored dreams are
always delightful ; and the mirage is only a
dream. It has no more substantial fabric than
the golden haze that lies in the canyons at sun-
set. It is only one of nature's veilings which

ILLUSIONS

127

she puts on or off capriciously. But again its
loveliness is not the less when its uncertain,
fleeting character is revealed. It is one of the
desert^s most charming features because of its
strange light and its softly glowing opaline color.
And there we have come back again to that
beauty in landscape which lies not in the lines
of mountain valley and plain, but in the almost
formless masses of color and light.

Beauty of
mirage.

Views of
Nature.

CHAPTEE VIII
CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD

Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolent
goddess just as our own inadequate vision
happens to see her. If we have eyes only for
her creative beauties we think her all goodness ;
if we see only her power of destruction we
incline to think she is all evil. With what
infinite care and patience, worthy only of a
good goddess, does she build up the child, the
animal, the bird, the tree, the flower ! How
wonderfully she fits each for its purpose, round-
ing it with strength, energy, and grace ; and
beautifying it with a prodigality of colors. For
twenty years she works night and day to bring
the child to perfection, for twenty days she toils
upon the burnished wings of some insect buz-
zing in the sunlight, for twenty hours she paints
the gold upon the petals of the dandelion. And
then what ? What of the next twenty ? Does
she leave her handiwork to take care of itself
until an unseen dragon called Decay comes
138

CACTUS AND GEEASE WOOD

129

along to destroy it ? !N"ot at all. The good
goddess has a hand that builds up. Yes ; and
she has another hand that takes down. The
maryellous skill of the one has its complement,
its counterpart, in the other. Block by block
she takes apart the mosaic with just as much
deftness as she put it together.

Those first twenty years of our life we were
allowed to sap blood and strength from our sur-
roundings ; the last twenty years of our life our
surroundings are allowed to sap blood and
strength from us. It is Nature^s plan and it is
carried out without any feeling. With the same
indifferent spirit that she planted in us an eye
to see or an ear to hear, she afterward plants a
microbe to breed and a cancer to eat. She in
herself is both growth and decay. The virile
and healthy things of the earth are hers ; and
so, too, are disease, dissolution, and death. The
flower and the grass spring up, they fade, they
wither ; and Nature neither rejoices in the life
nor sorrows in the death. She is neither good
nor evil ; she is only a great law of change that
passeth understanding. The gorgeous pagean-
try of the earth with all its beauty, the life
thereon with its hopes and fears and struggles,
and we a part of the universal whole, are brought

Growth and
decay.

Nature's
plan.

130

THE DESERT

The law of
change.

Nature foil-
ing her own
plans.

Attacit and
defence.

up from the dust to dance on the green in the
sunlight for an hour ; and then the procession
that comes after us turns the sod and we creep
back to Mother Earth. All, all to dust again ;
and no man to this day knoweth the why thereof.

One is continually assailed with queries of
this sort whenever and wherever he begins to
study lN*ature. He never ceases to wonder why
she should take such pains to foil her own plans
and bring to naught her own creations. Why
did she give the flying fish such a willowy tail
and such long fins, why did she labor so in-
dustriously to give him power of flight, when at
the same time she was giving another fish in the
sea greater strength, and a bird in the air great-
er swiftness wherewith to destroy him ? Why
should she make the tarantula such a powerful
engine of destruction when she was in the same
hour making his destroyer, the tarantula- wasp ?
And always here in the desert the question
comes up : Why should ISTature give these
shrubs and plants such powers of endurance
and resistance, and then surround them by heat,
drouth, and the attacks of desert animals ? It
is existence for a day, but sooner or later the
growth goes down and is beaten into dust.

The individual dies. Yes ; but not the species.

CACTUS AND GEEASE WOOD

131

Perhaps now we are coming closer to an under-
standing of Nature's method. It is the species
that she designs to last, for a period at least ;
and the individual is of no great importance,
merely a sustaining factor, one among millions
requiring continual renewal. It is a small mat-
ter whether there are a thousand acres of grease
wood more or less, but it is important that the
family be not extinguished. It grows readily
in the most barren spots, is very abundant and
very hardy, and hence is protected only by an
odor and a varnish. On the contrary take the
bisnaga — a rather rare cactus. It has only a
thin, short tap-root, therefore it has an enor-
mous upper reservoir in which to store water,
and a most formidable armor of fish-hook
shaped spines that no beast or bird can pene-
trate. Eemove the danger which threatens the
extinction of the family and immediately Nat-
ure removes the defensive armor. On the
desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn like
a point of steel. Follow it from the desert in-
to the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where
th^re is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of
chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find
it turned into a tree, and the thorn merely a
dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the

Preserva-
tion of the
species.

Means of
preserva-
tion.

132

THE DESERT

Maintain-
ing the
status quo.

The plant-
struggle for
life.

pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
cousin, the organ cactus, you find them growing
a soft thorn that would hardly penetrate cloth-
ing. Abundance of soil and rain, abundance
of other vegetation for browsing animals, and
there is no longer need of protection. With
it the family would increase too rapidly.

So it seems that Nature desires neither in-
crease nor decrease in the species. She wishes
to maintain the status quo. And for the sake
of keeping up the general healthfulness and
virility of her species she requires that there
shall be change in the component parts. Each
must suffer not a ^^sea change, ^^ but a chemical
change ; 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 her
desert growths into the Styx to make them in-
vulnerable, yet ever she holds them by the heel
and leaves one point open to the destroying
arrow.

Yet it is remarkable how Nature designs and
prepares the contest — the struggle for life —
that is continually going on in her world. How
wonderfully she arms both offence and defence !
What grounds she chooses for the conflict !
What stern conditions she lays down ! Given a

CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD

133

waste of sand and rock, given a heat so intense
that under a summer sun the stones will blister
a bare foot like hot iron, given perhaps two or
three inches of rain in a twelvemonth ; and
what vegetation could one expect to find grow-
ing there ? Obviously, none at all. But
no ; Nature insists that something shall fight
heat and drouth even here, and so she designs
strange growths that live a starved life, and
bring forth after their kind with much labor.
Hardiest of the hardy are these plants and just
as fierce in their way as the wild-cat. You can-
not touch them for the claw. They have no
idea of dying without a struggle. You will
find every one of them admirably fitted to en-
dure. They are marvellous engines of resist-
ance.

The first thing that all these plants have to
fight against is heat, drouth, and the evaporation
of what little moisture they may have. And
here !N^ature has equipped them with ingenuity
and cunning. Not all are designed alike, to be
sure, but each after its kind is good. There
are the cacti, for example, that will grow where
everything else perishes. Why ? For one rea-
son because they have geometrical forms that
prevent loss from evaporation by contracting a

Fighting
heat and
drouth.

Prevention
of evaporor
tion.

134

THE DESERT

Absence of
large leaves.

Exhaust of
moisture.

minimum surface for a given bulk of tissue.*
There is no waste, no unnecessary exposure of
surface. Then there are some members of the
family like the ^^ old man " cactus, that have
thick coatings of spines and long hairy growths
that prevent the evaporation of moisture by
keeping off the wind. Then again the cacti
have no leaves to tempt the sun. Many of the
desert growths are so constructed. Even such
a tree as the lluvia d^oro has needles rather than
leaves, though it does put forth a row of tiny
leaves near the end of the needle ; and when we
come to examine the ordinary trees such as the
mesquite, the depua, the palo breya, the palo
verde, and all the acacia family, we find they
have very narrow leaves that have a fashion of
hanging diagonally to the sun and thus avoid-
ing the direct rays. Nature is determined that
there shall be no unnecessary exhaust of moist-
ure through foliage. The large-leafed bush or
tree does not exist. The best shade to be found
on the desert is under the mesquite, and unless
it is very large, the sun falls through it easily
enough.

* I am indebted to Professor Forbes of the University
of Arizona for this and several other statements in con-
nection with desert vegetation.

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

135

As an extra precaution some shrubs are given
a shellac-like sap or gum with which they var-
nish their leaves and make evaporation almost
impossible. The ordinary greasewood is an ex-
ample of this ; and perhaps because of its var-
nish, it is, with the cacti, the hardiest of all the
desert growths. It is found wherever anything
living is found, and flourishes under the fiercest
heat. Its leaves always look bright and have a
sticky feeling about them as though recently
shellacked.

There are other growths that seem to have a
fine sense of discretion in the matter of danger,
for they let fall all their leaves at the first ap-
proach of drouth. The ocatilla, or "candle
wood " as it is sometimes called, puts out a long
row of bright leaves along its stems after a rain,
but as soon as drouth comes it sheds them has-
tily and then stands for months in the sunlight
— a bundle of bare sticks soaked with a resin
that will burn with fire, but will not evaporate
with heat. The sangre de dragon (sometimes
called sangre en grado) does the same thing.

But Nature's most common device for the
protection and preservation of her desert brood
is to supply them with wonderful facilities for
finding and sapping what moisture there is, and

Qums and
varnishes
of bush&a.

The ocatilla.

136

THE DESERT

Tap roots.

Under-
ground
structure.

Feeding the
top growth.

conserving it in tanks and reservoirs. The
roots of the greasewood and the mesquite are
almost as powerful as the arms of an octopus,
and they are frequently three times the length
of the bush or tree they support. They will
bore their way through rotten granite to find a
damp ledge almost as easily as a diamond drill ;
and they will pry rocks from their foundations
as readily as the wistaria wrenches the ornamen-
tal wood-work from the roof of a porch. They
are always thirsty and they are always running
here and there in the search for moisture. A
vertical section of their underground structure
revealed by the cutting away of a river bank or
wash is usually a great surprise. One marvels
at the great network of roots required to sup-
port such a very little growth above ground.

Yet this network serves a double purpose.
It not only finds and gathers what moisture
there is but stores it in its roots, feeding the
top growth with it economically, not wastef ully.
It has no notion of sending too much moisture
up to the sunlight and the air. Cut a twig and
it will often appear very dry ; cut a root and
you will find it moist.

The storage reservoir below ground is not an
unusual method of supplying water to the plant.

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

137

Many of the desert growths have it. Perhaps
the most notable example of it is the wild gourd.
This is little more than an enormous tap root
that spreads out turnip-shaped and is in size
often as large around as a man^s body. It holds
water in its pulpy tissue for months at a time, and
while almost everything above ground is parched
and dying the vines and leaves of the gourd,
fed from the reservoir below, will go on grow-
ing and the flowers continue blooming with the
most unruffled serenity. In the Sonora deserts
there is a cactus or a bush (its name I have never
heard) growing from a root that looks almost like
a horneVs nest. This root is half-wood, half-
vegetable, and is again a water reservoir like the
root of the gourd.

But there are reservoirs above ground quite
as interesting as those below. The tall fluted
column of the sahuaro, sometimes fifty feet
high, is little more than an upright cistern for
holding moisture. Its support within is a se-
ries of sticks arranged in cylindrical form and
held together by some fibre, some tissue, and a
great deal of saturated pulp. Drive a stick
into it after a rain and it will run sap almost
like the maguey from which the Indians distill
mescal. All the cacti conserve water in their

storage
reservoirs
below
ground.

Reservoirs

above

ground.

138

THE DESERT

Thickened
barks.

Qathering
'(moisture.

A ttacks
upon desert
plants.

lobes or columns or at the base near the ground.
So too the Spanish bayonets^ the yuccas, the
prickly pears and the choUas.

Many of the shrubs and trees like the sangre
de dragon and the torote have enlarged or
thickened barks to hold and supply water. If
you cut them the sap runs readily. When it
congeals it forms a gum which heals over the
wound and once more prevents evaporation.
Existence for the plants would be impossible
without such inventions. Plant life of every
kind requires some moisture all the time. It
is an error to suppose because they grow in the
so-called ^^ rainless desert^' that therefore they
exist without water. They gather and hus-
band it during wet periods for use during dry
periods, and in doing so they seem to display
almost as much intelligence as a squirrel or an ant
does in storing food for winter consumption.

Is Nature's task completed then when she
has provided the plants with reservoirs of water
and tap roots to pump for them ? By no means.
How long would a tank of moisture exist in the
desert if unprotected from the desert animals ?
The mule-deer lives here, and he can go for
weeks without water, but he will take it every
day if he can get it. And the coyote can run

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

139

the hills indefinitely with little or no moisture ;
but he will eat a water melon, rind and all, and
with great relish, when the opportunity offers.
The sahuaro, the bisnaga, the choUa, and the
pan-cake lobed prickly pear would have a short
life and not a merry one if they were left to the
mercy of the desert prowler. As it is they are
sometimes sadly worried about their roots by
rabbits and in their lobes by the deer. It
seems almost incredible but is not the less a
fact, that deer and desert cattle will eat the
cholla — fruit, stem, and trunk — though it
bristles with spines that will draw blood from
the human hand at the slightest touch.

Nature knows very well that the attack will
come and so she provides her plants with various
different defenses. The most common weapon
which she gives them is the spine or thorn.
Almost everything that grows has it and its
different forms are many. They are all of them
sharp as a needle and some of them have saw-
edges that rip anything with which they come
in contact. The grasses, and those plants akin
to them like the yucca and the maguey, are
often both saw-edged and spine-pointed. All
the cacti have thorns, some straight, some
barbed like a harpoon, some curved like a hook.

Browsing
animals.

Weapons of
defense.

140

THE DESERT

The spine
and thorn,

The cruci-
fixion thorn.

There are ehollas that have a sheath covering
the thorn — a scabbard to the sword — and when
anything pushes against it the sheath is left
sticking in the wound. The different forms of
the bisnaga are little more than vegetable por-
cupines. They bristle with quills or have hook-
shaped thorns that catch and hold the intruder.
The sahuaro has not so many spines, but they
are so arranged that you can hardly strike the
cylinder without striking the thorns.

The cacti are defended better than the other
growths because they have more to lose, and are
consequently more subject to attack. And yet
there is one notable exception. The crucifix-
ion thorn is a bush or tree somewhat like the
palo verde, except that it has no leaf. It is a
thorn and little else. Each small twig runs
out and ends in a sharp spike of which the
branch is but the supporting shaft. It bears
in August a small yellow flower but this grows
out of the side of the spike. In fact the whole
shrub seems created for no other purpose than
the glorification of the thorn as a thorn.*

* It is said to be very scarce but I have found it grow-
ing along the Castle Creek region of Arizona, also at
Kingman, Peach Springs, and further north. A stunted
variety grows on the Mojave but it is not frequently seen
on the Colorado.

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

141

Tree, bush, plant and grass — ^great and small
alike — each has its sting for the intruder. You
can hardly stoop to pick a desert flower or pull a
bunch of small grass without being aware of a
prickle on your hand. Nature seems to have
provided a whole arsenal of defensive weapons
for 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 de-
fended. And she has given them not only
armor but a spirit of tenacity and stubbornness
wherewith to carry on the struggle. Cut out
the purslain and the iron weed from the garden
walk, and it springs up again and again, con-
tending for life. Put heat, drouth, and ani-
mal attack against the desert shrubs and they
fight back like the higher forms of organic life.
How typical they are of everything in and about
the desert. There is but one word to describe
it and that word — fierce — I shall have worn
threadbare before I have finished these chapters.

We have not yet done with enumerating the
defenses of these plants. The bushes like the
greasewood and the sage have not the bulk of
body to grow the thorn. They are too slight,
too rambling in make-up. Besides their reser-
voirs are protected by being in their roots under

The sting of
flowers.

Fierceness
of the plant.

142

THE DESERT

Odors and
juices.

Saps astrin-
gent and
cathartic.

the ground. But Nature has not left their
tops wholly at the mercy of the deer. Take
the leaf of the sage and crush it in your hand.
The odor is anything but pleasant. No animal
except the jack-rabbit, no bird except the sage
hen will eat it ; and no human being will eat
either the rabbit or the hen, if he can get any-
thing else, because of the rank sage flavor.
Rub the greasewood in your hand and it feels
harsh and brittle. The resinous varnish of the
leaves gives it a sticky feeling and a disagreeable
odor again. Nothing on the desert will touch
it. Cut or break a twig of the sangre de dragon
and a red sap like blood runs out. Touch it to
the tongue and it proves the most powerful of
astringents. The Indians use it to cauterize
bullet wounds. Again no animal will touch it.
Half the plants on the desert put forth their
leaves with impunity. They are not disturbed
by either browsers or grazers. Some of them
are poisonous, many of them are cathartic or
emetic, nearly all of them are disagreeable to
the taste.

So it seems with spines, thorns, barbs, resins,
varnishes and odorous smells Nature has armed
her desert own very effectually. And her ex-
penditure of energy may seem singularly dis-

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

143

proportionate to the result attained. The little
vegetation that grows in the waste may not
seem worth while, may seem insignificant
compared with the great care bestowed upon it.
But Nature does not think so. To her the cac-
tus of the desert is just as important in its
place as the arrowy pine on the mountain.
She means that something shall grow and bear
fruit after its kind even on the gravel beds of
the Colorado ; she means that the desert shall
have its covering, scanty though it be, just the
same as the well-watered lands of the tropics.

But are they useful, these desert growths ?
Certainly they are ; just as useful as the pine
tree or the potato plant. To be sure, man
cannot saw them into boards or cook them in a
pot ; but then Nature has other animals be-
side man to look after, other uses for her pro-
ducts than supporting human life. She toils
and spins for all alike and man is not her spe-
cial care. The desert vegetation answers her
purposes and who shall say her purposes have
ever been other than wise ?

Are they beautiful these plants and shrubs
of the desert ? Now just what do you mean
by that word '* beautiful '^ ? Do you mean
something of regular form, something smooth

The expend-
iture of
energy.

The desert
covering.

Use of
desert
plants.

144

THE DESERT

Their
beauty.

Beauty in
character.

Forms of
theyucca
and
maguey.

and pretty ? Are yon dragging into nature
some remembrances of classic art; and are
you looking for the Dionysius face, the
Doryphorus form, among these trees and
bushes ? If so the desert will not furnish you
too much of beauty. But if you mean some-
thing that has a distinct character, something
appropriate to its setting, something admirably
fitted to a designed end (as in art the peasants
of Millet or the burghers of Kembrandt and
Rodin), then the desert will show forth much
that people nowadays are beginning to think
beautiful. Mind you, perfect form and perfect
color are not to be despised ; neither shall you
despise perfect fitness and perfect character.
The desert plants, every one of them, have very
positive characters ; and I am not certain but
that many of them are interesting and beauti-
ful even in form and color.

No doubt it is an acquired taste that leads
one to admire greasewood and cactus ; but can
anyone be blind to the graceful form of the
maguey, or better still, the yucca with its tall
stalk rising like a shaft from a bowl and capped
at the top by nodding creamy flowers ? On the
mountains and the mesas the sahuaro is so com-
mon that perhaps we overlook its beauty of

CACTUS AND GEEASEWOOD

145

form ; yet its lines are as sinnous as those of a
Moslem minaret, its flutings as perfect as those
of a Doric column. Often and often you see it
standing on a ledge of some rocky peak, like
the lone shaft of a ruined temple on a Greek
headland. And by way of contrast what could
be more lovely than the waving lightness, the
drooping gracefulness of the lluvia d^oro. The
swaying tossing lluvia d'oro, well called the
^' shower of gold " ! It is one of the most beau-
tiful of the desert trees with its white skin like
the northern birch, its long needles like the
pine, and the downward sweep of its branches
like the willow. A strange wild tree that seems
to shun all society, preferring to dwell like a
hermit among the rocks. It roots itself in the
fissures of broken granite and it seems at its
happiest when it can let down its shower of gold
over some precipice.

There are other tree forms, like the palo verde
and the mesquite, that are not wanting in a
native grace ; and yet it may as well be admitted
that most of the trees and bushes are lacking
in height, mass, and majesty. It is no place
for large growths that reach up to the sun. The
heat and drouth are too great and tend to make
form angular and grotesque. But these very

The lluvia
d'oro.

Grotesque
forms.

146

THE DESEET

Abnormal
colors.

Blossoms
and flowers.

conditions that dwarf form perhaps enhance
color by distorting it in an analogous manner.
When plants are starved for water and grow in
thin poor soil they often put on colors that are
abnormal, even unhealthy. Because of starva-
tion perhaps the little green of the desert is a
sallow green ; and for the same reason the lobes
of the prickly pear are pale-green, dull yellow,
sad pink or livid mauve. The prickly pear
seems to take all colors dependent upon the
poverty, or the mineral character, of the ground
where it grows. In that respect perhaps it is
influenced in the same way as the parti-colored
hydrangea of the eastern dooryard.

All the cacti are brilliant in the flowers they
bear. The top of the bisnaga in summer is at
first a mass of yellow, then bright orange, finally
dark red. The sahuaro bears a purple flower,
and the cholla, the ocatilla, the pitahaya come
along with pink or gold or red or blue flowers.
And again all the bushes and trees in summer
put forth showers of color — graceful masses of
petaled cups that look more like flowers grown
in 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-
green bark that grows a blossom almost like an

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

147

eastern violet. And down in Sonora one is daz-
zled by the splendor of the guyacan (or gual-
lacan) which throws out blossoms half-blue and
half -red. All the commoner growths like the
sage, the mesquite, the palo fierro, and the palo
bianco, are blossom bearers. In fact everything
that grows at all in the desert puts forth in sea-
son some bright little flag of color. In the
mass they make little show, but examined in
the part they are interesting because of their
nurture, their isolation, and their peculiarity
of form and color. The conditions of life have
perhaps contorted t-hem, have paled or grayed
or flushed or made morbid their coloring ; but
they are all of them beautiful. Beautiful color
is usually unhealthy color as we have already
suggested.

Aside from the blossoms upon bush and tree
there are few bright petals shining in the des-
ert. It is no place for flowers. They are too
delicate and are usually wanting in tap root
and armor. If they spring up they are soon
cut down by drouth or destroyed by animals.
Many tales are told of the flowers that grow on
the waste after the rains, but I have not seen
them though I have seen the rains. There are
no lupins, phacelias, pentstemons, poppies, or

Many
varieties.

Wild
flowers.

148

THE DESERT

Saltrbush.

The grasses.

The lichens.

yellow violets. Occasionally one sees the wild
verbena or patches of the evening primrose, or
up in the swales the little baby blue-eye grow-
ing all alone, or perhaps the yellow mimulus ;
but all told they do not make up a very strong
contingent. The salt bush that looks the color
of Scotch heather, out-bulks them all ; and yet
is not conspicuously apparent. Higher up in the
hills and along the mesas one often meets with
many strange flowers, some fiery red and some
with spines like the Canadian thistle ; but not
down in the hot valleys of the desert.

Nor are there many grasses of consequence
aside from a small curled grass and the heavy
sacaton that grow in bunches upon isolated
portions of the desert. By " isolated ^^ I mean
that for some unknown reason there are tracts
on the desert seemingly sacred to certain plants,
some to cholla, some to yuccas, some to grease
wood, some to sahuaros, some to sacaton grass.
It seems to be a desert oddity that the vegeta-
tion does not mix or mingle to any great ex-
tent. There are seldom more than four or five
kinds of growth to be found in one tract. It
is even noticeable in the lichens. One moun-
tain range will have all gray lichens on its
northern walls, another range will have all

CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD

149

orange lichens, and still another will be mottled
by patches of coal-black lichens.

Strange growths of a strange land ! Heat,
drouth, and starvation gnawing at their vitals
month in and month out ; and yet how deter-
mined to live, how determined to fulfill their
destiny ! They keep fighting off the elements,
the animals, the birds. Never by day or by
night do they loose the armor or drop the spear
point. And yet with all the struggle they se-
renely blossom in season, perpetuate their kinds,
and hand down the struggle to the newer gen-
eration with no jot of vigor abated, no tittle
of hope dissipated. Strange growths indeed !
And yet strange, perhaps, only to us who have
never known their untrumpeted history.

The

continuous

struggle.

Meeting
desert re-
quirements.

The

peculiar
desert
character.

CHAPTER IX

DESERT ANIMALS

The life of the desert lives only by virtue of
adapting itself to the conditions of the desert.
Nature does not bend the elements to favor the
plants and the animals ; she makes the plants
and the animals do the bending. The torote
and the evening primrose must get used to heat,
drouth, and a rocky bed ; the coyote must learn
to go without food and water for long periods.
Even man, whose magnificent complacency leads
him to think himself one of Nature^s favorites,
fares no better than a wild cat or an angle of
choUa. He must endure the same heat, thirst,
and hunger or perish. There is no other alter-
native.

And so it happens that those things that can
live in the desert become stamped after a time
with a peculiar desert character. The struggle
seems to develop in them special characteristics
and make them, not different from their kind ;
but more positive, more insistent The yucca
150

DESERT ANIMALS

161

of the Mojave is the yucca of New Mexico and
Old Mexico but hardier ; the wild cat of the
Colorado is the wild cat of Virginia but swifter,
more ferocious ; the Yuma Indian is like the
Zuni or the Navajo but lanker, more sinewy,
more enduring. Father Garces, who passed
through here one hundred and twenty-five years
ago, records in his Memoirs more than once the
wonderful endurance of the desert Indians.
"The Jamajabs (a branch of the Yumas) en-
dure hunger and thirst for four days,^' he writes
in one place. The tale is told that the Indians
in the Coahuila Valley at the present day can
do substantially the same thing. And, too, it
is said that the Yumas have traveled from the
Colorado to the Pacific, across the desert on
foot, without any sustenance whatever. No
one, not to the desert born, could do such a
thing. Years of training in starvation, thirst
and exposure have produced a man almost as
hardy as the cactus, and just as distinctly a
type of the desert as the coyote.

But the Indian and the plant must have some
water. They cannot go without it indefinitely.
And just there the desert animals seem to fit
their environment a little snugger than either
plant or human. For, strange as it may ap-

Desert
Indians,

The
animali.

152

THE BESERT

Endurance
of the
jack-rabbit.

pear, many of them get no water at all. There
are sections of the desert, fifty or more miles
square, where there is not a trace of water in
river, creek, arroyo or pocket, where there is
never a drop of dew falling ; and where the two
or three showers of rain each year sink into the
sand and are lost in half an hour after they
have fallen. Yet that fifty-mile tract of sand
and rock supports its animal, reptile and insect
life just the same as a similar tract in Illinois
or Florida. How the animals endure, how —
even on the theory of getting used to it — the
jack-rabbit, the ground squirrel, the rat, and
the gopher can live for months without even
the moisture from green vegetation, is one of
the mysteries. A mirror held to the nose of
a desert rabbit will show a moist breath-mark
on the glass. The moisture came out of the
rabbit, is coming out of him every few sec-
onds of the day ; and there is not a drop of
moisture going into him. Evidently the an-
cient axiom : ^^ Out of nothing, nothing comes '^
is all wrong.

It is said in answer that the jack-rabbit gets
moisture from roots, cactus-lobes and the like.
And the reply is that you find him where there
are no roots but greasewood and no cactus at

DESERT ANIMALS

153

all. Besides there is no evidence from an ex-
amination of his stomach that he ever eats any-
thing but dried grass, bark, and sage leaves.
But if the matter is a trifle doubtful about the
rabbit on account of his traveling capacities,
there is no doubt whatever about the ground
squirrels, the rock squirrels, and the prairie
dogs. None of them ever gets more than a hun-
dred yards from his hole in his life, except pos-
sibly when migrating. And the circuit about
each hole is usually bare of everything except
dried grass. There in no moisture to be had.
The prairie dog is not found on the desert, but
in Wyoming and Montana there are villages of
them on the grass prairies, with no water, root,
lobe, or leaf within miles of them. The old
theory of the prairie dog digging his hole down
to water has no basis in fact. Patience, a strong
arm and a spade will get to the bottom of his
burrow in half an hour.

All the desert animals know the meaning of
a water famine, and even those that are pro-
nounced water drinkers know how to get on
with the minimum supply. The mule-deer
whose cousin in the Adirondacks goes down to
water every night, lives in the desert mountains,
month in and month out with nothing more

Rock
squirrels.

Prairie
dogs and
water.

Water
famiihe.

154

THE DESERT

Mule-deer
browsing.

Coyotes and
wild-cats
living with-
out water.

watery to quench thirst than a lobe of the
prickly pear or a joint of cholla. But he is nat-
urally fond of green vegetation, and in the early
morning he usually leaves the valley and climbs
the mountains where with goats and mountain
sheep be browses on the twigs of shrub and tree.
The coyote likes water, too, but he puts up with
sucking a nest of quail eggs, eating some mes-
quite beans, or at best absorbing the blood from
some rabbit. The wild cat will go for weeks
without more moisture than the blood of birds
or lizards, and then perhaps, after long thirst,
he will come to a water pocket in the rocks to
lap only a handful, doing it with an angry
snarling snap as though he disliked it and was
drinking under compulsion. The gray wolf
is too much of a traveler to depend upon any
one locality. He will run fifty miles in a night
and be back before morning. Whether he
gets water or not is not possible to ascertain.
The badger, the coon, and the bear are very
seldom seen in the more arid regions. They
are not strictly speaking desert animals because
unfitted to endure desert hardships. They are
naturally great eaters and sleepers, loving cool
weather and their own fatness ; and to that the
desert is sharply opposed. There is nothing

DESERT ANIMALS

156

fat in the land of sand and cactus. Animal
life is lean and gaunt ; if it sleeps at all it is with
one eye open ; and as for heat it cares very lit-
tle about it. For the first law of the desert to
which animal life of every kind pays allegiance
is the law of endurance and abstinence. After
that requirement is fulfilled special needs pro-
duce the peculiar qualities and habits of the in-
dividual.

Yet there is one quality more general than
special since almost everything possesses it, and
that is ferocity — fierceness. The strife is des-
perate ; the supply of food and moisture is
small, the animal is very hungry and thirsty.
What wonder then that there is the determi-
nation of the starving in all desert life ! Every-
thing pursues or is pursued. Every muscle is
strung to the highest tension. The bounding
deer must get away; the swift-following wolf
must not let him. The gray lizard dashes for
a ledge of rock like a flash of light ; but the
bayonet bill of the road runner must catch
him before he gets there. Neither can afford
to miss his mark. And that is perhaps the
reason why there is so much development in
special directions, so much fitness for a par-
ticular purpose, so much equipment for the

Lean,
gaunt l^e.

Fiercenesa
of the
animals.

156

THE DESERT

Fitness for
attack and
escape.

The wildr
cat.

The spring
of the cat.

doing or the avoiding of death. Because the
wild-cat cannot afford to miss his quarry, there-
fore is he made a something that seldom does
miss.

The description of the lion as ^^a jaw on four
paws " will fit the wild-cat very well — only he
is a jaw on two paws. The hind legs are in-
significant compared with the front ones, and
the body back of the shoulders is lean, lank,
slight, but withal muscular and sinewy. The
head is bushy, heavy, and square, the neck and
shoulders are massive, the forelegs and paws so
large that they look to belong to some other an-
imal. The ears are small yet sensitive enough
to catch the least noise, the nose is acute, the
eyes are like great mirrors, the teeth like points
of steel. In fact the whole animal is little more
than a machine for dragging down and devour-
ing prey. That and the protection of his breed
are his only missions on earth. He is the same
creeping, snarling beast that one finds in the
mountains of California, but the desert animal
is larger and stronger. He sneaks upon a band
of quail or a rabbit with greater caution, and
when he springs and strikes it is with greater
certainty. The enormous paws pin the game to
the earth, and the sharp teeth cut through like

DESERT ANIMALS

157

knives. It is not more than once in two or
three days that a meal comes within reach and
he has no notion of allowing it to get away.

The panther, or as he is more commonly
called, the mountain lion, is no such square-
built mass of muscle, no such bundle of energy
as the wild-cat, though much longer and larger.
The figure is wiry and serpentine, and has all the
action and grace of the tiger. It is pre-eminently
a figure for crouching, sneaking, springing, and
dragging down. His struggle-f or-lif e is perhaps
not so desperate as that of the cat because he lives
high up in the desert mountains where game is
more plentiful ; but he is a very good struggler
for all that. Occasionally one hears his cry in
the night (a cry that stops the yelp of the coyote
very quickly and sets the ears of the jack-rabbit
a-trembling) but he is seldom seen unless sought
for. Even then the seeker does not usually
care to look for him, or at him too long. He
has the tiger eye, and his jaw and claw are too
powerful to be trifled with. He will not attack
one unless at bay or wounded ; but as a moun-
tain prowler he is the terror of the young deer,
the mountain sheep, and the rabbit family.

One sees the gray wolf but little oftener than
the mountain lion. Sometimes in the very

Hie moun-
tain lion.

Habits of
the moun-
tain lion.

The gray
wolf.

158

THE DESERT

early morning you may catch a glimpse of him
sneaking np a mountain canyon, but he usually
keeps out of sight. His size is great for a wolf
— sometimes over six feet from nose to tail tip
— but it lies mostly in length and bulk. He does
not stand high on his feet and yet is a swift and
long-winded runner. In this and in his strength
of jaw lies his special equipment. He is not
very cunning but he takes up and follows a
trail, and runs the game to earth with consider-
able perseverance. I have never seen anything
but his footprints on the desert. Usually he
keeps well up in the mountains and comes down
on the plains only at night. He prefers prairie
or table-land country, with adjacent stock
ranges, to the desert, because there the hunting
is not difficult. Sheep, calves, and pigs he will
eat with some relish, but his favorite game is the
young colt. He runs all his game and catches
it as it runs like the true wolf that he is. Some-
times he hunts in packs of half a dozen, but if
there is no companionship he does not hesitate
to hunt alone.

The prairie wolf or coyote is not at all like
the gray wolf. He seldom runs after things,
though he does a good deal of running away
from them. And he is a fairly good runner too.

DESERT ANIMALS

159

But he does not win his living by his courage.
His special gift is not the muscular energy that
crushes at a blow ; nor the great strength that
follows and tires and finally drags down. Nat-
ure designed him with the wolf form and in-
stinct, but gave him something of the clever-
ness of the fox. It is by cunning and an
obliging stomach that the coyote is enabled to
eke out a living. He is cunning enough to
know, for instance, that you cannot see him on
a desert background as long as he does not
move ; so he sits still at times for many min-
utes, watching you from some little knoll. As
long as he is motionless your eyes pass over him
as a patch of sand or a weathered rock. When
he starts to move, it is with some deliberation.
He prefers a dog-trot and often several shots
from your rifle will not stir him into a run. He
slips along easily and gracefully — a lean, hungry-
looking wretch with all the insolence of a hood-
lum and all the shrewdness of a thief. He re-
quires just such qualities together with a keen
nose, good eyes and ears, and some swiftness of
dash to make a living. The desert bill of fare
is not all that a wolf could desire ; but the coyote
is not very particular. Everything is food that
comes to his jaws. He likes rabbit meat, but

Cleverness
of the
coyote.

160

THE DESERT

Hia subsist-
ence.

His hack-
ground.

Ihefox

does not often get it. For desert rabbits do
not go to sleep with both eyes shut. Failing
the rabbit he snuffs out birds and their nests,
trails up anything sick or wounded, and in emer-
gencies runs down and devours a lizard. If
animal food is scarce he turns his attention to
vegetation, eats prickly pears and mesquite
beans ; and up in the mountains he stands on
his hind legs and gathers choke cherries and
manzanitas. With such precarious living he be-
comes gaunt, leathery, muscled with whip-cord.
There is a meagreness and a scantiness about him ;
his coarse coat of hair is sun-scorched, his whole
appearance is arid, dusty, sandy. There is no
other animal so thoroughly typical of the desert.
He belongs there, skulking along the arroyos
and washes just as a horned toad belongs under
a granite bowlder. That he can live there at all
is due to Nature^s gift to him of all-around clev-
erness.

The fox is usually accounted the epitome of
animal cunning, but here in the desert he is
not frequently seen and is usually thought less
clever than the coyote. He prefers the foot-
hills and the cover of dense chaparral where he
preys upon birds, smells out the nest of the
valley quail^ catches a wood-rat 5 or^ if hard

DESEET ANIMALS

161

pushed to it, makes a meal of crickets and grass-
hoppers. But even at this he is not more facile
than the coyote. Nor can he surpass the coyote
in robbing a hen-roost and keeping out of a
trap while doing it. He cuts no important fig-
ure on the desert and, indeed, he is hardly a
desert animal though sometimes found there.
The conditions of existence are too severe for
him. The strength of the cat, the legs of the
wolf, and the stomach of the coyote are not his ;
and so he prowls nearer civilization and takes
more risk for an easier life.

And the prey, what of the prey ! The ani-
mals of the desert that furnish food for the
meat eaters like the wolf and the cat — the ani-
mals that cannot fight back or at least wage un-
equal warfare — are they left hopelessly and help-
lessly at the mercy of the destroyers ? Not so.
Nature endows them and protects them as best
she can. Every one of them has some device to
baffle or trick the enemy. Even the poor little
horned toad, that has only his not too thick
skin to save him, can slightly change the color
of that skin to suit the bowlder he is flattened
upon so that the keenest eye would pass him
over unnoticed. The jack-rabbit cannot change
his skin, but he knows many devices whereby he

The prey.

Devices for
escape.

162

THE DESERT

Senses of
the rabbit.

Speed of the
jaek-rabbit.

contrives to save it. Lying in his form at the
root of some bush or cactus he is not easily seen.
He crouches low and the gray of his fur fits
into the sand imperceptibly. You do not see
him but he sees you. His eyes never close ;
they are always watching. Look at them close-
ly as he lies dead before you and how large and
protruding they are ! In the life they see every-
thing that moves. And if his eyes fail him,
perhaps his ears will not. He was named the
jackass-rabbit because of his long ears ; and the
length of them is in exact proportion to their
acuteness of hearing. No footstep escapes them.
They are natural megaphones for the reception
of sound. It can hardly be doubted that his nose
is just as acute as his eyes and his ears. So
that all told he is not an animal easily caught
napping.

And if the jack-rabbif s senses fail him, has
he no other resource ? Certainly, yes ; that is if
he is not captured. In proportion to his size
he has the strongest hind legs of anything on
the desert. In this respect he is almost like a
kangaroo. When he starts running and begins
with his long bound, there is nothing that can
overtake him except a trained greyhound. He
ricochets from knoll to knoll like a bounding

DESERT ANIMALS

163

ball, and as he crosses ahead of yon perhaps yon
think he is not moving very fast. Bnt shoot at
him and see how far behind him your rifle ball
strikes the dust. No coyote or wolf is foolish
enongh to chase him or ever try to rnn him
down. His endurance is quite as good as his
speed. It makes no difference about his not
drinking water and that all his energy comes
from bark and dry grass. He keeps right on
running ; over stones, through cactus, down a
canyon, up a mountain. For keen senses and
swift legs he is the desert type as emphatically
as the coyote that is forever prowling on his
track.

The little ^' cotton-tail '' rabbit is not perhaps
so well provided for as the jack-rabbit ; but
then he does not live in the open and is not so
exposed to attack. He hides in brush, weeds, or
grass ; and when startled makes a quick dash
for a hole in the ground or a ledge of rock. His
legs are good for a short distance, and his senses
are acute ; but the wild-cat or the coyote catches
him at last. The continuance of his species
lies in prolific breeding. The wild-cat, too,
catches a good many gophers, rats, mice, and
squirrels. The squirrels are many in kind and
beautiful in their forms and colorings. One

His endur-
ance.

The ''cotton-
taiV

164

THE DESERT

Squirrtls

and

gophers.

The desert
antelope.

Sis eyes.

can hardly count them all — squirrels with long
tails and short tails and no tails ; squirrels
yellow, brown, gray, blue, and slate-colored.
They live in the rocks about the bases of the
desert mountains ; and eventually they fall a
prey to the wild-cat who watches for them just
as the domestic cat watches for the house rat.
Their only safeguard is their energetic way of
darting into a hole. For all their sharp noses
and ears they are foolish little folk and will
keep poking their heads out to see what is go-
ing on.

But for acute senses, swift legs, and powerful
endurance nothing can surpass the antelope.
He is rarely seen to-day (morels the pity !) ; but
only a few years ago there were quite a number
of them on the Sonora edge of the Colorado
Desert. Usually they prefer the higher mesas
where the land is grass-grown and the view is
unobstructed ; but they have been known to
come far down into the desert. And the ante-
lope is very well fitted for the sandy waste. The
lack of water does not bother him, he can eat
anything that grows in grass or bush ; and he
can keep from being eaten about as cleverly as
any of the deer tribe. His eye alone is a marvel
of development. It protrudes from the socket

DESERT ANIMALS

165

— bulges out almost like the end of an egg —
and if there were corners on the desert mesas
I believe that eye could see around them. He
cannot be approached in any direction without
seeing what is going on ; but he may be still-
hunted and shot from behind crag or cover.

His curiosity is usually the death of him, be-
cause he will persist in standing still and look-
ing at things ; but his senses almost always give
him fair warning. His nose and ears are just
as acute as his eyes. And how he can run !
His legs seem to open and shut like the blades
of a pocket-knife, so leisurely, so apparently
effortless. But how they do take him over the
ground ! With one leg shot from under him
he runs pretty nearly as fast as before. A
tougher, more wiry, more beautiful animal was
never created. Perhaps that is the reason why
every man^s hand has been raised against him
until now his breed is almost extinct. He was
well fitted to survive on the desert mesas and
the upland plains — a fine type of swiftness and
endurance — but Nature in her economy never
reckoned with the magazine rifle nor the greed
of the individual who calls himself a sports-
man.

The mule-deer with his large ears, long muz-

His nose
and ears.

His
swiftness.

166

THE DESERT

zle and keen eyes, is almost as well provided for
as the antelope. He has survived the antelope
possibly because he does not live in the open
country. He haunts the brush and the rock
cover of the gorge and the mountain side.
There in the heavy chaparral he will skulk
and hide while you may pass within a few feet
of him. If he sees that he is discovered he
can make a dash up or down the mountain in
a way that astonishes. Stones, sticks, and brush
have no terror for him. He jumps over them
or smashes through them. He will bound
across a talus of broken porphyry that will cut
the toughest boots to pieces, striking all four
feet with every bound, and yet not ruffle the
hair around his dew claws ; or he will dash
through a tough dry chaparral at full speed
without receiving a scrape or a cut of any kind.
The speed he attains on such ground aston-
ishes again. His feet seem to strike rubber in-
stead of stone ; for he bounds like a ball, de-
scribes a quarter circle, and bounds again. The
magazine of your rifle may be emptied at him ;
and still he may go on, gayly cutting quarter
circles, until he disappears over the ridge. He
is one of the hardiest of the desert progeny.
The lack of water affects him little. He browses

DESEKT ANIMALS

167

and gets fat on twigs and leaves that seem to
have as little nutriment about them as a tele-
graph-pole ; and he lies down on a bed of stones
as upon a bed of roses. He is as tough as
the goats and sheep that keep well up on the
high mountain ridges ; and in cleverness is per-
haps superior to the antelope. But oftentimes
he will turn around to have a last look, and
therein lies his undoing. In Sonora there is
found a dwarf deer — a foolish if pretty little
creature — and along river-beds the white-tailed
deer is occasionally seen ; but these deer with
the goats and the sheep hardly belong to the
desert, though living upon its confines.

In fact, none of the far-travelling animals lives
right down in the desert gravel-beds continu-
ously. They go there at night or in the early
morning, but in the daytime they are usually
found in the neighboring hills. The rabbits,
rats, and squirrels, if undisturbed, will usually
stay upon the flat ground ; and there is also an-
other variety of desert life that does not wander
far from the sand and the rocks. I mean the
reptiles. They are not as a class swift in
flight, nor over-clever in sense, nor cunning in
devices. Nor have they sufficient strength to
grapple and fight with the larger animals. It

Habits of
the desert-
deer.

Tlie white-
tail.

The
reptilec.

168

THE DESERT

Poison of
reptiles.

The/ang
and sting.

would seem as though Nature had brought
them into the desert only half made-up — a prey
to every beast and bird. But no; they are
given the most deadly weapon of defence of all
— ^poison. Almost all of the reptiles have poison
about them in fang or sting. We are accus-
tomed to label them *^ poisonous " or ^^not poi-
sonous/^ as they kill or do not kill a human
being ; but that is not the proper criterion by
which to judge. The bite of the trap-door
spider will not seriously affect a man, but it
will kill a lizard in a few minutes. In propor-
tion to his size the common red ant of the
desert is more poisonous than the rattlesnake.
It is reiterated with much positiveness that a
swarm of these ants have been known to kill
men. There is, however, only one reptile on the
desert that humanity need greatly fear on ac-
count of his poison and that is the rattlesnake.
There are several varieties called in local par-
lance ^^side-winders/' ^^ ground rattlers/' and
the like ; but the ordinary spotted, brown, or
yellow rattlesnake is the type. He is not a
pleasant creature, but then he is not often met
with. In travelling many hundreds of miles on
the desert I never encountered more than half a
dozen.

V

DESERT ANIMALS

169

The rattle is indescribable, but a person will
know it the first time he hears it. It is some-
thing between a buzz and a burr, and can
cause a cold perspiration in a minute fraction
of time. The snake is very slow in getting
ready to strike, in fact sluggish ; but once the
head shoots out, it does so with the swiftness of
an arrow. Nothing except the road-runner can
dodge it. The poison is deadly if the fang has
entered a vein or a fleshy portion of the body
where the flow of blood to the heart is free. If
struck on the hand or foot, the man may re-
cover, because the circulation there is slow and
the heart has time to repel the attack. Every
animal on the desert knows just how venomous
is that poison. Even your dog knows it by in-
stinct. He may shake and kill garter-snakes,
but he will not touch the rattlesnake.

All of the spider family are poisonous and
you can find almost every one of them on the
desert. The most sharp-witted of the family is
the trap-door spider — the name coming from
the door which he hinges and fastens over the
entrance of his hole in the ground. The taran-
tula is simply an overgrown spider, very heavy
in weight, and inclined to be slow and stupid
in action. He is a ferocious-looking wretch

The rattle-
snake.

Effect of the
•poison.

Spiders and
tarantulas.

170

THE DESERT

Centipedes

and

scorpions.

Lizards
and swifts.

The hydro-
phobia
skunk.

and has a ferocious bite. It makes an ugly
wonnd and is deadly enough to small animals.
The scorpion has the reputation of being very
venomous ; but his sting on the hand amounts
to little more than that of an ordinary wasp.
Nor is the long-bodied, many-legged, rather
graceful centipede so great a poison-carrier as
has been alleged. They are all of them poi-
sonous, but in varying degrees. Doubtless the
(to us) harmless horned toads and the swifts
have for their enemies some venom in store.

The lizards are many in variety, and their
colors are often very beautiful in grays, yellows,
reds, blues, and indigoes. The Gila monster
belongs to their family, though he is much
larger. The look of him is very forbidding and
he has an ugly way of hissing at you ; but just
how venomous he is I do not know. Very
likely there is some poison about him, though
this has been denied. It would seem that every-
thing that cannot stand or run or hide must
be defended somehow. Even the poor little
skunk when he comes to live on the desert de-
velops poisoned teeth and his bite produces
what is called hydrophobia. The truth about
the hydrophobia skunk is, I imagine, that he is
an eater of carrion ; and when he bites a per-

DESEET ANIMALS

171

son he is likely to produce blood-poisoning,
which is miscalled hydrophobia.

Taking them for all in all, they seem like a
precious pack of cutthroats, these beasts and
reptiles of the desert. Perhaps there never was
a life so nurtured in violence, so tutored in at-
tack and defence as this. The warfare is con-
tinuous from the birth to the death. Every-
thing must fight, fly, feint, or use poison ; and
every slayer eventually becomes a victim. What
a murderous brood for Nature to bring forth !
And what a place she has chosen in which to
breed them ! Not only the struggle among
themselves, but the struggle with the land,
the elements — the eternal fighting with heat,
drouth, and famine. What else but fierceness
and savagery could come out of such condi-
tions ?

But, after all, is there not something in the
sheer brute courage that endures, worthy of our
admiration ? These animals have made the best
out of the worst, and their struggle has given
them a physical character which is, shall we
not say, beautiful ? Perhaps you shudder at the
thought of a panther dragging down a deer —
one enormous paw over the deer^s muzzle, one
on his neck, and the strain of all the back mus-

The

cutthroat

band.

The

eternal

struggle.

Brute
courage.

172

THE DESERT

Brute
character.

Beauty in
character.

Graceful
forms of
animals.

cles coming into play. But was not that the
purpose for which the panther was designed ?
As a living machine how wonderfully he works!
Look at the same subject done in bronze by
Barye and you will see what a revelation of
character the great statuary thought it. Look,
too, at Barye^s wolf and fox, look at the lions of
Gericault, and the tigers and serpents of Dela-
croix ; and with all the jaw and poison of them
how beautiful they are !

You will say they are made beautiful through
the 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 sub-
jects ? Why, simply because they recognized
that for art there is no such thing as nobility or
vulgarity of subject. Everything may be fit if
it possesses character. The beautiful is the
characteristic — the large, full-bodied, well-ex-
pressed truth of character. At least that is one
very positive phase of beauty.

Even the classic idea of beauty, which re-
gards only the graceful in form or movement
or the sensuous in color, finds types among
these desert inhabitants. The dullest person
in the arts could not but see fine form and pro-
portion in the panther, graceful movement in

DESERT ANIMALS

173

the antelope^ and charm of color in all the
pretty rock squirrels. For myself, being some-
what prejudiced in favor of this drear waste
and its savage progeny, I may confess to hav-
ing watched the flowing movements of snakes,
their coil and rattle and strike, many times and
with great pleasure ; to having stretched my-
self for hours upon granite bowlders while fol-
lowing the play of indigo lizards in the sand ;
to having traced with surprise the slightly
changing skin of the horned toad produced by
the reflection of different colors held near him.
I may also confess that common as is the jack-
rabbit he never bursts away in speed before me
without being followed by my wonder at his
graceful mystery of motion ; that the crawl of
a wild-cat upon game is something that arrests
and fascinates by its masterful skill ; and that
even that desert tramp, the coyote, is entitled
to admiration for the graceful way he can slip
through patches of cactus. The fault is not in
the subject. It is not vulgar or ugly. The
trouble is that we perhaps have not the prop-
er angle of vision. If we understood all, we
should admire all.

Colors of
lizards.

Mystery of
motion.

The first
day s walk.

Tracks in
the sand.

CHAPTEK X
WINGED LIFE

The deserts secrets of life and growth and
death are not to be read at a glance. The first
day^s walk is usually a disappointment. You
see little more than a desolate waste. The
light of the blue sky, the subtle color of the air,
the roll of the valleys, the heave of the moun-
tains do not reveal themselves at once. The
vegetation you think looks like a thin covering
of dry sticks. And as for the animals, the birds
— the living things on the desert — they are not
apparent at all.

But the casual stroll does not bring you to
the end of the desert^s resources. You may
perhaps walk for a whole day and see not a beast
or a bird of any description. Yet they are here.
Even in the lava-beds where not even cactus
will grow, and where to all appearance there is
no life whatever, you may see tracks in the sand
where quail and road-runners and linnets have
been running about in search of food. There
174

WIITGED LIFE

175

are tracks, too, of the coyote and the wild-cat —
tracks following tracks. The animals and the
birds belong to the desert or the neighboring
mountains ; but they are not always on view.
You meet with them only in the early morning
and evening when they are moving about. In
the middle of the day they are in the shadow of
bush or rock or lying in some cut bank or cave
— keeping out of the direct rays of the sun.
The birds are not very numerous even when
they come forth. They prefer places that afford
better cover. And yet as you make a memo-
randum of each new bird you see you are sur-
prised after a time to find how many are the
varieties.

And the surprise grows when you think of
the dangers and hardships that continually har-
ass bird-life here in the desert. It may be
fancied perhaps that the bird is exempt from
danger because he has wings to carry him out
of the reach of the animals ; but we forget that
he has enemies of his own kind in the air. And
if he avoids the hawks by day, how shall he
avoid the owls by night ? Where at night shall
he go for protection ? There are no broad-
leaved trees to offer a refuge — in fact few trees
of any sort. The bushes are not so high that I

Scarcity of
birds.

Bangers of
bird-life.

No cover for
protection.

176

THE DESERT

The food
problem.

The heat
and drouth
again.

a coyote cannot reach to their top at a jump ;
nor are the spines and ledges of rock in the
mountains so steep that a wild-cat cannot climb
np them.

No ; the bird is subject to the same dangers
as the animals and the plants. Something is
forever on his trail. He must always be on
guard. And the food problem^, ever of vital
interest to bird-life, bothers him just as much
as it does the coyote. There is little for him
to eat and nothing for him to drink ; and hard-
ly a resting-place for the sole of his foot. Be-
sides, it would seem as though he should be af-
fected by the intense heat more than he is in
reality. Humanity at times has difficulty in
withstanding this heat, for though it is not
suffocating, it parches the mouth and dries up
the blood so rapidly that if water is not attain-
able the effect is soon apparent. The animals
— that is, the wild ones — are never fazed by it ;
but the domestic horse, dog, and cow yield to
it almost as readily as a man. And men and
animals are all of low-blood temperature — a
man^s normal temperature being about 98 F.
But what of the bird in his coat of feathers
which may add to or detract from his warmth ?
What is his normal temperature ? It varies

WINGED LIFE

177

with the species, so far as I can ascertain by ex-
periment, from 112 to 120 F. Consider that
blood temperature in connection with a sur-
rounding air varying from 100 to 125 F. ! It
would seem impossible for any life to support
it. One may well wonder what strange wings
beat this glowing air, what bird-life lives in this
fiery waste !

Yet the desert-birds look not very different
from their cousins of the woods and streams
except that they are thinner, more subdued in
color, somewhat more alert. They are very
pretty, very innocent-looking birds. But we
may be sure that living here in the desert, en-
during its hardships and participating in its in-
cessant struggle for life and for the species, they
have just the same savage instincts as the plants
and the animals. The sprightliness and the
color may suggest harmlessness ; but the eye,
the beak, the claw are designed for destruction.
The road-runner is one of the mildest-looking
and most graceful birds of the desert, but the
spring of the wild-cat to crush down a rabbit is
not more fierce than the snap of the bird^s beak
as he tosses a luckless lizard. He is the only
thing on the desert that has the temerity to
fight a rattlesnake. It is said that he kills the

A bird's
tempera-
ture.

Innocent-
looking
birds with
savage
instincts.

The road-
runner.

178

THE DESERT

Wrens and
jiy-catchers.

Develop-
ment of
special
characteris-
tics.

snake, but as to that I am not able to give evi-
dence.

And it is not alone the bird of prey — not
alone the road-runners, the eagles, the vult-
ures, the hawks, and the owls that are savage
of mood. Every little wisp of energy that
carries a bunch of feathers is endowed with the
same spirit. The downward swoop of the cac-
tus wren upon a butterfly and the snip of his
little scissors bill, the dash after insects of the
fly-catchers, vireos, swallows, bats, and whip-
poor-wills are just as murderous in kind as the
blow of the condor and the vice-like clutch of
his talons as they sink into the back of a rab-
bit. Skill and strength in the chase are abso-
lutely necessary in a desert where food is so
scarce, and in proportion the little birds have
these qualities in common with the great.

And naturally, as in the case of the animals,
the skill and the strength develop along the line
of the bird^s needs, producing that quality of
character, that fitness for the work cut out for
him, to which we have so often referred. There
are birds that belong almost solely to the king-
dom of the air — birds like the condor, the
vulture, and the eagle. Upon the ground they
move awkwardly, not having better feet to

WINGED LIFE

179

walk with than ducks and geese. The talons
are too much developed for walking. When
they rise from the ground they do it heavily
and with quick flapping wings. Not until
they are fairly started in the upper air do
they show what wonderful wing-power they
possess.

The common brown-black vulture or turkey
buzzard is the type of all the wheelers and sail-
ers. The ^^ soaring eagle '^ of poetry is some-
thing of a goose beside him. For the wings of
the vulture bear him through wind, sun, and
heat, hour after hour, without a pause. To
see him circling as he hunts down a mountain
range a hundred miles or more, one might
think that the abnormal breast-muscles never
grew weary. He goes over every foot of the
ground with his eyes and at the same time
watches every other vulture in the sky. Let
one of his fellows stop circling and drop earth-
ward on a long incline, and immediately he is
followed by all the black crew. They know
instantly that something has been discovered.
But often the hunt is in vain, and then for
whole days at a time those motionless wings
bear their burden apparently without fatigue.
With no food perhaps for a fortnight and

Birds of the
air.

The

brmvn-black

vulture.

The vulture
hunting.

180

THE DESEET

The vulture
sailing.

The

southern

buzzard.

The crow.

never any water, that spare rack of muscles
sails the air with as little effort as floating
thistle-down. No one knows just how it is
done. In blow or calm, against the wind or
with it, high in the blue or low over the
ground, any place, anywhere, and under any
circumstances those wings cut through the air
almost like sunlight. You can hear a whizz
like the flight of arrows as the bird passes
close over your head ; but you cannot see the
slightest motion in the feathers.

The hot, thin air of the desert would seem a
less favorable air for sailing than the moister
atmosphere of the south ; but the vulture of
the tropics is not the equal of the desert-bird.
He is heavier, lazier, and more stupid — possi-
bly because better fed. There are several vari-
eties in the family, the chief variants being the
one with white tipped wings and the one with
a white eagle-like head. Neither of them is as
good on the wing as the black species, though
none of them is to be despised. Even the or-
dinary carrion crow of the desert is an expert
sailer compared with any of the crow family to
be found elsewhere. The exigencies of the sit-
uation seem to require wings developed for long-
distance flights ; and the vultures, the crows.

WINGED LIFE

181

the eagles, the hawks, all respond after their
individual fashions.

The condor is perhaps the vnlture^s peer
in the matter of sailing. He belongs to the
vulture family, though very much larger than
any of its members, sometimes measuring
fifteen feet across the wings and weighing forty
pounds. He is the largest bird on the conti-
nent. At the present time he is occasionally
seen wheeling high in air like a mere insect in
the great blue dome. It is said that he soars
as high as twentyfive thousand feet above the
earth. But to-day he sails alone and his tribe
has grown less year by year. With the eagles
he keeps well up in the high sierras and builds
a nest on the inaccessible peaks or along the
steep escarpments. He belongs to the desert
only 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 to
the mountains at night. The owls are some-
what different, not being given to long flight.
The deep caves or wind-worn recesses under
mountain ledges furnish them abiding-places.
These caves also send forth at dusk a full com-
plement of bats that seem not different from
the ordinary Eastern bats. The burrowing

T?ie areat
condor.

The eagles
and hawks.

182

THE DESERT

Bats and
owls.

The burrow-
ing owl.

owl is perhaps misnamed, though not misplaced.
There is no evidence whatever, that I have ever
seen or heard, to show that he burrows. What
happens is that he crawls into some hole that is
already burrowed instead of a cave or recess in
the rocks. A prairie-dog or badger hole is his
preference. That the place has inhabitants,
including the tarantula and (it is said) the rat-
tlesnake, does not bother the owl. He walks
in with his mate and speedily makes himself at
home. How the different families get on to-
gether can be imagined by one person as well as
by another. They do not seem to pay any at-
tention to each other so far as I have observed.
Ordinarily the desert animals, birds, and rep-
tiles agree to no such truce. They are at war
from the start. I do not know that the owls,
the bats, the night-hawks have any special
equipment for carrying on their part of the
war. Sometimes I have fancied they had larger
eyes than is usual with their kinds outside of
the desert ; but I have no proof of this. Per-
haps it is like the speculation as to whether the
buzzard sees or scents the carrion that he dis-
covers so readily — hardly amenable to proof.

All of the air-birds are strikingly developed
in the wings and equally undeveloped in the

WINGED LIFE

183

feet, while all the ground-birds of the desert
are just the reverse of this — that is, deficient in
wings but strong of foot and leg. The road-
rnnner, or as he is sometimes called the chap-
arralcock, is a notable instance of this. He is
a lizard-eater, and in order to eat he must first
catch his lizard. Now this is by no means an
easy task. The ordinary gray, brown, or yel-
low lizard is the swiftest dodger and darter
there is in the sand, and even in straight-line
running he will travel too fast for an ordinary
dog to catch him. His facility, too, in dashing
up, over, and under bowlders is not to be under-
estimated. The road-runner^s task then is not
an easy one, and yet he seems to accomplish it
easily. There is no great effort about his pur-
suit and yet he generally manages to catch the
lizard. It is because his legs are specially con-
structed for running, and his head, neck, and
beak for darting. His wings are of little use.
When chased by a dog he will finally take to
them, but only for about fifty yards. Then he
drops to the ground and starts on foot again.
He will run away from a man, and sometimes
even a horse cannot keep up with him. Oddly
enough, he seems always to run a little side-
ways. The long tail (used as a rudder) is car-

The ground ■
birds.

The road-
runner's
swiftness.

184

THE DESERT

The vicious
beak.

The desert-
quail.

Wings of
the quail.

ried a little to the right or the left and gives
this impression. When frightened, his top-knot
is raised like that of the pheasant, and he often
runs with his beak open. It is a most vicious
beak for all that it looks not more blood-thirsty
than that of the crow. It snaps through a
scorpion or a centipede like a pair of sheep-
shearers. And with all his energy and strength
the road-runner weighs only about a pound.
He is a long-geared bird, but not actually any
larger than a pigeon.

The blue valley-quail — whether of Arizona or
California breeding — is quite as strong of leg as
the 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 rather
poor average of quails' wings. By that I mean
that all quails rise from cover with a great roar
and bustle, and they fly very fast for a short
distance ; but they are soon down upon the
ground, running and hiding. The flight of the
quail, too, is straight ahead. It is not possible
for him to rise up over five hundred feet of
canyon wall, for instance, and even on an ordi-
nary mountain side he takes several flights be-
fore he reaches the summit. The wings are
not muscled like the legs, and that is because

WINGED LIFE

185

the quail is a ground-bird. He gets his food
there and spends most of his time there. In
the East Bob White always roosts upon the
ground, but the desert-quail is usually too
clever to trust himself in such an exposed place.
He will travel miles to get into a cotton-wood
tree at dusk, and if there is water near at hand
so much the better. He dearly loves the water
and the tree, but if he cannot get them he ac-
cepts the situation philosophically and goes to
sleep on a high ledge of rock with water per-
haps in his thought but not in his crop.

Thanks to his capacity for travelling, the
quail usually manages to get enough of small
seeds and insects to keep himself alive. He is
a great roamer — in the course of a day travel-
ling over many miles of country — and his quest
is always food. He likes to be among the great
bowlders that lie along the bases of the moun-
tains ; and when disturbed he flies and jumps
from rock to rock, much to the discouragement
of the coyote that happens to be the disturber.
When forced to rise he flies perhaps for a hun-
dred yards or more and then drops and begins
running. In the spring he mates, raises a
brood, and teaches the young ones the gentle
art of running. In the fall he and his family

Travelling
for water.

Habits of
quail.

186

THE DESERT

His strong
legs.

Bush-birds

of a dozen or sixteen join with other families
to make a great covey of several hundred, or in
the old days before the market-hunters came,
several thousand. And they all run. The
bottom of the quaiFs foot is always itching for
the ground ; and he seems never so happy as
when leaving the enemy far behind him. His
little legs take him through the brush so fast
that you cannot keep up with him. Every
muscle in him is as tough as a watch-spring.
You may wound him, but you have not yet got
him. He will creep into some cactus patch or
crawl down a snake-hole — elude you in some
way — and in the end die game just out of your
reach.

There are few trees upon the desert and few
bushes of any size ; yet there are birds of the
tree and the bush here just as there are birds
of the air and the ground. The most of them
seem the same kind of linnets, sparrows, and
thrushes that are seen along the California
coast ; though probably they have some peculiar
desert characteristic. I cannot see any differ-
ence between the little woodpeckers here and
the woodpeckers elsewhere ; yet this desert va-
riety flies from sahuaro to sahuaro, alights on
the spiny trunk with a little thump, and im-

WINGED LIFE

187

mediately begins hitching himself up through
the worst imaginable rows of needles just as
though he were climbing a plain pine-tree.
The ordinary turtle-dove with his red pigeon-
feet alights on the top of the same sahuaro,
the wren bores holes in it and makes a nest
within the cylinder ; and the dwarf thrush
dashes in and out of tangled thickets of cholla
all day long, and yet none of them suffers any
injury. It seems incredible that birds not ac-
customed to the desert could do such things.

Possibly, too, these bush-birds — insect-de-
vourers most of them — have some special faculty
for catching their prey, though I have not been
able to discover it. The fly-catchers, the mock-
ing-birds, the finches, in a land of plenty are
quick enough in breaking the back of a butter-
fly or beetle, and any extra energy would seem
superfluous. Still there is no telling what fine
extra stimulus lies in an empty crop. And
crops are usually empty on the desert. Even
the little humming-bird has diiB&culty in pick-
ing a living. In blossom time he is, of course,
in fine condition, but I have seen him dashing
about in the fall when nothing at all was in
bloom, and evidently none the worse for some
starvation. He is a swifter flyer than the or-

The wood-
peckers and
cactus.

IKnches and
mocking-
birds. ^

The hum-
mij^g-bird.

188

THE DESERT

Doves and
grosbeaks.

The lark
and flicker.

dinary bird and is also duller in coloring, but
in other respects he seems not different. He
breeds on the desert, building his nest in the
pitahaya ; and he and his mate then have a
standing quarrel with their neighbors for the
rest of the summer. There is not in the whole
feathered tribe a more quarrelsome scrap of
vivacity than the humming-bird.

The dwarf dove common to Sonora, the
oven-bird, the red grosbeak, and many other
of the smaller birds known to civilization, are
found on the desert ; but apparently with no
special faculty for overcoming its hardships.
This is due perhaps to the fact that they are
not always there — are not exclusively desert-
birds. Nor do any of the migratory birds be-
long to the desert, though they stop here for
weeks at a time in their flights north or south.
At almost any season of the year one sees the
cow-blackbird and the smaller crow-blackbird.
The mocking-bird comes only in the spring
and fall, and the lark in early summer. The
lark looks precisely like the Eastern bird, but
his note is changed ; whereas the flicker has
changed the color under his wings from yel-
low to pink, but not his note. The robin is
no whit different from the front-lawn robin of

WINGED LIFE

189

our childhood ; and the bobolink rising from
salt-bush and yucca, singing as he rises, is the
bobolink of ancient days. At times there are
troops of magpies that come and go across the
waste, and at other times troops of blue-jays.
And high in air through the warmth of spring
and the cold of autumn there are great flocks
of ducks, geese, brant, divers, shags, willet,
curlew, swinging along silently to the southern
or northern waterways. They seldom pause,
even when following the Colorado Kiver, unless
in need of water. On the mesas and uplands
one sometimes sees a group of sand-hill cranes
walking about and indulging in a crazy dance
peculiarly their own, but the sight is no lon-
ger a common one.

And again the prey — what of the prey ? Has
Nature left the beetles, the bugs, the worms,
the bees, completely at the pleasure of the bird^s
beak ? No ; not completely, though it must
be acknowledged that she has not provided
much defensive armor for them individually.
She incases her beautiful blue and yellow
beetles in hard shells that other insects cannot
break through, but they are flimsy defences
against the mocking-bird. To bugs and worms
and bees she gives perhaps a sting, deadly

Jays and
magpies.

Water-fowl.

Beetles and
worms.

190

THE DESERT

Fighting
destruction
by breed.

The blue
and green
beetles.

enough when thrust into a spider, but useless
again when used in defence against a cactus-
thrush. And this is where Nature shows her
absolute indifference to the life or the death of
the individual. She allows the bugs and beetles
to be slaughtered like the mackerel in the sea.
But she is a little more careful about preserving
the species. And how does she do this without
preserving the individual ? Why, simply by
increasing the number of individuals, by breed,
by fertility, by multiplicity. Thousands are
annually slaughtered ; yes, but thousands are
annually bred. What matter about their lives
or deaths provided they do not increase or de-
crease as a species !

The insects on the desert are mere flashes of
life — pin-points of energy — but not without pur-
pose and not without beauty. The beasts and
the birds may be bleached brown or gray by the
sun ; but the insects are many of them as gay
as those of the tropics. The ordinary beetles
that a chance turn of a stone reveals are like
scarabs of gold, turquoise, azurite, bronze,
platinum, hurrying and scurrying out of the
way. The tarantula- wasp, with his gorgeous
orange-colored body and his blue wings, is like a
bauble made of precious stones flickering along

WINGED LIFE

191

the ground. The great dragon-fly with his
many lensed eyes^ the bees with black and yel-
low bodies, the butterflies with bright-hued
wings, the white and gray millers — all of them
dwellers in the sands — are spots of light and
color that illumine the desert as the rich jewel
the Ethiop^s ear. The wings of gauze that
bear the ordinary fly upon the air, the feet of
ebony that carry the plain black beetle along the
rocks, are made with just as much care and skill
as the wings of the condor and the foot of the
road-runner. Nature in every product of her
hand shows the completeness of her workman-
ship. She made the wings and the legs for a
purpose and they fulfil that purpose. They
are without flaw and above reproach. Once
more, 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 admit
it without argument. The slate-blue of the
quail, the gay red of the grosbeak, the charm
of the rock-wren, the vivacity of the bobolink or
the scale-runner, captivate you and compel your
sympathy and admiration. Yes ; but everyone
of them is, after his kind, as much of a butcher,
just as much of a destroyer, as the wild-cat or

Butterflies.

Design and
character.

Beauty of
birds.

192

THE DESERT

Beauty also
of reptiles.

Nature's
work all
purposeful.

the yellow rattlesnake. And they have no more
character and perhaps less fitness for the desert
life than the sneaking coyote or the flattened
lizard which you do not admire. But why are
not the coyote and the lizard beautiful too ?
Why not the beauty of the horned toad and the
serpent ? Are we never to love or to admire
save where form and color tickle the eye ? Are
these forever to monopolize the name of beauty
and gather to themselves the world's applause ?
If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas,
which, taken en masse, are called education, we
should know that there is nothing ugly under
the sun, save that which comes from human
distortion. Nature's work is all of it good, all
of it purposeful, all of it wonderful, all of it
beautiful. We like or dislike certain things
which may be a way of expressing our prejudice
or our limitation ; but the work is always per-
fect of its kind irrespective of human appreci-
ation. We may prefer the sunlight to the star-
light, the evening primrose to the bisnaga, the
antelope to the mountain-lion, the mocking-bird
to the lizard ; but to say that one is good and
the other bad, that one is beautiful and the other
ugly, is to accuse Nature herself of preference —
something which she never knew. She designs

WINGED LIFE

193

for the cactus of the desert as skilfully and as
faithfully as for the lily of the garden. Each
in its way is suited to its place, and each in its
way has its unique beauty of character. And
so, more truly perhaps than Shakespeare him-
self knew, the toad called ugly and venomous,
still holds a precious jewel in its head.

Precious
jewel of the
toad.

Flat steps of
the desert.

Across

Southern

Arizona,

CHAPTER XI
MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

The word mesa (table), by local usage in
Mexico and in the western United States, is
applied to any flat tract of ground that lies
above an arroyo or valley, as well as to the flat
top of a mountain. In a broad, if somewhat
strained use of the word, it also means the
great table-lands and elevated plains lying be-
tween a river- valley and the mountain confines
on either side of it. The mesas are the steps
or benches that lead upward from the river
to the mountain, though the resemblance to
benches is not always apparent because of the
cuttings 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 a
great plain or so-called mesa that extends far
across Southern Arizona and Sonora almost up
to the Continental Divide. It is broken by
194

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

195

short ranges of barren mountains^ that have
the general trend of the main Sierra Madre^
and it looks so much like the country to the
west of the river that it is usually recognized
as a part of the desert, or at the least ^^ desert
country/^

It is, however, somewhat different from the
Bottom of the Bowl or even the valleys of the
Mojave. The elevation, for one thing, gives it
another character. The rise from bench to
bench is very gradual, and to the ordinary ob-
server hardly perceptible ; but nevertheless when
the foot-hills of the Santa Kita Mountains are
reached, the altitude is four thousand feet or
more. There is a difference in light, sky,
color, air ; even some change in the surface of
the earth. The fine sands of the lower desert
and the sea-bed silts are missing ; the mesas lie
close up to the mountains and receive the first
coarse wash from the sides ; the barrancas on
the mountain - sides are choked with great
masses of fallen rock, with bowlders of granite,
with blocks of blackened lava. The arroyos
that carry the wash from the mountains — mere
ditches and trenches cut through the mesas —
are filled with rounded stones, coarse sands,
glittering scales of mica, bits of quartz, breaks

Rising up
from the
desert.

The great
mesas.

196

THE DESERT

*' Grease

wood'^

plains.

Upland
vegetation*

of agate and carnelian. The mesas themselves
are made up of sand and gravel, sometimes
long shelvings of horizontal rocks, sometimes
patches of terra-cotta, rifts of copper shale,
or beds of parti-colored clay.

There is more rain in this upland country
and consequently more vegetation than down
below. Grease wood grows everywhere and is
the principal green thing in sight. So pre-
dominant is it that the term ^^ grease wood
plains ^^ is not inappropriate to the whole re-
gion. Groves of sahuaro stand in the valleys
and reach up and over the mountain-tops,
chollas and nopals are on the flats; the mes-
quite grows in miniature forests. But besides
these there are bushes and trees not seen in the
basin. Palo fierro, palo bianco, cottonwood
live along the dry river-beds, white and black
sage on the mesas, white and black oaks in the
foot-hills. Then, too, there are patches of pale
yellow sun-dried grass covering many acres,
great beds of evening primrose, and fields cov-
ered with the purple salt-bush. It is quite an-
other country when you come to examine it
piece by piece.

As you rise higher and higher to the Conti-
nental Divide the whole face of the mesa under-

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

197

goes a further change. It slips imperceptibly
into a grass plain, stretching flat as far as the
eye can see, covered with whitened grass, and
marked by clumps of yuccas slowly growing
into yucca palms. No rocks, trees, cacti, or
grease wood ; no primrose, wild gourd, or ver-
bena. Nothing but yucca palms, bleached
grass, blue sky, and lilac mountains. It is still
in kind a desert country, and it is still called a
mesa or table-land ; but its character is changed
into something like the great flat lands of Ne-
braska or the broken plateau country of Mon-
tana.

In the spring, when the snows have melted
and the rains have fallen, these plains turn
green with young grass and are spattered with
great patches of wild-flowers; but the drouth
and heat of early summer soon fade the grasses
to a bright yellow, and in the fall the yellow
bleaches to a dead white. There is little wild
life left upon these plains. The bush-birds
need more cover than is to be found here, while
the ground-birds need more open roadway.
In the spring, when the prairie pools are filled
with water, there are geese and cranes in abun-
dance ; but they soon pass on north. These
great grass tracts were once the home of count-

Grass

plains.

Spring and
summer on
the plains.

198

THE DESEET

Home of the
antelope.

Beds of
soda and
gypsum.

Riding into
the unex-
pected.

less bands of antelope, for it is just such an
open country as the antelope loves ; but they
have passed on, too. In their place roam
herds of cattle, and the gray wolf, the coyote,
and the buzzard follow the herds.

The grease wood and the grass plains of Ari-
zona and New Mexico are typical of all the flat
countries lying up from the deserts ; and yet
there are many tracts of small acreage in this
same region that show distinctly different feat-
ures. Sometimes there are small beds of flat
alkali dust, sometimes beds of soda and gypsum,
sometimes beds of salt. Then occasionally there
is a broad plain sown broadcast far and wide
with blocks of lava — the remnants of a great
lava-stream sent forth many centuries ago ; and
again flat reaches strewn thick with blocks of
porphyry that have been washed down from the
mountains no one knows just when or how.
You are always riding into the unexpected in
these barren countries, stumbling upon strange
phenomena, seeing strange sights.

And yet as you ascend from the valley of the
Colorado moving to the northeast, the lands
and the sights become even stranger. For now
you are rising to the Great Plateau and the
Grand Canyon country — the region of the butte.

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

199

the yast escarpment, the dome, the cliff, the
gorge. It is a more mountainous land than
that lying to the south, and it is deeper cut
with river-beds and canyons. Yet still you
have no trouble in finding even here the flat
spaces peculiar to all the desert-bordering ter-
ritory. There are grease vrood plains as at the
south and great bare benches that seem endless
in their sweep. There are, too, spaces covered
with 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, the
yuccas become trees, and higher up toward Ash
Fork the hills are covered with a growth of juni-
per. Flowers and shrubs are more abundant,
birds and animals come and go across your path-
way, and there are green valleys with water
running upon the surface of the ground. And
yet not twenty miles from the green valley you
may enter upon the most barren plain imagi-
nable— a place like the Painted Desert, perhaps,
where in spots not a living thing of any kind is
seen, where there is nothing but dry rock in the
mountains and dry dust in the valley. These
areas of utter desolation are of frequent enough
occurrence in all the regions lying immediately
to the north and the east of the Mojave to re-

The Grand

Canyon

country.

Hills

covered with
juniper.

The Painted
Desert.

200

THE DESERT

Riding on
the mesas.

The rever-
sion to
savagery.

The thin
air again.

mind you that you are still in a desert land, and
that the bench and the arid plain are really a
part of the great waste itself.

Nature never designed more fascinating coun-
try to ride over than these plains and mesas
lying up and back from the desert basin. You
may be alone without necessarily being lone-
some. And everyone rides here with the feel-
ing that he is the first one that ever broke into
this unknown land, that he is the original dis-
coverer; and that this new world belongs to
him by right of original exploration and con-
quest. Life becomes simplified from necessity.
It begins all over again, starting at the primitive
stage. There is a reversion to the savage. Civ-
ilization, the race, history, philosophy, art —
how very far away and how very useless, even
contemptible, they seem. What have they to do
with the air and the sunlight and the vastness of
the plateau ! Nature and her gift of buoyant life
are overpowering. The joy of mere animal ex-
istence, the feeling that it is good to be alive
and face to face with Nature's self, drives every-
thing else into the background.

And what air one breathes on these plains —
what wonderful air ! It is exhilarating to the
whole body ; it brightens the senses and sweet-

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

201

ens the mind and quiets the nerves. And how
clear it is ! Leagues away needle and spine and
mountain-ridge still come out clear cut against
the sky. Is it the air alone that makes possible
such far-away visions, or has the light somewhat
to do with it ? What penetrating, all-pervad-
ing, wide-spread light ! How silently it falls
and how like a great mirror the plain reflects it
back to heaven !

Light and air — what means wherewith to
conjure 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 to
detach and come toward us. There is no range
ahead of us ; there are only scattered groups of
hills many miles apart. Far away to the left
on a little rise of ground is a wild horse watch-
ing us, his head high in air, his nostrils sniffing
for our scent upon the breeze. How colossal he
seems ! Doubtless he is the last of some upland
band, the leader of the troop who through great
size and strength was best fitted to survive.
But no ; he is only a common little Indian
pony distorted to huge proportions by the heat-
ed atmosphere. We are riding into the sunset.
Ahead of us every notch in the hills, every little
valley has a shaft of golden light streaming

The light
and its
deceptions.

Distorted
proportions.

202

THE DESERT

Changed
colors.

The little
hills.

Painting
the desert.

through it. But turn in your saddle and look
to the east, and the hills we have left behind
us are surrounded by veilings of lilac. Again
the omnipresent desert air ! We see the
western hills as through an amber glass, but
looking to the east the glass is changed to pale
amethyst.

How delicately beautiful are the hills that
seem to gather in little groups along the waste !
They are not sharp-edged in their ridges like
the higher mountains. Wind, rain, and sand
have done their work upon them until there is
hardly a rough feature left to them. All their
lines are smooth and flow from one into another ;
and all the parti-colors of their rocks and soils
are blended into one tone by the light and the
air. With surfaces that catch and reflect light,
and little depressions that hold shadows, how
very picturesque they are ! Indeed as you
watch them breaking the horizon-line you are
surprised to see how easily they compose into
pictures. If you tried to put them upon can-
vas your surprise would probably be greater to
find 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 —

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

203

that one meets with in the plateau region are
not of the same make-up as the clay buttes of
Wyoming or the gravel hills of New England.
They have a core of rock within them and are
nothing less than washed-down foot-hills. You
will often see a chain of them receding from the
range toward the plain, and growing smaller as
they recede, until the last one is a mound only
a few feet in height. They are flattening down
to the level of the plain — sinking into the
sandy sea.

Usually the lomas are seen against a back-
ground of dark mountains of which they are
or have been at one time a constituent part.
For the lomas are the outliers from the foot-
hills as the foot-hills from the mountains proper.
They are the most worn because they are the
lowest down in the valley — in fact the bottom
steps which receive not only their own wash but
that of all the other steps besides. The moun-
tains pour their waters and loose stones upon
the foot-hills, the foot-hills cast them off upon
the lomas, and the lomas in turn thrust them
upon the plains. But the casting off effort be-
comes weaker at each step as the sides of the
hill become less of a declivity. When the little
hill is reached the sand-wash settles about the

Worn-do2vn
mountains.

The moun-
tain-ivash
and its
effect.

204

THE DESERT

Flattening
down to the
plain.

base, and in time the whole mass rises on its
sides and sinks somewhat in the centre, until
a mere rise of ground is all that remains. So
perish the hills that we are accustomed to spealc
of as ^* everlasting/^ It is merely another illus-
tration of Nature's method in the universe.
She is as careless of the individual hill or moun-
tain as of the individual man, animal, or flower.
All are beaten into dust. But the species is
more enduring, better preserved. Year by year
Nature is tearing down, washing down, pulling
to pieces range after range ; but year by year
she is also heaving up stupendous mountains "
like the Alps, and crackling with a mighty
squeeze the earth's crust into the ridges of the
Eockies and the Andes.

The foot-hills are just what their name indi-
cates— the hills that lie at the foot of the moun-
tains. They are not usually detached from the
main range like so many of the lomas, but are a
part of it ; and while not exactly the buttresses
of the mountains, yet they remind one of those
architectural supports of cathedral walls. The
foot-hills themselves are perhaps as firmly sup-
ported as the mountains for very often they
stretch down from the mountains in a long
ridge like a spine, and from the spine are

Mountain-
making.

The
foot-hills.

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

205

thrown out supporting ribs that trail away into
the valleys. In a granite country these foot-
hills are usually very smooth, and are made up
largely, as regards their surfaces, of the grit and
grind of the rocks. The rocks themselves are
usually wind worn, rounded by rain and sand,
and sometimes fantastic in shape. Often the
soft granite wears through in seams and leaves
lozenge-like blocks linked together like beads
upon a string ; often the whole rock-crown of
the hill is honey-combed by the wind until it
looks as soft as a sponge. The foot-hills of
porphyry are more jagged and rough in every
way. The stone is much harder and while it
splits like granite and falls along the mountain-
side in a talus it does not readily disintegrate.
The last bit of it remains a hard kernel, and
the porphyry foot-hill is usually a keen-edged
mountain in miniature.

The hills have a desert vegetation of grease
wood, cactus, and sage, with occasional trees like
the palo verde and the 11 u via d^oro ; but their
general appearance is not very different from
the mesas. Where the altitude is high — say
five thousand feet and over — there may be a
more radical change in vegetation ; for now the
oak begins to appear, and if it is open country

Forms of
the foot-
hills.

Mountain-
plants.

206

THE DESERT

Bare
mountains.

The

southern

exposures.

the grasses and flowers show everywhere. Some-
times the foot-hills are covered with a dense
chaparral made up of many low trees and
bushes ; but this growth is more peculiar to
the Californian hills west of the Coast Kange
than to Arizona. Many of the ranges in the
Canyon country are almost as bare of vegeta-
tion as an ancient lake-bed. And sometimes
altitude seems to have little to do with the
kinds of growths. Cacti and the salt-bush
flourish at six thousand feet as readily as down
in the Salton Basin three hundred feet below
sea-level. The most dangerous and difficult
thing to set up about anything in this desert
world is the general law or common rule. The
exception — the thing that is perhaps uncom-
mon— comes up at every turn to your un-
doing.

Even the mountains of Arizona that have an
elevation of from five to eight thousand feet
are often quite bare of timber. The sahuaro,
the nopal, the palo verde may grow to their
very peaks and still make only a scanty cover-
ing. Seen from a distance the southern ex-
posure of the mountain looks perfectly bare ;
but if you travel around it to the north side
where the sunlight does not fall except for a

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

207

few hours of the day, you will find a growth of
bushes, small trees, vines, and grasses that, tak-
en together, form something of a thicket — that
is for a desert. And here, too, on the northern
exposure you will find the abrupt walls of the
peak stained with great fields of orange and
gray lichens that lend a color quality to the
whole top.

But through the bushes and grasses and
lichens the wine-red of the porphyry comes
cropping out to tell you that the mountain is a
mass of rock, that it holds little or no soil on
its sides, that it has not a suspicion of water ;
and that whatever grows upon it, does so, not
by favor of circumstance, but through sheer
desert stubbornness. The vegetation is a thin
disguise that is penetrated in a few moments.
The arid character of the mountain says plainly
enough that we are not yet out of the region
of sands and burning winds and fiery sun-shafts.
The whole of the Arizona country as far east
as the Continental Divide, in spite of its occa-
sional green valleys and few high mountain-
ranges with timbered tops, is a slope leading
up and out from the desert by gradual if broken
steps which we have called mesas or benches.
It is a bare, dry land. Its name would imply

Qray
lichens.

SHU in the

desert

region.

208

THE DESERT

Arida zona.

Cloud-
bursts on
the mesas.

The wash of
rains.

that the early Spaniards had found it that and
called it arida zona for cause.*

Yet at times it is a land of heavy cloud-bursts
and wash-outs. In the summer months it fre-
quently rains on the mesas in torrents. The
bare surface of the country drains this water al^
most like the roof of a house because there are
no grasses or bushes of consequence to check
the water and allow it to soak into the ground.
The descent from the Divide to the Colorado
River is quite steep. The flood of waters rushes
down the steps of the mesas and over the bare
ground with terrific force. It quickly cuts
channels in the low places down which are
hurled sand, gravel, and bowlders. The cutting
of the channel during the heavy rains is some-
thing extraordinary, partly because the stream
has great volume and fall, and partly because
the channel-bed is usually of soft rock and easily
cut. In a few dozen years the arroyo of a mesa
that carries off the water from the mountain-
range has cut a river-bed many feet deep ; in a

* The late Dr. Elliot Coues and others reject the obvi-
ous arida zona of the Spanish in favor of some strained
etymologies from the Indian dialects, about which no two
of them agree. Why should the name not have come
from the Spanish, and why should it not mean just sim-
ply arid zone or belt ?

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

209

few hundred years the valley-bed changes into
a gorge with five hundred feet of sheer rock-
wall ; in a few thousand years perhaps the rest-
less wearing water of the great river has sunk
its bed five thousand feet below the surface and
made the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

The Canyon country is well named, for it has
plenty of wash-outs and gorges. Almost any-
where among the mountain-ranges you can find
them — not Grand Canyons, to be sure, but ones
of size sufiicient to be impressive without being
stupendous. Walls of upright rock several hun-
dred feet in height have enough bulk and body
about them to impress anyone. The mass is
really overpowering. It is but the crust of
the earth exposed to view ; but the gorge at Ni-
agara and the looming shaft of the Matterhorn
are not more. The imagination strains at such
magnitude. And all the accessories of the
gorge and canyon have a might to them that
adds to the general effect. The sheer precipices,
the leaning towers, the pinnacles and shafts, the
recesses and caves, the huge basins rounded
out of rock by the waterfalls are all touched
by the majesty of the sublime.

And what could be more beautiful than the
deep shadow of the canyon ! You may have

Gorge
cutting.

In the
canyons.

Upright
walls of
rock.

210

THE DESERT

Color in

canyon

shadows.

The blue sky
seen from
the canyon
depths.

had doubts about those colored shadows which
painters of the plein-air school talked so much
about a few years ago. You may have thought
that it was all talk and no reality ; but now that
you are in the canyon, and in a shadow, look
about you and see if there is not plenty of color
there, too. The walls are dyed with it, the
stones are stained with it — all sorts of colors
from strata of rock, from clays and slates, from
minerals, from lichens, from mosses. The
stones under your feet have not turned black
or brown because out of the sunlight. If you
were on the upper rim of the canyon looking
down, the whole body of air in shadow would
look blue. And that strange light coming from
above ! You may have had doubts, too, about
the intense luminosity of the blue sky ; but look
up at it along the walls of rock to where it
spreads in a thin strip above the jaws of the
canyon. Did you ever see such light coming
out of the blue before ! See how it flashes from
the long line of tumbling water that pitches over
the rocks ! White as an avalanche, the water
slips through the air down to its basin of stone ;
and white, again, as the snow are the foam and
froth of the pool.

Stones and water in a gorge, wastes of rock

MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS

211

thrust upward into mountains, long vistas of
plain and mesa glaring in the sunlight — what
things are these for a human being to fall in
love with ? Doctor Johnson, who occasionally
went into the country to see his friends, but
never to see the country, who thought a man
demented who enjoyed living out of town ; and
who cared for a tree only as firewood or lum-
ber, what would he have had to say about the
desert and its confines ? In his classic time,
and in all the long time before him, the earth
and the beauty thereof remained comparatively
unnoticed and unknown. Scott, Byron, Hugo,
— not one of the old romanticists ever knew
Nature except as in some strained way symbolic
of human happiness or misery. Even when the
naturalists of the last half of the nineteenth
century took up the study they were impressed
at first only with the large and more apparent
beauties of the world — the Alps, the Niagaras,
the Grand Canyons, the panoramic views from
mountain-tops. They never would have tol-
erated the desert for a moment

But the Nature-lover of the present, who has
taken so kindly to the minor beauties of the
world, has perhaps a little wider horizon than
his predecessors. Not that his positive knowl-

Desert
landscape.

The former
knowledge
of Nature.

212

THE DESERT

The Nature-
lover of the
present.

Human
limitations.

edge is so much greater, but rather where he
lacks in knowledge he declines to condemn.
He knows now that Mature did not give all her
energy to the large things and all her weakness
to the small things; he knows now that she
works by law and labors alike for all ; he knows
now that back of everything is a purpose, and
if he can discover the purpose he cannot choose
but admire the product.

That is something of an advance no doubt —
a grasp at human limitations at least — but there
is no reason to think that it will lead to any
lofty heights. Nature never intended that we
should fully understand. That we have stum-
bled upon some knowledge of her laws was more
accident than design. We have by some strange
chance groped our way to the Gate of the Gar-
den, and there we stand, staring through the
closed bars, with the wonder of little children.
Alas ! we shall always grope ! And shall we
ever cease to wonder ?

CHAPTEE XII

MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS

The character of the land lying along the
western boundaries of the deserts is very differ-
ent from that of the Arizona canyon country.
Moving toward the Pacific you meet with no
mesas of consequence, nor do you traverse many
plateaus or foot-hills. The sands extend up to
the bases of the Coast Eange and then stop
short. The mountains rise abruptly from the
desert like a barrier or wall. Sometimes they
lift vertically for several thousand feet, but
more often they present only a steep rough
grade. There are cracks in the wall called
passes, through which railways lead on to the
Pacific ; and there are high divides and saddles
— dips in the top of the wall — through which in
the old days the Indians trailed from desert to
sea, and which are to-day known only to the
inquisitive few.

From the saddles — and better still from the
topmost peaks — there are wonderful sights to
213

The western
mountains:

Saddles and
passes.

214

THE DESERT

The view
from the
mountain-
top.

LooTiing up
toward the
peak.

be seen. Yon will never know the vast reach
of the deserts until you see them from a point
of rock ten thousand feet in air. Then you are
standing on the Kim of the Bowl and can see
the yellow ocean of sand within and the blue
ocean of water without. The ascent to that
high point is, however, not easy, especially if
undertaken from the desert side. But nothing
could be more interesting in quick change and
new surprise than the rise from the hot waste
at the bottom to the cold white-capped peaks of
the top. It is not often that you find moun-
tains with their feet thrust into tropic sands
and their heads thrust into clouds of snow.

Before you start to climb, before you reach
the foot of the mountains, you are struck by
the number of dry washes leading down from
the sides and gradually losing themselves in the
sands. As the eyes trace these arroyos up the
mountain-side they are seen to turn into green
streaks and finally, near the peak, into white
streaks. You know what that means and yet
can hardly believe that those white lines are
snow-banks packed many feet deep in the can-
yons ; that from them run streams which
lower down become green lines because of the
bushes, and trees growing on their

MOUNTAIK-BARKIERS

215

banks ; and that finally the streams, after
plunging through canyons, fall into the arroyos
and are drunk up by the desert sands before
they have left the mountain-bases. It seems
incredible that a stream should be born ; run its
course through valley, gorge, and canyon ; and
then disappear forever in the sands, all within
a few miles. Yet not one but many of these
mountain-streams have that brief history.

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

If you ascend by the bed of the arroyo it is
not long before you begin to note the presence
of underground water. It is apparent in the
green of the vegetation. The grasses are seen
growing first in bunches and then in sods,
little blue flowers are blooming beside the
grasses; alders, willows, and young sycamores

Lost
streams.

Avalanches
and bowl-
der-beds.

The ascent
by the
arroyo.

216

THE DESERT

Growth of
the stream.

banks.

Water/alls.

are growing along the banks, and live-oaks are
in the stream-bed among the bowlders. As yon
move up and into the mountain the bed be-
comes more of a rocky floor, the earth-deposits
grow thii;iner, and presently little water-pockets
begin to show themselves. At first you see
them in pot-holes and worn basins in the rock,
then water begins to show in small pools under
cut banks, and then perhaps there is a little
glassy slip of light over a flat rock in a narrow
section of the bed. Gradually the slip grows in
length and joins the pools, until at last you
see the stream come to life, as it were, out of
the ground.

The banks begin to rise. As you advance
they lift higher and higher, they grow into
abrupt walls of rock ; the strata of granite crop
out in ragged ledges. The trees and grasses
disappear, and in their place come cold pale
flowers growing out of beds of moss, or cling-
ing in rock-niches where all around the gray
and orange lichens are weaving tapestries upon
the walls. The bed of the stream seems to have
sunken down, but in reality it is rising by steps
and falls ever increasing in size. The stream
itself has grown much larger, swifter, more
noisy. You move slowly up and around the

MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS

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 light
is dim. The glare and heat of the desert have
vanished and in their place is the shadow of the
cave. You toil on far up the chasm, creeping
along ledges and rising by niches, until a great
pool, a basin hewn from the rock, is before
you ; and the hewer is seen waving and flash-
ing in the air a hundred feet as it falls into the
pool. Around you and ahead of you is a sheer
pitch of rock curved like a horseshoe. It is
insurmountable ; there is no thoroughfare.
You will not gain the peak by way of the can-
yon. The water-ousel on the basin edge — sole
tenant of the gorge — seems to laugh at your ig-
norance of that fact. Let us turn back and try
the ridges.

Up the faces of the spurs and thus by the
backbones and saddles to the summit is not
easy travelling. At first desert vegetation sur-
rounds you, for the cacti and all their compan-
ions creep up the mountain-side as far as possi-
ble. The desert does not give up its dominion
easily. Bowlders are everywhere, vines and
grasses are growing under their shade ; and, as
you advance, the bushes arise and gradually

In the

gorge.

The ascent
by the
ridges.

218

THE DESERT

The
chaparral.

Home of the
grizzly.

Itidge trails
and taluses.

thicken into brush, and the brush runs into a
chaparral. The manzanita, the lavender, and
white lilac, the buckthorn, the laurel, the su-
mac, all throw out stiff dry arms that tear at
your clothing. The mountain-covering that
from below looked an ankle-deep of grasses and
weeds — a velvety carpet only — turns out to be
a dense tangle of brush a dozen feet high. It
is not an attractive place because the only suc-
cessful method of locomotion through it is on
the hands and knees. That method of moving
is peculiar to the bear, and so for that matter
is the chaparral through which you are tearing
your way. It is one of the hiding-places of the
grizzly. And there are plenty of grizzlies still
left in the Sierra Madre. To avoid the chapar-
ral (and also the bear) you would better keep
on the sunny side of the spurs where the
ground is more open.

You are at the top of one of the outlying spurs
at last and you find there a dim trail made by
deer and wolves leading along the ridge, across
the saddle, and up to the next spur. As you
follow this you presently emerge from the brush
and come face to face with a declivity, covered
by broken blocks of stone that seem to have
been slipping down the mountain-side for cen-

MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS

219

turies. It is an old talus of one of the spurs.
You wind about it diagonally until different
ground is reached, and then you are once more
upon a ridge — higher by a spur than before.

Again the scene changes. An open park-
like country appears covered with tall grass,
the sunlight flickers on the shiny leaves of live-
oaks, and dotted here and there are tall yuccas
in bloom — the last of the desert growths to
vanish from the scene. Flowers strange to the
desert are growing in the grass — clumps of yel-
low violets, little fields of pink alfileria, purple
lilies, purple nightshades, red paint-brushes,
and flaming fire-rods. And there are birds in the
trees that know the desert only as they fly — blue
birds with red breasts as in New England, blue-
jays with their chatter as in Minnesota, blue-
backed woodpeckers with their tapping on dead
limbs as in Pennsylvania. And here was once
the stamping-ground of the mule-deer. Here
in the old days under the shade of the live-oak
he would drowse away the heat of the day and
at night perhaps step down to the desert. He
was safe then in the open country, but to-day
he knows danger and skulks in the depths of
the chaparral, from which a hound can scarcely
drive him.

Among the
live-oaks.

Birds and
deer.

220

THE DESEKT

Yawning
canyons.

The canyon
stream.

Snoio.

Onward and upward through the oaks until
you are on the top of another ridge. Did you
think it was the top because it hid the peak ?
Ah no; the granite crags are still far above
you. And there, yawning at yoar very feet, is
another canyon whose existence you never sus-
pected. How steep and broad and ragged the
walls look to you ! And down in the bottom
of the canyon — almost a mile down it seems —
are huge masses of rock, fallen towers and
ledges, great frost-heaved strata lying piled in
confusion among trees and vines and heavy
brush. Here and there down the canyon^s
length appear disconnected flashes of silvery
light showing where a stream is dashing its
way under rocks and through tangled brush
down to the sandy sea. And far above you to
the right where the canyon heads is a streak of
dirty-looking snow. There is nothing for it
but to get around the head of the canyon above
the snow-streak, for crossing the canyon itself
is unprofitable, not to say impossible.

How odd it seems after the sands to see the
snow. The long wedge lying in the barranca
under the shadowed lee of an enormous spur is
not very inviting looking. It has melted down
and accumulated dust and dirt until it looks al-

MOTJNTAIN-BARRIERS

221

most like a bed of clay. But the little stream
running away from its lowest part is pure ; and
it dashes through the canyon, tumbles into little
pools, and slips over shelving precipices like a
thing of life. Could the canyon have been cut
out of the solid rock by that little stream ? Who
knows ! Besides, the stream is not always so
small. The descent is steep, and bowlders car-
ried down by great floods cut faster than water.
It is dangerous travelling — this crossing of
snow-banks in June. You never know how
soft they may be nor how deep they may drop
you. Better head the snow-bank no matter how
much hard brush and harder stones there may
be to fight against. The pines are above you
and they are beginning to appear near you. Be-
side you is a solitary shaft of dead timber, its
branches wrenched from it long ago and its
trunk left standing against the winds. And on
the ground about you there are fallen trunks,
crumbled almost to dust, and near them young
pines 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 lower
down. You pass through it easily and press on
upward, still upward, in the cool mountain-air,
until you are above the barranca of snow and un-

The ivear of
water.

The pines.

222

THE DESERT

Barrancas
and escarp-
ments.

Under
the pines.

Bushes,
fernsy and
mosses.

der the lee of a vast escarpment. The wall is
perpendicular and you have to circle it looking
for an exit higher up. For half an hour you
move across a talus of granite blocks^ and then
through a break in the wall you clamber up to
the top of the escarpment. You are on a high
spur which leads up a pine-clad slope. You are
coming nearer your quest.

The pines ! — at last the pines ! How gigan-
tic they seem, those trees standing so calm and
majestic in their mantles of dark green — how
gigantic to eyes grown used to the little palo
verde or the scrubby grease wood ! All classes
of pines are here — sugar pines, bull pines, white
pines, yellow pines — not in dense numbers
standing close together as in the woods of Ore-
gon, but scattered here and there with open
aisles through which the sunshine falls in broad
bars. Many small bushes — berry bushes most
of them — ^are under the pines ; and with them
are grasses growing in tufts, flowers growing in
beds, and bear-clover growing in fields. Aimless
and apparently endless little streams wander
everywhere, and ferns and mosses go with them.
Bowlder streams they are, for the rounded bowl-
der is still in evidence — in the stream, on the
bank, and under the roots of the pine.

MOUNTAIN-BAERIERS

223

The beautiful mountain-quail loves to scram-
ble over these stones, especially when they are
in the water ; and the mountain-quail is here.
This is his abiding-place, and you are sure to
see him, for he has a curiosity akin to that of
the antelope and must get on a bowlder or a log
to look at you. And this is the home of hun-
dreds of woodpeckers that seem to spend their
entire lives in pounding holes in the pine-trees
and then pounding acorns into the holes. It
is a very thrifty practice and provides against
winter consumption, only the squirrels consume
the greater part of the acorns if the blue- jays
do not get ahead of them. For here lives the
ordinary blue-jay and also his mountain cousin,
the crested jay, with a coat so blue that it might
better be called indigo. A beautiful bird, but
with a jangling note that rasps the air with dis-
cord. His chief occupation seems to be climb-
ing pine-trees as by the rungs of a ladder.
There are sweeter notes from the warblers, the
nuthatches, and the chickadees. But no desert-
bird comes up so high ; and as for the common
lawn and field birds like the robin and the
thrush, they do not fancy the pines.

Upward, still upward, under the spreading
arms of the pines ! How silent the forest save

Mountain-
quail.

Indigo jays.

Warblers.

224

THE DESERT

The mouti'
tain-air.

The dwarf
pine.

The
summit.

for the soughing of the wind through the pine
needles and the jangle of the jays ! And how
thin and clear the mountain-air ! How white the
sunlight falling upon the moss-covered rocks ! It
must be that we have risen out of the dust-
laden atmosphere of the desert. And out of
its heat too. The air feels as though blown to
us from snow-banks^ and indeed, they are in the
gullies lying on either side of us. For now we
are coming close to the peak. The bushes have
been dwindling away for some time past, and
the pines have been growing thinner in body,
fewer in number, smaller in size. A dwarf pine
begins to show itself — a scraggly tempest-fight-
ing tree, designed by Nature to grow among the
bowlders of the higher peaks and to be the first
to stop the slides of snow. The hardy grasses
fight beside it, and with them is the little snow-
bird, fighting for life too.

Upward, still upward, until great spaces be-
gin to show through the trees and the ground
flattens and becomes a floor of rock. In the
barrancas on the north side the snow still lies in
banks, but on the south side, where the sun falls
all day, the ground is bare. You are now above
the timber line. Nothing shows but wrecked
and shattered strata of rock with patches of

MOUNTAIN-BAERIEES

225

stunted grass. The top is only barren stone.
The uppermost peak, which you have perhaps
seen from the desert a hundred miles away look-
ing like a sharp spine of granite shot up in the
air, turns out to be something more of a dome
than a spine — a rounded knob of gray granite
which you have no difficulty in ascending.

At last you are on the peak and your first
impulse 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 nar-
rative and romance ; but I venture to doubt if
you have ever seen one. It is seen only from
high points — from just such a place as you are
now standing upon. Therefore look up first of
all and see a blue sky that is turning into violet.
Were you ten thousand feet higher in the air
you would see it darkened to a purple-violet
with the stars even at midday shining through
it. How beautiful it is in color and how won-
derful it is in its vast reach ! The dome in-
stead of contracting as you rise into it, seems to
expand. There are no limits to its uttermost
edge, no horizon lines to say where it begins.
It is not now a cup or cover for the world, but
something that reaches to infinity — something
in which the world floats.

Th4ilook
upward at
the sky.

The dark-
blue dome.

226

THE DESERT

White light.

Distant
views.

The Pacific.

And do you notice that the sun is no longer
yellow but white, and that the light that comes
from it is cold with just the faintest shade of
violet about it ? The air, too, is changed.
Look at the far-away ridges and peaks, some of
them snow-capped, but the majority of them
bare ; and see the air how blue and purple it
looks along the tops and about the slopes. Peak
upon peak and chain upon chain disappear to
the north and south in a mysterious veil of gray,
blue, and purple. Green pine-clad spurs of the
peaks, green slopes of the peaks themselves,
keep fading away in blue - green mazes and
hazes. Look down into the canyons, into the
shadowed depths where the air lies packed in a
mass, and the top of the mass seems to reflect
purple again. This is a very different air from
the glowing mockery that dances in the basin
of Death Valley. It is mountain-air and yet
has something of the sea in it. Even at this
height you can feel the sea-breezes moving along
the western slopes. For the ocean is near at
hand — not a hundred miles away as the crow
flies. From the mountain-top it looks like a
flat blue band appended to the lower edge of
the sky, and it counts in the landscape only as
I a strip of color or light.

MOUNTAIN-BAREIERS

227

Between the ocean and the mountain yon are
standing upon lies the habitable portion of
Southern California, spread out like a relief
map with its broken ranges, its chaparral-cov-
ered foot-hills, and its wide valleys. How fair
it looks lying under the westering sun with
the shadows drawing in the canyons, and the
valleys glowing with the yellow light from
fields of ripened barley ! And what a con-
trast to the yellow of the grain are the dark
green orchards of oranges and lemons scat-
tered at regular intervals like the squares of
a checker-board ! And what pretty spots of
light and color on the map are the orchards
of prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, the patches
of velvety alfalfa, the groves of eucalyptus and
Monterey cypress, the long waving green lines
of cottonwoods and willows that show where
run the mountain-streams to the sea !

Yet large as they are, these are only spots.
The cultivated portion of the land is but a
flower-garden beside the unbroken foot-hills
and the untenanted valleys. As you look down
upon them the terra-cotta of the granite
shows through the chaparral of the hills ; and
the sands of the valleys have the glitter of the
desert. You know intuitively that all this

Soufhem
California,

JBasKcoft Ubreury

The garden
in the
desert.

228

THE DESERT

Reclaiming
the valleys.

Fighting
fertility.

eountry was planned by Nature to be desert.
Down to the water-edge of the Pacific she once
carried the light, air, and life of the Mojave
and the Colorado.

But man has in measure changed the desert
conditions by storing the waste waters of the
mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irriga-
tion. His success has been phenomenal. Out
of the wilderness there have sprung farms,
houses, towns, cities with their wealth and lux-
ury. But the cultivated conditions are main-
tained only at the price of eternal vigilance.
Nature is compelled to reap where she has not
sown ; and at times she seems almost human in
the way she rebels and recurs to former condi-
tions. Two, three ; yes, at times, four years
in succession she gives little rain. A great
drouth follows. Then the desert breaks in
upon the valley ranches, upon the fields of bar-
ley, the orchards of prunes and peaches and
apricots. Then abandoned farms are quite as
plentiful as in New England ; and once aban-
doned, but a few years elapse before the desert
has them for its own. Nature is always driven
with difficulty. Out on the Mojave she fights
barrenness at every turn; here in Southern
California she fights fertility. She is deter-

MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS

229

mined to maintain just so much of desert with
just so much of its hardy, stubborn life. When
she is pleased to enhance it or abate it she will
do so ; but in her own good time and way.

Come to the eastern side of the peak and
look out once more upon the desert while yet
there is time. The afternoon sun is driving
its rays through the passes like the sharp-cut
shafts of search-lights, and the shadows of the
mountains are lengthening in distorted silhou-
ette upon the sands below. Yet still the San
Bernardino Range, leading off southeast to the
Colorado River, is glittering with sunlight at
every peak. You are above it and can see over
its crests in any direction. The vast sweep of
the Mojave lies to the north ; the Colorado
with its old sea-bed lies to the south. Far
away to the east you can see the faint forms of
the Arizona mountains melting and mingling
with the sky ; and in between lie the long pink
rifts of the desert valleys and the lilac tracery
of the desert ranges.

What a wilderness of fateful buffetings I
All the elemental forces seem to have turned
against it at different times. It has been swept
by seas, shattered by earthquakes and volca-
noes, beaten by winds and sands, and scorched

The desert
from the
mountair^
top.

The great
extent of the
desert.

The fateful
loilderness.

230

THE DESERT

All shall
perish.

The death
o/ worlds.

by suns. Yet in spite of all it has endured. It
remains a factor in Nature's plan. It main-
tains its types and out of its desolation it brings
forth increase that the species may not perish
from the face of the earth.

And yet in the fulness of time Nature de-
signs that this waste and all of earth with it
shall perish. Individual^ type, and species, all
shall pass away ; and the globe itself become as
desert sand blown hither and yon through
space. She cares nothing for the individual
man or bird or beast ; can it be thought that
she cares any more for the individual world ?
She continues the earth-life by the death of the
old and the birth of the new ; can it be thought
that she deals differently with the planetary
and stellar life of the universe ? Whence come
the new worlds and their satellites unless from
the dust of dead worlds compounded with the
energy of nebulas ? Our outlook is limited in-
deed, but have we not proof in our own moon
that worlds do die ? Is it possible that its
bleached body will never be disintegrated, will
never dissolve and be resolved again into some
new life ? And how came it to die ? What
was the element that failed — fire, water, or at-
mosphere ? Perhaps it was water. Perhaps it

MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS

231

died through thousands of years with the slow
evaporation of moisture and the slow growth of
the — desert.

Is then this great expanse of sand and rock
the beginning of the end ? Is that the way our
globe shall perish ? Who can say ? Nature
plans the life, she plans the death ; it must be
that she plans aright. For death may be the
culmination of all character ; and life but the
process of its development. If so, then not in
vain these wastes of sand. The harsh destiny,
the life-long struggle which they have imposed
upon all the plants and birds and animals have
been but as the stepping-stones of character. It
is true that Nature taxed her invention to the
utmost that each might not wage unequal strife.
She gave cunning, artifice, persistence, strength ;
she wished that each should endure and fulfil
to its appointed time. But it is not the armor
that develops the wearer thereof. It is the
struggle itself — the hard friction of the fight.
Not in the spots of earth where plenty breeds
indolence do we meet with the perfected type.
It is in the land of adversity, and out of much
pain and travail that finally emerges the high-
est manifestation.

Not in vain these wastes of sand. And this

The desert
the begin-
ning of the
end?

Develop-
ment
through
adversity.

232

THE DESEET

Sublimity
of the waste.

Desolation
and silence.

time not because they develop character in des-
ert life, but simply because they are beautiful
in themselves and good to look upon whether
they be life or death. In sublimity — the su-
perlative degree of beauty — what land can equal
the desert with its wide plains, its grim moun-
tains, and its expanding canopy of sky ! You
shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the
pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire
at sunrise and sunset ; you shall never see else-
where as here the sunset valleys swimming in a
pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus
fading into blue distance, the gorges and can-
yons banked full of purple shadow. Never
again shall you see such light and air and color ;
never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, such
fiery twilight. And wherever you go, by land
or by sea, you shall not forget that which you
saw not but rather felt — the desolation and the
silence of the desert.

Look out from the mountain's edge once
more. A dusk is gathering on the desert's face,
and over the eastern horizon the purple shadow
of the world is reaching up to the sky. The
light is fading out. Plain and mesa are blurring
into unknown distances, and mountain-ranges
are looming dimly into unknown heights. Warm

MOUNTAIN-BARRIEKS

233

drifts of lilac-blue are drawn like mists across
the valleys ; the yellow sands have shifted into
a pallid gray. The glory of the wilderness has
gone down with the sun. Mystery — that haunt-
ing sense of the unknown — is all that remains.
It is time that we should say good-night — per-
haps a long good-night — to the desert.

Good-night
to the
desert.