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Title: The desert
Further studies in natural appearances
Author: John C. Van Dyke
Release date: June 5, 2024 [eBook #73778]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901
Credits: Joeri de Ruiter and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DESERT ***
THE DESERT
[Illustration: Silence and Desolation.]
THE DESERT
_FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL
APPEARANCES_
BY
JOHN C. VAN DYKE
AUTHOR OF “NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,”
“ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
----
Published September, 1901.
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
PREFACE-DEDICATION
To
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
destroyers? 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 Œdipus of
her brood was brought forth! And how instinctively she taught the
fear of him to the rest of her children! 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 approach. 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 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 believe me
there is no sunlight there compared with that which falls upon the
upper peaks of 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 Rome again
and stand upon that hill where all good romanticists 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. Ride 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 feeling 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 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 unblazed. 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 begins by admiring
the Hudson-River 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
board and chart her beauties with square and compasses. One can give
his impression and but little more. Perhaps I can tell you something
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 NORIA 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--Antelope--The Lost
Mountains--The ascent--Deer trails--Footprints--The stone
path--Defensive walls--The summit--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--Mountain “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 desert--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
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 III. _The Bottom of the Bowl._--Early geological days--The
former Gulf--Sea-beaches on desert--Harbors and reefs--Indian
remains--The Cocopas--The Colorado River--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--Below 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--Nature
eternal--Return of desolation
44
CHAPTER IV. _The Silent River._--Rise of the Colorado--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--Herons and bitterns--Snipe--Sadness of bird-life--The
forsaken shores--Solitude--Beauty of the river--Its majesty--The
delta--Disintegration--The river in flood--The “bore”--Meeting of river
and sea--The blue tomb--Shores of Gulf
63
CHAPTER V. _Light, 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--Producing color--Refracted rays--Cold colors, how
produced--Warm colors--Sky colors--Color produced by dust--Effect
of heat--Effect of winds--Sand-storms--Reflections 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--Colored shadows--Blue shadows
upon salt-beds--How light makes color--Desert sunsets
77
CHAPTER VI. _Desert Sky and Clouds._--Commonplace 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-colors--Horizon skies--Spectrum colors--Bands of yellow--The orange
sky--Desert-clouds--Rainfall--Effect of the nimbus--Cumuli--Heap-clouds
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 mysteries--Space and
immensity--The silences--The cry of the human
95
CHAPTER VII. _Illusions._--Reality and appearance--Preconceived
impressions--Deception by sunlight--Distorted forms and
colors--Changed appearance of mountains--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
produced--Objects in water--Confused mirage--The swimming wolf--Colors
and shadows in 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--Underground structure--Feeding
the top growth--Storage reservoirs below ground--Reservoirs above
ground--Thickened barks--Gathering moisture--Attacks upon desert
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--Beauty in
character--Forms of the yucca and maguey--The lluvia 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 requirements--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 scorpions--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._--First 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--Development 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 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
destruction 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 XI. _Mesas and Foot-Hills._--Flat steps of the desert--Across
Southern Arizona--Rising from the desert--The great mesas--“Grease
wood plains”--Upland 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--Avalanches and bowlder-beds--Ascent by the arroyo--Growth
of the stream--Rising banks--Waterfalls--Gorges--Ascent 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--Indigo 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 Pacific--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
CHAPTER I
THE APPROACH
[Sidenote: Desert mountains.]
[Sidenote: Unknown ranges.]
It is the last considerable group of mountains between the divide and
the low basin of the Colorado desert. For days I have been watching
them change color at sunset--watching the canyons shift into great
slashes of blue and purple shadow, and the ridges flame with edgings of
glittering fire. They are lonesome looking mountains lying off 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 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, nobody’s hills, no man’s range; but nevertheless I am off for
them in the morning at daylight.
[Sidenote: Early morning on the desert.]
[Sidenote: Air illusions.]
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 illusions
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
o’clock, the foot hills are not reached, I shall turn back.
[Sidenote: Sand forms in the valleys.]
[Sidenote: Winds of the desert.]
The summer heat has withered everything except the mesquite, the palo
verde,[1] 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 shallow 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 comparison with the
north wind. When you feel it on your face you may think it the breath
of some distant volcano.
[Sidenote: Sun shafts.]
How pale-blue the Lost Mountains look under the growing light. I am
watching their edges develop into broken barriers of rock, and 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.
[Sidenote: The beauty of sunlight.]
That beam of light! Was there ever anything 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.
[Sidenote: Desert life.]
[Sidenote: Antelope.]
Yes, there is animal and bird life here though it is not always
apparent unless you look for it. Wrens and linnets are building nests
in the cholla, and finches are singing from the top of the sahuaro.[2]
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
apprehensive 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 central 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.
[Sidenote: The Lost Mountains.]
[Sidenote: Mountain walls.]
These desert mountains have a fashion of appearing distant until
you are almost up to them. Then they seem to give up the game of
deception and come out of their hiding-places. It is 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 complete 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.
[Sidenote: The ascent.]
[Sidenote: Deer trails.]
[Sidenote: Footprints.]
The walking up the mountain is not the best in the world. It is
over splintered rock, stepping 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 beaten path, and animals are just as fond of a
good path as humanity. By a strange coincidence 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 impression 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 suggestion 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
Cæsars? With what contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival of the
least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his shield!
[Sidenote: The stone path.]
[Sidenote: Following the trail.]
[Sidenote: Defensive walls.]
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 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 stretching
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 horseshoe 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?
[Sidenote: The summit.]
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
joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. A conclusion is instantly
jumped at, for the imagination will not make haste slowly under such
circumstances. These are the ruins of a once fortified camp.
[Sidenote: The 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.
[Sidenote: Nature’s reclamations.]
The traces of human activity are slight. Nature has been wearing them
away and reclaiming 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 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.
[Sidenote: Mountain dwellers.]
[Sidenote: Invading hosts.]
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! Climbing a hill against
a shower of arrows, spears, and bowlders is to fight at a terrible
disadvantage.
[Sidenote: Water and food supplies.]
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
where did either besieged or besieger get water? If there was ever a
spring in the mountain it long ago dried up, 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.
[Sidenote: The aborigines.]
[Sidenote: Historic periods.]
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 illustration of the Stone Age and talk of
unknown 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 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.
[Sidenote: The open desert.]
[Sidenote: Perception of beauty.]
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 directions. Perhaps, too, he was born with a predilection
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 decorated 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 mountain shadows at sunset. They are astonished at
your question for they see nothing but mountains. 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.
[Sidenote: Sense of beauty.]
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
impressionable 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
sublimity of nature?
[Sidenote: Mountain “view.”]
[Sidenote: The desert colors.]
These mountain-dwellers, always looking out from their height, must
have seen and remarked the large features of the desert--the great
masses of form, the broad blocks of color. 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
perfectly 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 compounded 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 lingered in the western sky?
[Sidenote: Looking down to the desert.]
[Sidenote: The land of fire.]
And how often they 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 unknown land to them and yet it had
its terrors. Tradition told that the Evil Spirit dwelt there, and it
was his hot breath that came up 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 reflection from his dwelling place? The very
mountain peaks flared red at times, and in the old days there were
rivers of fire. The petrified waves and eddies of those 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 volcanoes 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?
[Sidenote: Drought and heat.]
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 buried in sand, not decayed, but
withered like the grass on the lomas.
[Sidenote: Desert mystery.]
[Sidenote: Sand and gypsum.]
[Sidenote: Sand-whirls.]
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!
[Sidenote: Desert storms.]
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 air! 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 between 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.
[Sidenote: Drift of sand.]
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.
[Sidenote: Winter cold.]
[Sidenote: Snow on desert.]
It was in winter when the winds were fiercest. 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.
[Sidenote: Sea and sand.]
[Sidenote: Grim desolation.]
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 strip of sand or water? But there is a simplicity 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 peaceful
with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren
deserts, the tracts forsaken 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.
[Sidenote: Love for the desert.]
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 unbroken solitude. Nor ever knew why they loved it.
They were content and that was enough.
[Sidenote: The descent.]
[Sidenote: The Padres.]
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-abnegation, 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 perseverance 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 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?
[Sidenote: Light of the cross.]
[Sidenote: Aboriginal faith.]
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 mission 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 whisper words of prayer. The dwellers beside the
desert have cherished what the inhabitants of 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The use of Spanish names is compulsory. There are no English
equivalents.
[2] Properly Saguaro.
CHAPTER II
THE MAKE OF THE DESERT
[Sidenote: Sea of sand.]
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.
[Sidenote: Mountain ranges on the desert.]
[Sidenote: Plains, valleys, and mesas.]
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 are always circling you with a ragged horizon,
dark-hued, 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 prevents 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 escarpments.
[Sidenote: Effect of drought.]
With these large features of landscape common 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 Rhone would resemble
the sluggish yellow Nile. If the Adirondack region in New 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 possible to imagine.
[Sidenote: The effect of rains.]
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 flashing lakes. This is the very sheen and sparkle--the
witchery--of landscape which lend allurement to such countries as New
England, France, or Austria, and make them livable and lovable lands.
[Sidenote: Harshness of the desert.]
[Sidenote: A gaunt land.]
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-Valley 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 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 sublimity 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 elsewhere in nature.
[Sidenote: Conditions of life.]
[Sidenote: The incessant struggle.]
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 mountain’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 brotherhood here. Everything is at war with its
neighbor, and the conflict is unceasing.
[Sidenote: Elemental warfare.]
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 barrancas, 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.
[Sidenote: Desert vegetation.]
[Sidenote: Protruding edges.]
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 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 driftings 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
_vertebræ_ showing--elbows and shoulders protruding through the yellow
byssus of sand.
[Sidenote: Shifting sands.]
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 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.
[Sidenote: Desert winds.]
[Sidenote: Radiation of heat.]
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
skyward leaving a vast vacuum below that must be filled with a colder
air from without. This colder air on the southern portion of the
Colorado 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.
[Sidenote: Prevailing winds.]
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 seaward. How far out it goes is
unknown, but when it has cooled off 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
violent 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 region as
well as from the Pacific.
[Sidenote: Wear of the winds.]
[Sidenote: Erosion of mountains.]
In open places these desert winds are sometimes 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 through 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 answer
quite as well.
[Sidenote: Rock-cutting.]
[Sidenote: Fantastic forms.]
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 produced
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 human, such as faces, heads, and
hands. In the San Gorgonio Pass the rock-cuttings are in parallel
lines, and occasionally a row of garnets in the rock will make the
jewel-pointed fingers of a hand protruding from the parent body.[3]
Again shafts of hard granite may make tall spires and turrets upon a
mountain peak, a vein of quartz may bulge out in a white or yellow 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 enormous
dragon.
[Sidenote: Wash-outs.]
[Sidenote: Sand-lines in caves.]
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 geologist 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.
[Sidenote: Cloud-bursts.]
[Sidenote: Canyon streams.]
Yes; there is some water on the deserts, some rainfall each year.
Even Sahara gets its occasional showers, and the Colorado and the
Mojave 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.
[Sidenote: Desert floods.]
[Sidenote: Power of water.]
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 buoyancy,
and the tendency is to drag down and roll the swimmer like a bowlder.
Even the 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 vanished, leaving
scarce a rack behind.
[Sidenote: Water-pockets.]
[Sidenote: No running streams.]
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 slowly oozes away to the river or the Gulf. There
is none of it remains upon the surface except perhaps a pool caught
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 lives many months on the desert and returns to a
well-watered country, the last thing he becomes accustomed to is the
sight of running water.
[Sidenote: Oases in the waste.]
In every desert there are isolated places where water stands in
pools, fed by underground 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 surrounded 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 unreality. They are
strange because bright-green foliage and moisture of any kind seem out
of place on the desert.
[Sidenote: Catch-basins.]
[Sidenote: Old sea-beds.]
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 often
glimmering white with salt. These beds are no doubt of recent origin
geologically, and were never more than the catch-basins of surface
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 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 slowly. Just how many centuries ago who shall say? Geologists may
guess and laymen may doubt, but the Keeper of the Seals says nothing.
[Sidenote: Volcanic action.]
[Sidenote: Lava streams.]
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 chips and breaks of lava,
showing that at one time there must have been quantities of it belched
out of the volcanoes.
[Sidenote: Geological ages.]
[Sidenote: Kinds of rock.]
There were convulsions in those days when the sea washed close to the
bases of the mountains. 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 explosions. For here are many kinds of splintered and twisted
rocks--rocks aqueous and igneous, 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 furnace;
and the dust of sulphur, copper, and iron blown upon granite as though
oxidized by fire.
[Sidenote: Glaciers.]
[Sidenote: Land slips.]
The evidence for glaciers is not so convincing. 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 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.
[Sidenote: Movement of stones.]
[Sidenote: The talus.]
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 bowlders
reaching the plain.
[Sidenote: Stages of the talus.]
In the first stage of the talus the blocks are ragged-edged and as
large as a barrel. Nothing whatever grows upon the slope. It is as bare
as the side of a volcanic crater. And just as difficult to walk over.
The talus is added to at the top by the falling rock of the face-wall,
and it is losing at the bottom by the under blocks grinding away to
stone and gravel. The flattening 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 mountain 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.
[Sidenote: Desert-floors.]
[Sidenote: Sandstone blocks.]
[Sidenote: Salt-beds.]
[Sidenote: Sand-beds.]
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 impression 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 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 wild-cat 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.
[Sidenote: Mountain vegetation.]
[Sidenote: Withered grasses.]
The mountains whence all the wash comes, are mere ranges of rock. In
the canyons, where there is perhaps some underground 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.
[Sidenote: Barren rock.]
[Sidenote: Mountain colors.]
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. 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 islands 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.
[Sidenote: Saw-toothed ridges.]
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 Moslem minarets or cathedral
spires; and at evening, 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.
[Sidenote: Seen from the peaks.]
[Sidenote: Sun-fire kingdom.]
And whether at sunset, at sunrise, or at midnight, how like
watch-towers these mountains 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
dominions.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Professor Blake of the University of Arizona has called my
attention to this.
CHAPTER III
THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL
[Sidenote: Early geological days.]
[Sidenote: The former Gulf.]
In the ancient days when the shore of the Pacific was young, when the
white sierras had only recently been heaved upward and the desert
itself was in a formative stage, the ocean reached much farther inland
than at the present time. It pushed through many a pass and flooded
many a depression in the sands, as its wave-marks upon granite bases
and its numerous 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 Range
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 River was a blue sea. The
Bowl was full. No one knew if it had a bottom or imagined that it would
ever be emptied of water and given over to the drifting sands.
[Sidenote: Sea-beaches on desert.]
[Sidenote: Harbors and reefs.]
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,
stretching under a spur of the Coast Range, 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 natural 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.
[Sidenote: Indian remains.]
[Sidenote: The Cocopas.]
These are the only records that tell of the sea’s occupation. The
Indians have no tradition about it. Yet when the sea was there the
Indian tribes were there also. Along the 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 pottery, 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 forefathers
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.
[Sidenote: The Colorado River.]
[Sidenote: The delta dam.]
But there came a time when there was a disturbance of the existing
conditions in the Upper Gulf. Century after century the Colorado River
had been carrying down to the sea its burden of sedimental sand and
silt. It had been entering the Gulf far down on the eastern side at
an acute angle. Gradually its deposits had been building up, banking
up; and gradually the river had been pushing them out and across the
Gulf in a southwesterly direction. Finally there was formed a delta
dam stretching 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 carried it away.
[Sidenote: The inland lake.]
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 of the water and with their hosts of barnacles
and sea-life became a part of the land.
[Sidenote: The first fall.]
[Sidenote: Springs and wells in the sea-bed.]
[Sidenote: The New River.]
The waters of the great inland lake fell perhaps 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
receiving reinforcements from some source. Possibly 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 itself. No one knows their
fountain-head. Perhaps 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 River 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 River. The
bed of this river runs northward from below the boundary-line of Lower
California; and in 1893, during 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.
[Sidenote: New beaches.]
It was undoubtedly some accident of this kind that called the halt in
the original recession. 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 sloping
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 zoöphite.
[Sidenote: The second fall.]
Nor was the change in beach and rock alone. New 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 evidently made a great effort to repair the damage
and adapt the lake to its new conditions. And the Indians, too,
accepted the change. There are many indications in broken pottery,
arrow-heads, and mortars that the aboriginal tribes moved down to the
new beach and built wickiups by the diminished waters. And the old
fishing-foraging-fighting life was probably resumed.
[Sidenote: The third beach.]
[Sidenote: The failing water.]
Then once more the waters went down, down, down. Step by step they
receded until the secondary 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.
[Sidenote: Evaporation.]
What fate for a lake in the desert receiving no supplies from river
or sea--what fate save annihilation? The hot breath of the wind blew
across the cramped water and whipped its surface 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 upward. 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 _algæ_, 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!
[Sidenote: Bottom of the Bowl.]
[Sidenote: Drying out of the sea-bed.]
[Sidenote: Advance of desert.]
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. Finally the
desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of 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.
[Sidenote: Below sea-level.]
[Sidenote: Desolation of the basin.]
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. Circling
about you to the north, south, and west are sierras, some of them
over ten thousand feet in height. These form the Rim 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 forsaken. 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 washings from the
mountains--and is almost as fine as flour.
[Sidenote: Beauty of the sand-dunes.]
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
always rhythmical and flowing in their forms; and for color the desert
has nothing that surpasses 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 dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating
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.
[Sidenote: Cactus and salt-bush.]
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 uniformity. 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 intense heat. Plants
cannot live by sunlight alone.
[Sidenote: Desert animals in the basin.]
[Sidenote: Birds.]
[Sidenote: Lizards and snakes.]
Nor will the desert animals inhabit an absolute waste. The coyote and
the wild-cat 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, showing the animals to be
crossing the basin to the mountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too,
you will occasionally find birds--linnets, bobolinks, mocking-birds,
larks--but they are seen one at a time, and they look weary--like 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.
[Sidenote: Mirage.]
[Sidenote: The water illusion.]
Is there any beauty, other than the dunes, 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
perfection. 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 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, suggestions 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.
[Sidenote: Decorative landscapes.]
[Sidenote: Sensuous qualities in nature.]
And there you have the most decorative landscape 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 features that this Bowl of the desert is a thing
of 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.
[Sidenote: Changing the desert.]
[Sidenote: Irrigation in the basin.]
Yet here is more beauty destined to destruction. 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 deserted by
reptiles shall escape the industry or the avarice (as you please) of
man. A great company has been formed to turn the Colorado River 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 River. 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.
[Sidenote: Changing the climate.]
[Sidenote: Dry air.]
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
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 produced 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 Range into Southern California,
and eastward across the plains to Arizona and Sonora. In what measure
it is responsible for the general climate of those States cannot
be accurately summarized; but it certainly 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
practically to nullify the finest air on the continent.
[Sidenote: Value of the air supply.]
And why are not good air and climate as essential 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 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 supply, to keep the fountain-heads
pure, to maintain 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?
[Sidenote: Value of the deserts.]
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 alfalfa. 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 deserts? Does anyone doubt that the healthfulness of the
countries lying west of the Mississippi 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.
[Sidenote: Destruction of natural beauty.]
[Sidenote: Effects of mining, lumbering, agriculture.]
[Sidenote: Ploughing the prairies.]
[Sidenote: “Practical men”]
To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste
one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The æsthetic 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 hydraulic mining? Have we not
seen in Minnesota 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 forests, changed from a broad, majestic
river into a shallow, muddy stream; and the beautiful prairies of
Dakota turned under by the plough and then allowed to run to weeds? Men
must have coal though they ruin the valleys 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 dollars 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.
[Sidenote: Fighting wind, sand, and heat.]
[Sidenote: Nature eternal.]
[Sidenote: Return of desolation.]
And at last they have turned to the desert! It remains to be seen what
they will do with it. Reclaiming a waste may not be so easy as breaking
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 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 duration. 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 foliage; and with no less care she made the desert 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 solitude, though no human eye sees nor
human tongue speaks its loveliness.
CHAPTER IV
THE SILENT RIVER
[Sidenote: Rise of the Colorado.]
[Sidenote: In the canyon.]
[Sidenote: On the desert.]
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, gurgles 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 destruction. 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 into froth. At last, its canyon course run,
exhausted 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 Californian Gulf. And there it
meets--obliteration.
[Sidenote: The lower river.]
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 seaward, 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.
[Sidenote: Sluggish movement.]
[Sidenote: Stillness of river.]
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 overhanging
willow or cottonwood or handful of arrow-weed holds out a restraining
hand. But slowly, patiently, winding about obstructions, 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 River 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.
[Sidenote: The river’s name.]
[Sidenote: Its red color.]
It was not through paucity of imagination that the old Spaniards gave
the name--Colorado.[4] 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. You may
see on the face of the globe numerous muddy Missouris, blue Rhones, 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-bœuf_ 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.
[Sidenote: Compared with the Nile.]
[Sidenote: The blood hue.]
To call it a river of blood would be exaggeration, and yet the truth
lies in the exaggeration. As one walks along its crumbling banks
there 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 ensanguined 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 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 resemblance is more apparent than real. The
Colorado is a red river but not a scarlet one.
[Sidenote: River changes.]
[Sidenote: Red sands and silt.]
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 wandering down to the sea
usually leave their mountain purity behind them. The Colorado rushing
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 surface
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 deeper red
than the canyons. And it does this not through arroyos alone, but also
by a wide surface drainage.
[Sidenote: River-banks.]
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 Roman 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.
[Sidenote: “Bottom” lands.]
[Sidenote: The green bands.]
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 scattered 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) come down to meet these “bottom” lands, 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.
[Sidenote: Bushes and flowers.]
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.
[Sidenote: Soundless water.]
[Sidenote: Wild fowl.]
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 of oars breaks the air
with a jar, but breaks no bubbles on the water. You look long at the
stream and fall to wondering if there can be any life in it. What
besides a polywog or a bullhead 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 Rockies and the Pacific that runs
north and south.
[Sidenote: Herons and bitterns.]
[Sidenote: Snipe.]
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 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!”
[Sidenote: Sad bird-life.]
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 kingfisher on such a river as this? If it
were filled with fish he could not see them through that thick water.
[Sidenote: The forsaken.]
[Sidenote: Solitude.]
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 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.”
[Sidenote: Beauty of the river.]
[Sidenote: Its majesty.]
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 character than the Colorado.
You may not fancy the solitude of the stream nor its suggestive
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.
[Sidenote: The delta.]
[Sidenote: Disintegration.]
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
manifests 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.
[Sidenote: The river during floods.]
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
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.
[Sidenote: The “bore.”]
[Sidenote: Meeting of river and sea.]
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 conflict 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, 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.
[Sidenote: The blue tomb.]
[Sidenote: Shores of the Gulf.]
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 unknown 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 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. Therefore is there silence--something of the hush of
the deserts and the river that flows between.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] 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 translation from the Indian would seem superfluous.
CHAPTER V
LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR
[Sidenote: Popular ideas of the desert.]
These deserts, cut through from north to south by a silent river and
from east to west by two noisy railways, seem remarkable for only a few
commonplace things, according to the consensus 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.
[Sidenote: Sunlight on desert.]
[Sidenote: Glare and heat.]
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 brightness in the sunbeam, but to there being no
reliefs for the eye in shadows, in dark colors, in 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 sun’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 momentary study of this
desert air.
[Sidenote: Pure sunlight.]
[Sidenote: Atmospheric envelope.]
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 falling perfectly straight,
not a diffused white or 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 aërial envelope lies in the particles of dust, soot,
smoke, salt, and vapor which are found floating in larger or smaller
proportions in all atmospheres.
[Sidenote: Vapor particles.]
[Sidenote: Clear air.]
In rainy countries like England and Holland the vapor particles alone
are sufficiently numerous to cause at times great obscurity of light,
as in the case of fog; and the air is only comparatively 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 vagueness 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 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.
[Sidenote: Dust particles.]
[Sidenote: Hazes.]
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 moisture
particles, for its humidity is almost nothing; but the dust particles,
carried upward by radiation and the winds, answer a similar purpose.
They parry the sunshaft, 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
reflects the blue sky. Nor does it muffle or obscure so much as the
moisture-laden mists of Holland, but it thickens the air perceptibly
and decreases in measure the intensity of the light.
[Sidenote: Seeing the desert air.]
[Sidenote: Sea breezes on desert.]
Yet despite the fact that desert air is dust-laden and must be
thickened somewhat, there is something almost inexplicable about
it. It seems so thin, so rarefied; and it is so scentless--I had
almost said breathless--that it is like no air at all. You breathe it
without feeling it, you look through it without being conscious of
its presence. Yet here comes in the contradiction. Desert air is very
easily recognized by the eyes alone. The traveller in California 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
Range the train is moving. 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 effect 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.
[Sidenote: Colored air.]
[Sidenote: Different hues.]
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 the coloring of it
that makes it so apparent? Probably. Even the clearest atmosphere has
some coloring about it. Usually it is an indefinable blue. Air-blue
means the most delicate of all colors--something not of surface depth
but of transparency, builded up by superimposed 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.
[Sidenote: Producing color.]
[Sidenote: Refracted rays.]
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 sunlight 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
the small dust particles of the higher air region, 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 sunlight the remaining rays come down to
earth as a white or yellow or at times reddish light, dependent upon
the density of the lower atmosphere.
[Sidenote: Cold colors, how produced.]
[Sidenote: Warm colors.]
Now it seems that an atmosphere laden with moisture particles obstructs
the passage earthward 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 dominate 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 twilight 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 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 produce 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.
[Sidenote: Sky colors.]
I mean now that the air itself is colored. Of course countless
quantities of light-beams and dispersed rays break through the aërial
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 tinted 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 mountain canyons,
across mesas and lomas, and over the stretches of the desert plains?
[Sidenote: Color produced by dust.]
[Sidenote: Effect of heat.]
The truth is all air is colored, and that of the desert is deeper dyed
and warmer hued 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 thermometer 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 responsible for the rosy or golden
quality of the air-coloring.
[Sidenote: Effect of winds.]
[Sidenote: Sand-storms.]
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 aërial 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 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.
[Sidenote: Reflections upon sky.]
[Sidenote: Blue, yellow, and pink hazes.]
The dust-particle in itself is sufficient to account for the warmth
of coloring in the desert air--sufficient in itself to produce the
pink, yellow, 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 illusion, for instance, which seems only
the reflection of the sky from heated air) seem to suggest it. And
if we put together other casual observations they will make argument
toward the same goal. For instance, the common blue haze that we may
see any day in the mountains, 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 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.
[Sidenote: The dust-veil.]
[Sidenote: Summer coloring.]
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 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 perhaps responsible for the greater part of what
everyone calls “the wonderful color” of the desert.
[Sidenote: Local hues.]
[Sidenote: Greens of desert plants.]
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
dark-green pines in the mountain scenery of Norway.
[Sidenote: Color of sands.]
[Sidenote: Sands in mirage.]
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 sunset occasionally pink or saffron-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.
[Sidenote: Color of mountain walls.]
[Sidenote: Weather staining.]
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 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 subdued. A mountain wall may be dark red within, 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.
[Sidenote: Influence of the air.]
[Sidenote: Peak of Baboquivari.]
But granted the quantity and the quality of local colors in the desert,
and the fact still remains that the air is the medium that influences
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 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 Baboquivari 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.
[Sidenote: Buttes and spires.]
[Sidenote: Sun-shafts through canyons.]
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 conjunction with light is always responsible for the hues. Even
when you are close up to the mountains 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 air most
distinctly. Very beautiful are these golden sun-shafts 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
reality they are.
[Sidenote: Complementary hues in shadow.]
There is one marked departure from the uniform 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 marvellous blue in her sails just as she crosses the line of the sun,
and the desert mountains repeat 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.
[Sidenote: Colored shadows.]
[Sidenote: Blue shadows upon salt-beds.]
The presence of the complementary color in the shadow is exceptional,
however. The shadows 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
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 example, 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 Mojave-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.
[Sidenote: How light makes color.]
[Sidenote: Desert sunsets.]
All color--local, reflected, translucent, complementary--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 copper 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 sun’s
endeavor. If there are clouds stretched across the west the ending is
usually one of exceptional 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.
CHAPTER VI
DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS
[Sidenote: Commonplace things of nature.]
[Sidenote: The blue sky.]
How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in
the waste, in the wilderness! How “the morning and the evening make up
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 intensity of the sky, for we have always
heard of the “deep 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 deep blue tinge. At noon it has passed through a whole
gamut of tones and is pale blue, yellowish, lilac-toned, or rosy; in
the late afternoon 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.
[Sidenote: Changes in the blue.]
[Sidenote: Dawns on the desert.]
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, carmines, 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 seldom seen in moist countries, nor are they usual on the desert,
except during the hot summer months.
[Sidenote: Blue as a color.]
The prevailing note of the sky, the one oftenest seen, is, of course,
blue--a color we may not perhaps linger over because it is so common.
And yet how seldom it is appreciated! Our attention is called to it
in art--in a hawthorn jar as large as a sugar-bowl, made in a certain
period, in a certain Oriental school. The æsthetic 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 tortured out of the blue sky. It is
a splendid body of color; no more.
[Sidenote: Sky from mountain heights.]
[Sidenote: The night sky.]
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 has darkened still more and
has a violet hue about it. The night sky at this altitude is almost
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.
[Sidenote: Blackness of space.]
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 firmament merely as a
blue-black background. The diffusion of light must decrease with the
growing 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.
[Sidenote: Bright sky-colors.]
[Sidenote: Horizon skies.]
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 aërial envelope is
dense. The lower strata of atmosphere are in 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 almost 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.
[Sidenote: Spectrum colors.]
[Sidenote: Bands of yellow.]
[Sidenote: The orange sky.]
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
arrangement 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 of orange takes its place. It is a flame-colored
orange, and its hue is felt in reflection upon valley, plain, and
mountain peak. This indeed is the orange light that converts the air in
the mountain canyons into golden mist, and is measurably responsible
for the yellow sun-shafts 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.
[Sidenote: Desert clouds.]
[Sidenote: Rainfall.]
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 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 dissipates 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.
[Sidenote: Effect of the nimbus.]
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 mountains turn slate-colored, mouldy,
unwholesome looking. A mantle of drab envelops the scene, and the glory
of the desert has departed.
[Sidenote: Cumuli.]
[Sidenote: Heap clouds at sunset.]
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.
[Sidenote: Strati.]
Above the cumuli and often flung across them like bands of gauze, are
the strati--clouds of 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 purples, there are still bright spots of
color in the upper sky where the cirri are receiving the last rays of
the sun.
[Sidenote: Cirri.]
[Sidenote: Ice-clouds.]
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 globules of vapor.
[Sidenote: Clouds of fire.]
[Sidenote: The celestial tapestry.]
There is nothing remarkable about the desert 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
tapestry, as a curtain of flame drawn between night and day, and what
land or sky can rival it!
[Sidenote: The desert moon.]
[Sidenote: Rings and rainbows.]
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 see all the spectrum colors arranged in
order. Pale hues they are but they are all there. Rainbows 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.
[Sidenote: Moonlight.]
[Sidenote: Stars.]
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 revealed, 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!
[Sidenote: The midnight sky.]
[Sidenote: Alone in the desert.]
Lying down there in the sands of the desert, alone and at night, with
a saddle for your pillow, and your eyes staring upward at the stars,
how incomprehensible it all seems! The immensity and the mystery are
appalling; and yet how these very features attract the thought and
draw the curiosity of man. In the presence of the unattainable and the
insurmountable 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 unlock
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.
[Sidenote: The mysteries.]
[Sidenote: Space and immensity.]
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 unknown? Or have immensity, space, magnitude
a peculiar beauty of their own? Is it not true that bulk and breadth
are primary and essential 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 boundaries are limited; we only feel their immensity,
their mystery, and their beauty.
[Sidenote: The silences.]
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.
[Sidenote: The cry of the human.]
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 harmonies! How it breaks in discord
upon the unities of earth and air and sky! Century after century that
cry has gone up, mobbing high heaven; and always insanity in the cry,
insanity 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?
CHAPTER VII
ILLUSIONS
[Sidenote: Reality and appearance.]
In our studies of landscape we are very frequently 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 River 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 perhaps lively purple. The reality is
one thing, the appearance quite another thing; but why are not both of
them truthful?
[Sidenote: Preconceived impressions.]
And how very shy people are about accepting 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 impression of the eyes, and in consequence we
are misled and deluded.
[Sidenote: Deception by sunlight.]
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 cabinet
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 unexpected places, in unexpected
lights and colors.
[Sidenote: Distorted forms and colors.]
[Sidenote: Changed appearance of mountains.]
What, for instance, could be more perplexing than the odd distortions
in the forms and colors 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 and shade of the canyons
and barrancas well marked, the cool morning colors of the face-walls
and foot-hills distinctly placed and holding 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 obliterated; 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 barranca 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.
[Sidenote: Changes in line, light, and color.]
At evening, however, the range seems to return 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 colors come slowly back to
their normal condition, 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 yellow to
pink, from pink to lilac, until at last with the sun on the rim of the
earth, the mountains, the air, the clouds, and the sky are all glowing
with the tints of ruby, topaz, rose-diamond--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 of the gray-based mountain, which has been puzzling
you for so many hours, does not belong 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.
[Sidenote: False perspective.]
[Sidenote: Abnormal foreshortening.]
[Sidenote: Contradictions and denials.]
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, perspective 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 aërial 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.
[Sidenote: Deceptive distances.]
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 caution. 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 and look
at the valley beyond it, the distance across might seem very slight.
You 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 mountains. You may be right and
then again you may be wrong. You may spend two days getting to those
foot-hills.
[Sidenote: Dangers of the desert.]
[Sidenote: Immensity of valley-plains.]
This deception of distance is not infrequently accompanied by fatal
consequences. The inexperienced 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 exploring party is lost. If there are any survivors they
usually make the one report: “The distance seemed so short.” But there
are no short distances on the desert. Every valley-plain is an immense
wilderness of space.
[Sidenote: Shadow illusions.]
[Sidenote: Color-patches on mountains.]
There is another illusion--a harmless one--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 counterfeit 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.
[Sidenote: Illusion of lava-beds.]
[Sidenote: Appearance of cloud-shadow.]
The illusion of a cloud-shadow resting upon the foot-hills or in the
valley, is frequently produced by the local color of lava-beds. Lava
may be of almost any color, but when seen close to view it is usually
a reddish-black. At a distance, 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 (particularly 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.
[Sidenote: Mirage.]
[Sidenote: Definition.]
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
primarily 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 excessive bending of
light-rays in traversing adjacent layers of air of widely different
densities, whereby distorted, displaced, or inverted images are
produced.”[5]
[Sidenote: Need of explanation.]
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 downward. 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.
[Sidenote: Refraction of light-rays.]
[Sidenote: Dense air-strata.]
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 something 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 layers
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
consequently well-fitted to produce the effect of mirage. These layers
of air are of varying densities. 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.
[Sidenote: Illustration of camera lens.]
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 reversed--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.
[Sidenote: The bent light-ray.]
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.
Suppose 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.
[Sidenote: Ships at sea.]
[Sidenote: Ships upside down.]
Now suppose again instead of the light-rays bending to right or left
(as in the street-corner illustration), we consider them as bending
skyward 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 corner. You are looking straight
into the sky, yet seeing a ship below the verge. The light-rays
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.
[Sidenote: Wherein the illusion.]
[Sidenote: “Looming” of vessels, islands, and cities.]
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 formulated 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 recognize 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 below the
ocean’s rim, and so far away as a hundred miles, are seen looming in
the air. “Looming” is the word that describes the excessive 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?
[Sidenote: Reversed image of mountains.]
[Sidenote: Horses and cattle in mirage.]
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
experience. 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 distorted,
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 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 aërial ceiling in a very astonishing way.
[Sidenote: Illusion of rising buttes.]
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 stereopticon 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.
[Sidenote: Other causes for mirage.]
[Sidenote: Water-mirage.]
[Sidenote: The lake appearance.]
[Sidenote: How produced.]
The bending of the light-rays to either side instead of up or down, as
following the perpendicular, may or may not be of frequent occurrence.
I do not even know if the butte appearance 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 distance 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 weather. 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 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.
[Sidenote: Objects in the water.]
This illusion of water is probably seen more perfectly in the great
dry lake-beds of the desert where the ground is very flat and there
is no vegetation, than elsewhere. In the old Coahuila Valley region
of the Colorado the water comes up very close to you and the more
you flatten the angle of reflection by flattening yourself upon the
ground, the closer the water approaches. The objects in it which people
imagine look like familiar things are certainly very near. And these
objects--wild-fowl, bushes, tufts of swamp grass, islands, buttes--are
frequently 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.
[Sidenote: Confused mirage.]
[Sidenote: The swimming wolf.]
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. 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 looking through the air-layer
or some broken portion of it. But in the same scene there may be trees
upside down, and mountains seen in reflection, 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 before 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 because 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 unreflected--came as light usually travels from object
to eye.
[Sidenote: Colors and shadows in mirage.]
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 disappearance of the
objects and colors in the mirage are often quite wonderful. The
reversed mountain 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.
[Sidenote: Trembling air.]
But with all its natural look one is at loss to understand how it
could ever be seriously accepted 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 travellers 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 fantasy. You
cannot see it clear-cut and well-defined, and the snap-shot of your
camera does not catch it at all.
[Sidenote: Beauty of mirage.]
Yet its illusiveness adds to, rather than detracts from, its beauty.
Rose-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 sunset. It is only one of nature’s veilings which
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Century Dictionary.
CHAPTER VIII
CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD
[Sidenote: Views of Nature.]
[Sidenote: Growth and decay.]
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, rounding 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
buzzing 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 along to destroy it? Not at all. The good
goddess has a hand that builds up. Yes; and she has another hand that
takes down. The marvellous 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.
[Sidenote: Nature’s plan.]
[Sidenote: The law of change.]
Those first twenty years of our life we were allowed to sap blood and
strength from our surroundings; 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 pageantry 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 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.
[Sidenote: Nature foiling her own plans.]
[Sidenote: Attack and defence.]
One is continually assailed with queries of this sort whenever and
wherever he begins to study Nature. 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 industriously 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 greater 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 Nature 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.
[Sidenote: Preservation of the species.]
[Sidenote: Means of preservation.]
The individual dies. Yes; but not the species. Perhaps now we are
coming closer to an understanding 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 matter 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
enormous upper reservoir in which to store water, and a most formidable
armor of fish-hook shaped spines that no beast or bird can penetrate.
Remove the danger which threatens the extinction of the family and
immediately Nature removes the defensive armor. On the desert, for
instance, the yucca has a thorn like a point of steel. Follow it from
the desert into the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there 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 pitahaya into the tropics
again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you find them growing
a soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing. 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.
[Sidenote: Maintaining the status quo.]
So it seems that Nature desires neither increase 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 invulnerable, yet ever she holds them by the
heel and leaves one point open to the destroying arrow.
[Sidenote: The plant struggle for life.]
[Sidenote: Fighting heat and drouth.]
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 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 growing 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 cannot
touch them for the claw. They have no idea of dying without a struggle.
You will find every one of them admirably fitted to endure. They are
marvellous engines of resistance.
[Sidenote: Prevention of evaporation.]
[Sidenote: Absence of large leaves.]
[Sidenote: Exhaust of moisture.]
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 Nature 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 reason because they have geometrical forms that
prevent loss from evaporation by contracting a minimum surface for a
given bulk of tissue.[6] 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 avoiding the direct
rays. Nature is determined that there shall be no unnecessary exhaust
of moisture 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.
[Sidenote: Gums and varnishes of bushes.]
As an extra precaution some shrubs are given a shellac-like sap or
gum with which they varnish their leaves and make evaporation almost
impossible. The ordinary greasewood is an example of this; and perhaps
because of its varnish, 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.
[Sidenote: The ocatilla.]
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
approach 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 hastily 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.
[Sidenote: Tap roots.]
[Sidenote: Underground structure.]
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 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 ornamental 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 support such a very little growth above ground.
[Sidenote: Feeding the top growth.]
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 wastefully. 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.
[Sidenote: Storage reservoirs below ground.]
The storage reservoir below ground is not an unusual method of
supplying water to the plant. 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 growing 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 hornet’s nest. This root
is half-wood, half-vegetable, and is again a water reservoir like the
root of the gourd.
[Sidenote: Reservoirs above ground.]
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 series 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 lobes or columns or at the base near the
ground. So too the Spanish bayonets, the yuccas, the prickly pears and
the chollas.
[Sidenote: Thickened barks.]
[Sidenote: Gathering moisture.]
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 husband 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.
[Sidenote: Attacks upon desert plants.]
[Sidenote: Browsing animals.]
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 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 cholla, 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.
[Sidenote: Weapons of defense.]
[Sidenote: The spine and thorn.]
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. There are chollas 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
porcupines. 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.
[Sidenote: The crucifixion thorn.]
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 crucifixion 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.[7]
[Sidenote: The sting of flowers.]
[Sidenote: Fierceness of the plant.]
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 defended.
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, contending for life. Put heat, drouth, and animal 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.
[Sidenote: Odors and juices.]
[Sidenote: Saps astringent and cathartic.]
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 reservoirs are protected by being in their roots under 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 anything 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.
[Sidenote: The expenditure of energy.]
[Sidenote: The desert covering.]
So it seems with spines, thorns, barbs, resins, varnishes and odorous
smells Nature has armed her desert own very effectually. And her
expenditure of energy may seem singularly disproportionate 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 cactus 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.
[Sidenote: Use of desert plants.]
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 beside man to look after, other uses for her products than
supporting human life. She toils and spins for all alike and man is not
her special care. The desert vegetation answers her purposes and who
shall say her purposes have ever been other than wise?
[Sidenote: Their beauty.]
[Sidenote: Beauty in character.]
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 and pretty? Are you 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 something 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 Rembrandt 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 beautiful even in form and color.
[Sidenote: Forms of the yucca and maguey.]
[Sidenote: The lluvia d’oro.]
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 common that perhaps we
overlook its beauty of form; yet its lines are as sinuous 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
beautiful 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.
[Sidenote: Grotesque forms.]
[Sidenote: Abnormal colors.]
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 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 starvation 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.
[Sidenote: Blossoms and flowers.]
[Sidenote: Many varieties.]
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 eastern violet.
And down in Sonora one is dazzled by the splendor of the guyacan (or
guallacan) which throws out blossoms half-blue and half-red. All the
commoner growths like the sage, the mesquite, the palo fierro, and
the palo blanco, are blossom bearers. In fact everything that grows
at all in the desert puts forth in season 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 them, 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.
[Sidenote: Wild flowers.]
[Sidenote: Salt-bush.]
Aside from the blossoms upon bush and tree there are few bright petals
shining in the desert. 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 yellow violets. Occasionally
one sees the wild verbena or patches of the evening primrose, or up
in the swales the little baby blue-eye growing 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.
[Sidenote: The grasses.]
[Sidenote: The lichens.]
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 vegetation does
not mix or mingle to any great extent. 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 mountain range will have all gray lichens on its
northern walls, another range will have all orange lichens, and still
another will be mottled by patches of coal-black lichens.
[Sidenote: The continuous struggle.]
Strange growths of a strange land! Heat, drouth, and starvation gnawing
at their vitals month in and month out; and yet how determined 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 serenely blossom in season, perpetuate their kinds, and hand down
the struggle to the newer generation 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] I am indebted to Professor Forbes of the University of Arizona for
this and several other statements in connection with desert vegetation.
[7] It is said to be very scarce but I have found it growing 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.
CHAPTER IX
DESERT ANIMALS
[Sidenote: Meeting desert requirements.]
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 cholla. He must endure the same heat, thirst,
and hunger or perish. There is no other alternative.
[Sidenote: The peculiar desert character.]
[Sidenote: Desert Indians.]
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 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) endure 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.
[Sidenote: The animals.]
[Sidenote: Life without water.]
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 appear, 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 seconds of the
day; and there is not a drop of moisture going into him. Evidently the
ancient axiom: “Out of nothing, nothing comes” is all wrong.
[Sidenote: Endurance of the jack-rabbit.]
[Sidenote: Rock squirrels.]
[Sidenote: Prairie dogs and water.]
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 all. Besides there
is no evidence from an examination of his stomach that he ever eats
anything 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 hundred yards from his hole in his life, except possibly
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.
[Sidenote: Water famine.]
[Sidenote: Mule-deer browsing.]
[Sidenote: Coyotes and wild-cats living without water.]
[Sidenote: Lean, gaunt life.]
All the desert animals know the meaning of a water famine, and even
those that are pronounced 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 watery to quench thirst than a lobe of the
prickly pear or a joint of cholla. But he is naturally fond of green
vegetation, and in the early morning he usually leaves the valley and
climbs the mountains where with goats and mountain sheep he 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 mesquite 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 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 little 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 produce the peculiar qualities and habits of the individual.
[Sidenote: Fierceness of the animals.]
[Sidenote: Fitness for attack and escape.]
Yet there is one quality more general than special since almost
everything possesses it, and that is ferocity--fierceness. The strife
is desperate; the supply of food and moisture is small, the animal
is very hungry and thirsty. What wonder then that there is the
determination of the starving in all desert life! Everything 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 particular purpose, so much equipment for the doing or the avoiding
of death. Because the wild-cat cannot afford to miss his quarry,
therefore is he made a something that seldom does miss.
[Sidenote: The wild-cat.]
[Sidenote: The spring of the cat.]
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
insignificant 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
animal. 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 devouring 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 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.
[Sidenote: The mountain lion.]
[Sidenote: Habits of the mountain lion.]
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-for-life 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 mountain prowler he is the
terror of the young deer, the mountain sheep, and the rabbit family.
[Sidenote: The gray wolf.]
[Sidenote: Home of the wolf.]
One sees the gray wolf but little oftener than the mountain lion.
Sometimes in the very early morning you may catch a glimpse of him
sneaking up 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 considerable 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. Sometimes he hunts in packs of half a dozen, but if there is no
companionship he does not hesitate to hunt alone.
[Sidenote: The coyote.]
[Sidenote: Cleverness of the coyote.]
[Sidenote: His subsistence.]
[Sidenote: His background.]
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. 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. Nature designed him with the wolf form and
instinct, but gave him something of the cleverness 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 minutes, 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 hoodlum and all the shrewdness of a thief. He requires 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
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 emergencies 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 becomes 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 cleverness.
[Sidenote: The fox.]
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; or, if hard pushed to it, makes a meal of
crickets and grasshoppers. 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 figure 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.
[Sidenote: The prey.]
[Sidenote: Devices for escape.]
[Sidenote: Senses of the rabbit.]
And the prey, what of the prey! The animals of the desert that furnish
food for the meat eaters like the wolf and the cat--the animals that
cannot fight back or at least wage unequal warfare--are they left
hopelessly and helplessly 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 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
closely as he lies dead before you and how large and protruding they
are! In the life they see everything 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.
[Sidenote: Speed of the jack-rabbit.]
[Sidenote: His endurance.]
And if the jack-rabbit’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
ball, and as he crosses ahead of you perhaps you think he is not moving
very fast. But shoot at him and see how far behind him your rifle ball
strikes the dust. No coyote or wolf is foolish enough to chase him or
ever try to run 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.
[Sidenote: The “cotton-tail.”]
[Sidenote: Squirrels and gophers.]
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 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
going on.
[Sidenote: The desert antelope.]
[Sidenote: His eyes.]
But for acute senses, swift legs, and powerful endurance nothing can
surpass the antelope. He is rarely seen to-day (more’s 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 antelope 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--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.
[Sidenote: His nose and ears.]
[Sidenote: His swiftness.]
His curiosity is usually the death of him, because he will persist in
standing still and looking 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 sportsman.
[Sidenote: The mule-deer.]
[Sidenote: Deer in flight.]
[Sidenote: Habits of the desert-deer.]
[Sidenote: The white-tail.]
The mule-deer with his large ears, long muzzle 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
astonishes again. His feet seem to strike rubber instead of stone; for
he bounds like a ball, describes 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 and gets fat on twigs and leaves that
seem to have as little nutriment about them as a telegraph-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 perhaps 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.
[Sidenote: The reptiles.]
[Sidenote: Poison of reptiles.]
[Sidenote: The fang and sting.]
In fact, none of the far-travelling animals lives right down in the
desert gravel-beds continuously. 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 another 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 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 accustomed to label them “poisonous” or
“not poisonous,” 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 proportion 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 account of his poison and that is the rattlesnake.
There are several varieties called in local parlance “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.
[Sidenote: The rattlesnake.]
[Sidenote: Effect of the poison.]
The rattle is indescribable, but a person will know it the first time
he hears it. It is something 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 recover,
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 instinct. He may shake and kill
garter-snakes, but he will not touch the rattlesnake.
[Sidenote: Spiders and tarantulas.]
[Sidenote: Centipedes and scorpions.]
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 tarantula is
simply an overgrown spider, very heavy in weight, and inclined to be
slow and stupid in action. He is a ferocious-looking wretch and has a
ferocious bite. It makes an ugly wound 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
poisonous, but in varying degrees. Doubtless the (to us) harmless
horned toads and the swifts have for their enemies some venom in store.
[Sidenote: Lizards and swifts.]
[Sidenote: The hydrophobia skunk.]
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 everything
that cannot stand or run or hide must be defended somehow. Even the
poor little skunk when he comes to live on the desert develops 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 person he is likely to produce blood-poisoning,
which is miscalled hydrophobia.
[Sidenote: The cutthroat band.]
[Sidenote: The eternal struggle.]
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 attack and
defence as this. The warfare is continuous from the birth to the death.
Everything 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 conditions?
[Sidenote: Brute courage.]
[Sidenote: Brute character.]
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 muscles
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 Géricault, and the tigers and serpents of
Delacroix; and with all the jaw and poison of them how beautiful they
are!
[Sidenote: Beauty in character.]
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 subjects? 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-expressed
truth of character. At least that is one very positive phase of beauty.
[Sidenote: Graceful forms of animals.]
[Sidenote: Colors of lizards.]
[Sidenote: Mystery of motion.]
Even the classic idea of beauty, which regards 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 proportion in the panther, graceful movement in the
antelope, and charm of color in all the pretty rock squirrels. For
myself, being somewhat prejudiced in favor of this drear waste and its
savage progeny, I may confess to having watched the flowing movements
of snakes, their coil and rattle and strike, many times and with great
pleasure; to having stretched myself for hours upon granite bowlders
while following 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 proper angle of vision. If we understood all, we should admire
all.
CHAPTER X
WINGED LIFE
[Sidenote: The first day’s walk.]
The desert’s 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
mountains 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.
[Sidenote: Tracks in the sand.]
[Sidenote: Scarcity of birds.]
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 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
memorandum of each new bird you see you are surprised after a time to
find how many are the varieties.
[Sidenote: Dangers of bird-life.]
[Sidenote: No cover for protection.]
And the surprise grows when you think of the dangers and hardships that
continually harass 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 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 up them.
[Sidenote: The food problem.]
[Sidenote: The heat and drouth again.]
[Sidenote: A bird’s temperature.]
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 hardly a resting-place for the sole
of his foot. Besides, it would seem as though he should be affected
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 attainable 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 with the
species, so far as I can ascertain by experiment, from 112 to 120 F.
Consider that blood temperature in connection with a surrounding 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!
[Sidenote: Innocent-looking birds with savage instincts.]
[Sidenote: The road-runner.]
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, enduring its
hardships and participating in its incessant 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 snake,
but as to that I am not able to give evidence.
[Sidenote: Wrens and fly-catchers.]
And it is not alone the bird of prey--not alone the road-runners,
the eagles, the vultures, 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 cactus
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
rabbit. Skill and strength in the chase are absolutely necessary in a
desert where food is so scarce, and in proportion the little birds have
these qualities in common with the great.
[Sidenote: Development of special characteristics.]
[Sidenote: Birds of the air.]
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 kingdom of the air--birds like the condor, the vulture,
and the eagle. Upon the ground they move awkwardly, not having
better feet to 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.
[Sidenote: The brown-black vulture.]
[Sidenote: The vulture hunting.]
[Sidenote: The vulture sailing.]
The common brown-black vulture or turkey buzzard is the type of all the
wheelers and sailers. The “soaring eagle” of poetry is something 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
earthward 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 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.
[Sidenote: The southern buzzard.]
[Sidenote: The crow.]
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--possibly because better fed. There are several
varieties 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 ordinary carrion crow of the desert is an expert
sailer compared with any of the crow family to be found elsewhere.
The exigencies of the situation seem to require wings developed for
long-distance flights; and the vultures, the crows, the eagles, the
hawks, all respond after their individual fashions.
[Sidenote: The great condor.]
The condor is perhaps the vulture’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 continent. 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 twenty-five
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.
[Sidenote: The eagles and hawks.]
[Sidenote: Bats and owls.]
[Sidenote: The burrowing owl.]
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 somewhat
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 complement of bats that seem not
different from the ordinary Eastern bats. The burrowing 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 rattlesnake, does not bother the owl. He walks in with his
mate and speedily makes himself at home. How the different families
get on together can be imagined by one person as well as by another.
They do not seem to pay any attention to each other so far as I have
observed. Ordinarily the desert animals, birds, and reptiles 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. Perhaps it is like the speculation as to whether the
buzzard sees or scents the carrion that he discovers so readily--hardly
amenable to proof.
[Sidenote: The ground birds.]
[Sidenote: The road-runner’s swiftness.]
[Sidenote: The vicious beak.]
All of the air-birds are strikingly developed in the wings and equally
undeveloped in the 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-runner, or as he is sometimes called the
chaparralcock, 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 yellow 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 underestimated. 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 pursuit and yet he generally manages to catch the
lizard. It is because his legs are specially constructed 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 sideways. The
long tail (used as a rudder) is carried 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.
[Sidenote: The desert-quail.]
[Sidenote: Wings of the quail.]
[Sidenote: Travelling for water.]
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 ordinary
mountain side he takes several flights before he reaches the summit.
The wings are not muscled like the legs, and that is because 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 accepts the situation
philosophically and goes to sleep on a high ledge of rock with water
perhaps in his thought but not in his crop.
[Sidenote: Habits of quail.]
[Sidenote: His strong legs.]
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 travelling 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 mountains; 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 hundred 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 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 quail’s 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.
[Sidenote: Bush-birds.]
[Sidenote: The woodpeckers and cactus.]
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 difference between the little woodpeckers here and
the woodpeckers elsewhere; yet this desert variety flies from sahuaro
to sahuaro, alights on the spiny trunk with a little thump, and
immediately 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 accustomed to the desert could do such things.
[Sidenote: Finches and mocking-birds.]
[Sidenote: The humming-bird.]
Possibly, too, these bush-birds--insect-devourers most of them--have
some special faculty for catching their prey, though I have not
been able to discover it. The fly-catchers, the mocking-birds, the
finches, in a land of plenty are quick enough in breaking the back of a
butterfly 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 difficulty in picking 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 ordinary 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.
[Sidenote: Doves and grosbeaks.]
[Sidenote: The lark and flicker.]
[Sidenote: Jays and magpies.]
[Sidenote: Water-fowl.]
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 belong 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 yellow
to pink, but not his note. The robin is no whit different from the
front-lawn robin of 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 River, 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 longer a common one.
[Sidenote: Beetles and worms.]
[Sidenote: Fighting destruction by breed.]
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 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 decrease as a species!
[Sidenote: The blue and green beetles.]
[Sidenote: Butterflies.]
[Sidenote: Design and character.]
The insects on the desert are mere flashes of life--pin-points of
energy--but not without purpose 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 the
ground. The great dragon-fly with his many lensed eyes, the bees with
black and yellow 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 workmanship. 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.
[Sidenote: Beauty of birds.]
[Sidenote: Beauty also of reptiles.]
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 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?
[Sidenote: Nature’s work all purposeful.]
[Sidenote: Precious jewel of the toad.]
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
perfect of its kind irrespective of human appreciation. We may prefer
the sunlight to the starlight, 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 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 himself knew,
the toad called ugly and venomous, still holds a precious jewel in its
head.
CHAPTER XI
MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS
[Sidenote: Flat steps of the desert.]
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 between 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.
[Sidenote: Across Southern Arizona.]
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 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.”
[Sidenote: Rising up from the desert.]
[Sidenote: The great mesas.]
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 observer hardly perceptible; but nevertheless when the
foot-hills of the Santa Rita 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 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.
[Sidenote: “Grease wood” plains.]
[Sidenote: Upland vegetation.]
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 predominant is it that the
term “grease wood plains” is not inappropriate to the whole region.
Groves of sahuaro stand in the valleys and reach up and over the
mountain-tops, chollas and nopals are on the flats; the mesquite grows
in miniature forests. But besides these there are bushes and trees not
seen in the basin. Palo fierro, palo blanco, 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 covered with the purple salt-bush. It is quite another
country when you come to examine it piece by piece.
[Sidenote: Grass plains.]
As you rise higher and higher to the Continental Divide the whole face
of the mesa undergoes 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 verbena. 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 Nebraska or the broken plateau
country of Montana.
[Sidenote: Spring and summer on the plains.]
[Sidenote: Home of the antelope.]
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
abundance; but they soon pass on north. These great grass tracts were
once the home of countless 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.
[Sidenote: Beds of soda and gypsum.]
[Sidenote: Riding into the unexpected.]
The grease wood and the grass plains of Arizona 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 features. 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.
[Sidenote: The Grand Canyon country.]
[Sidenote: Hills covered with juniper.]
[Sidenote: The Painted Desert.]
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, the vast 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 territory. There are grease wood 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 juniper. Flowers and shrubs
are more abundant, birds and animals come and go across your pathway,
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 imaginable--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 remind 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.
[Sidenote: Riding on the mesas.]
[Sidenote: The reversion to savagery.]
Nature never designed more fascinating country to ride over than these
plains and mesas lying up and back from the desert basin. You may be
alone without necessarily being lonesome. And everyone rides here
with the feeling that he is the first one that ever broke into this
unknown land, that he is the original discoverer; and that this new
world belongs to him by right of original exploration and conquest.
Life becomes simplified from necessity. It begins all over again,
starting at the primitive stage. There is a reversion to the savage.
Civilization, 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
existence, the feeling that it is good to be alive and face to face
with Nature’s self, drives everything else into the background.
[Sidenote: The thin air again.]
And what air one breathes on these plains--what wonderful air! It is
exhilarating to the whole body; it brightens the senses and sweetens
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-pervading, wide-spread light! How silently it falls and how like a
great mirror the plain reflects it back to heaven!
[Sidenote: The light and its deceptions.]
[Sidenote: Distorted proportions.]
[Sidenote: Changed colors.]
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 watching 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 heated 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 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.
[Sidenote: The little hills.]
[Sidenote: Painting the desert.]
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 canvas 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.
[Sidenote: Worn-down mountains.]
These hills--they are usually called lomas--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.
[Sidenote: The mountain wash and its effect.]
[Sidenote: Flattening down to the plain.]
[Sidenote: Mountain-making.]
Usually the lomas are seen against a background 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 mountains
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 becomes 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 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 speak of as “everlasting.” It is merely another
illustration of Nature’s method in the universe. She is as careless of
the individual hill or mountain 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 Rockies and the
Andes.
[Sidenote: The foot-hills.]
[Sidenote: Forms of the foot-hills.]
The foot-hills are just what their name indicates--the hills that
lie at the foot of the mountains. 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 supported as the mountains for very
often they stretch down from the mountains in a long ridge like
a spine, and from the spine are 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.
[Sidenote: Mountain-plants.]
[Sidenote: Bare mountains.]
The hills have a desert vegetation of grease wood, cactus, and sage,
with occasional trees like the palo verde and the lluvia 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 the grasses and flowers show everywhere.
Sometimes 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 Range than to Arizona. Many of
the ranges in the Canyon country are almost as bare of vegetation 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 uncommon--comes up at every turn
to your undoing.
[Sidenote: The southern exposures.]
[Sidenote: Gray lichens.]
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 covering. Seen from a distance the southern exposure 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 few hours
of the day, you will find a growth of bushes, small trees, vines, and
grasses that, taken 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.
[Sidenote: Still in the desert region.]
[Sidenote: Arida zona.]
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 occasional 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 that the early Spaniards had found it
that and called it _arida zona_ for cause.[8]
[Sidenote: Cloud-bursts on the mesas.]
[Sidenote: The wash of rains.]
[Sidenote: Gorge cutting.]
Yet at times it is a land of heavy cloud-bursts and wash-outs. In the
summer months it frequently rains on the mesas in torrents. The bare
surface of the country drains this water almost 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 something 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 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 restless wearing water of the great river has sunk its bed
five thousand feet below the surface and made the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado.
[Sidenote: In the canyons.]
[Sidenote: Upright walls of rock.]
The Canyon country is well named, for it has plenty of wash-outs
and gorges. Almost anywhere among the mountain-ranges you can find
them--not Grand Canyons, to be sure, but ones of size sufficient to
be impressive without being stupendous. Walls of upright rock several
hundred 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 Niagara 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.
[Sidenote: Color in canyon shadows.]
[Sidenote: The blue sky seen from the canyon depths.]
And what could be more beautiful than the deep shadow of the canyon!
You may have 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.
[Sidenote: Desert landscape.]
[Sidenote: The former knowledge of Nature.]
Stones and water in a gorge, wastes of rock 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 lumber, 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
tolerated the desert for a moment.
[Sidenote: The Nature-lover of the present.]
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 knowledge is so much greater,
but rather where he lacks in knowledge he declines to condemn. He knows
now that Nature 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.
[Sidenote: Human limitations.]
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 stumbled 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 Garden, 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?
FOOTNOTES:
[8] The late Dr. Elliot Coues and others reject the obvious _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 simply
arid zone or belt?
CHAPTER XII
MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS
[Sidenote: The western mountains.]
[Sidenote: Saddles and passes.]
The character of the land lying along the western boundaries of the
deserts is very different 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 Range 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.
[Sidenote: The view from the mountain-top.]
From the saddles--and better still from the topmost peaks--there are
wonderful sights to be seen. You 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 Rim 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 mountains with their feet thrust into tropic sands and
their heads thrust into clouds of snow.
[Sidenote: Looking up toward the peak.]
[Sidenote: Lost streams.]
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 canyons; that from them run streams which
lower down become green lines because of the grasses, bushes, and trees
growing on their 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.
[Sidenote: Avalanches and bowlder-beds.]
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.
[Sidenote: The ascent by the arroyo.]
[Sidenote: Growth of the stream.]
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 are growing along the banks,
and live-oaks are in the stream-bed among the bowlders. As you move
up and into the mountain the bed becomes more of a rocky floor, the
earth-deposits grow thinner, 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.
[Sidenote: Rising banks.]
[Sidenote: Waterfalls.]
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 clinging 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 falls, each one harder to surmount than
the last, until finally you are in the canyon.
[Sidenote: In the gorge.]
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 flashing 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 canyon. The water-ousel on the basin edge--sole tenant of the
gorge--seems to laugh at your ignorance of that fact. Let us turn back
and try the ridges.
[Sidenote: The ascent by the ridges.]
[Sidenote: The chaparral.]
[Sidenote: Home of the grizzly.]
Up the faces of the spurs and thus by the backbones and saddles to the
summit is not easy travelling. At first desert vegetation surrounds
you, for the cacti and all their companions creep up the mountain-side
as far as possible. 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 thicken
into brush, and the brush runs into a chaparral. The manzanita,
the lavender, and white lilac, the buckthorn, the laurel, the
sumac, 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
successful 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 chaparral (and also the
bear) you would better keep on the sunny side of the spurs where the
ground is more open.
[Sidenote: Ridge trails and taluses.]
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 centuries. 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.
[Sidenote: Among the live-oaks.]
[Sidenote: Birds and deer.]
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 yellow 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.
[Sidenote: Yawning canyons.]
[Sidenote: The canyon stream.]
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 your
very feet, is another canyon whose existence you never suspected. 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.
[Sidenote: Snow.]
[Sidenote: The wear of water.]
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 almost 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 carried down by
great floods cut faster than water.
[Sidenote: The pines.]
[Sidenote: Barrancas and escarpments.]
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. Beside 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
under 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.
[Sidenote: Under the pines.]
[Sidenote: Bushes, ferns, and mosses.]
The pines!--at last the pines! How gigantic 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 Oregon, 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 bowlder is still in evidence--in the stream, on
the bank, and under the roots of the pine.
[Sidenote: Mountain-quail.]
[Sidenote: Indigo jays.]
[Sidenote: Warblers.]
The beautiful mountain-quail loves to scramble 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 hundreds 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 discord. His chief occupation seems to
be climbing 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.
[Sidenote: The mountain-air.]
[Sidenote: The dwarf pine.]
Upward, still upward, under the spreading arms of the pines! How silent
the forest save 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-fighting 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.
[Sidenote: The summit.]
Upward, still upward, until great spaces begin 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 stunted grass. The top is only barren
stone. The uppermost peak, which you have perhaps seen from the desert
a hundred miles away looking 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.
[Sidenote: The look upward at the sky.]
[Sidenote: The dark-blue dome.]
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 narrative 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 wonderful it is in its vast reach! The
dome instead 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.
[Sidenote: White light.]
[Sidenote: Distant views.]
[Sidenote: 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 a
strip of color or light.
[Sidenote: Southern California.]
Between the ocean and the mountain you are standing upon lies the
habitable portion of Southern California, spread out like a relief
map with its broken ranges, its chaparral-covered 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 contrast to the
yellow of the grain are the dark green orchards of oranges and lemons
scattered 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!
[Sidenote: The garden in the desert.]
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 country 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.
[Sidenote: Reclaiming the valleys.]
[Sidenote: Fighting fertility.]
But man has in measure changed the desert conditions by storing the
waste waters of the mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irrigation.
His success has been phenomenal. Out of the wilderness there have
sprung farms, houses, towns, cities with their wealth and luxury. But
the cultivated conditions are maintained 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 conditions. 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 barley, the orchards
of prunes and peaches and apricots. Then abandoned farms are quite as
plentiful as in New England; and once abandoned, 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 determined
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.
[Sidenote: The desert from the mountain-top.]
[Sidenote: The great extent of the desert.]
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 silhouette
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.
[Sidenote: The fateful wilderness.]
What a wilderness of fateful buffetings! All the elemental forces
seem to have turned against it at different times. It has been swept
by seas, shattered by earthquakes and volcanoes, beaten by winds and
sands, and scorched by suns. Yet in spite of all it has endured. It
remains a factor in Nature’s plan. It maintains its types and out of
its desolation it brings forth increase that the species may not perish
from the face of the earth.
[Sidenote: All shall perish.]
[Sidenote: The death of worlds.]
And yet in the fulness of time Nature designs 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 nebulæ? Our outlook is limited indeed, 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 atmosphere? Perhaps it was water.
Perhaps it died through thousands of years with the slow evaporation
of moisture and the slow growth of the--desert.
[Sidenote: The desert the beginning of the end?]
[Sidenote: Development through adversity.]
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 highest manifestation.
[Sidenote: Sublimity of the waste.]
[Sidenote: Desolation and silence.]
Not in vain these wastes of sand. And this time not because they
develop character in desert life, but simply because they are beautiful
in themselves and good to look upon whether they be life or death. In
sublimity--the superlative degree of beauty--what land can equal the
desert with its wide plains, its grim mountains, 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 elsewhere as here the sunset valleys swimming in
a pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus fading into blue
distance, the gorges and canyons 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.
[Sidenote: Good-night to 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 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 haunting sense of the unknown--is all that remains. It is
time that we should say good-night--perhaps a long good-night--to the
desert.
Transcriber’s Notes
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Small capitals are changed to uppercase.
Sidenotes have been moved before the corresponding paragraph.
Footnotes have been moved to the end of the chapter.
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected
after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources. Except for those changes noted below,
all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have
been retained.
The following corrections have been applied to the text (before/after):
(p. viii)
... show itself, Yes; ...
... show itself. Yes; ...
(p. 40)
... that a wildcat can walk ...
... that a wild-cat can walk ...
(p. 54)
... and the wildcat do not ...
... and the wild-cat do not ...
(p. 54)
... look weary-like ...
... look weary--like ...
(p. 92)
Sunshafts through canyons.
Sun-shafts through canyons.
(p. 92)
... golden sunshafts shot through ...
... golden sun-shafts shot through ...
(p. 100)
... the yellow sunshafts that, ...
... the yellow sun-shafts that, ...
(p. 154)
... sheep be browses ...
... sheep he browses ...
(p. 181)
... high as twentyfive thousand ...
... high as twenty-five thousand ...
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