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Title: The White Heart of Mojave
An Adventure with the Outdoors of the Desert
Author: Edna Brush Perkins
Release Date: August 9, 2019 [EBook #60078]
Language: English
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The White Heart of Mojave
[Illustration: Logo]
[Illustration: A DESERT ROAD]
THE WHITE HEART OF MOJAVE
AN ADVENTURE WITH THE OUTDOORS OF THE DESERT
EDNA BRUSH PERKINS
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1922, by_
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
my friend
CHARLOTTE HANNAHS JORDAN
who shared this adventure
in the wind and sun
of big spaces
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FEEL OF THE OUTDOORS 9
II. HOW WE FOUND MOJAVE 20
III. THE WHITE HEART 51
IV. THE OUTFIT 71
V. ENTERING DEATH VALLEY 87
VI. THE STRANGEST FARM IN THE WORLD 112
VII. THE BURNING SANDS 128
VIII. THE DRY CAMP 141
IX. THE MOUNTAIN SPRING 155
X. THE HIGH WHITE PEAKS 180
XI. SNOWSTORM AND SANDSTORM 195
XII. THE END OF THE ADVENTURE 219
APPENDIX 225
ILLUSTRATIONS
A Desert Road _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Some Half-wild Burros Around Silver Lake 54
Beatty, at the Base of a Big Red Mountain 80
The Outfit 90
The Camp Behind the Barn 102
The Alkali Bottom of Death Valley 130
The Desert 150
A Pack-Train Crossing a Dry Lake 166
I
_The Feel of the Outdoors_
Beyond the walls and solid roofs of houses is the outdoors. It
is always on the doorstep. The sky, serene, or piled with white,
slow-moving clouds, or full of wind and purple storm, is always
overhead. But walls have an engrossing quality. If there are many of
them they assert themselves and domineer. They insist on the unique
importance of the contents of walls and would have you believe that
the spaces above them, the slow procession of the seasons and the
alternations of sunshine and rain, are accessories, pleasant or
unpleasant, of walls,--indeed that they were made, and a bungling job,
too, and to be disregarded as a bungling job should be, solely that
walls might exist.
Perhaps your lawyer or your dentist has his office on the nineteenth
floor of a modern skyscraper. While you wait for his ministrations you
look out of his big window. Below you the roofs of the city spread for
miles to blue hills or the bright sea. The smoke of tall chimneys rolls
into the sky that fills all the space between you and the horizon and
the sun; the smoke of hustling prosperity fans out, and floats, and
mixes with the clouds, and becomes at last part of a majestic movement
of something other than either smoke or clouds. Suddenly the roofs that
covered only tables and chairs and power machines cover romance, a
million romances rise and mingle like the smoke of the tall chimneys.
They mix with the romance of the clouds and the hills. You are happy.
Nothing is changed around you, but you are happy. You only know that
the sun did it, and those far-off hills. When the man you are waiting
for comes in you congratulate him on his fine view. Then the jealous
walls assert themselves again; they want you to forget as soon as
possible.
But you never quite forget. You visit the woods or the mountains or the
sea in your vacation. You loaf along trout streams, or in red autumn
woods with a gun in your hands for an excuse, or chase golf balls over
green hills, or sail on the bay and get becalmed and do not care. For
the pleasure of living outdoors you are willing to have your eyes smart
from the smoke of the camp fire, and to be wet and cold, and to fight
mosquitoes and flies. You like the feel of it, and you wait for that
sudden sense of romance everywhere which is the touch of something
big and simple and beautiful. It is always beyond the walls, that
something, but most of us have been bullied by them so much that we
have to go far away to find it; then we can bring it home and remember.
Charlotte and I knew the outdoors a little. Though we were middle-aged,
mothers of families and deeply involved in the historic struggle for
the vote, we sometimes looked at the sky. In our remote youth we had
had a few brief experiences of the mountains and the woods; I had some
not altogether contemptible peaks to my credit and she had canoed in
the Canadian wilds, so when we decided that a vacation was due us
we chose the outdoors. Our labors had been arduous, divided as they
were between the clamorings of the young and our militant mission
to free the world; we were thoroughly habituated to walls and set
a high value on their contents. It was our habit to tell large and
assorted audiences that freedom consists in casting a ballot at regular
intervals and taking your rightful place in a great democracy; nor
did it seem anomalous, as perhaps it should have, that our chiefest
desire was to escape from every manifestation of democracy in the
solitariness of some wild and lonely place far from city halls,
smokestacks, national organizations, and streets of little houses all
alike. For some time the desire had been cutting through our work
with an edge of restlessness. We called it "Need for a Vacation," not
knowing that every desire to withdraw from the crowd is a personal
assertion and a protest against the struggle and worry, the bluff and
banality and everlasting tail-chasing which goes on inside the walls of
the stateliest statehouse and the two-room suite with bath. Our real
craving was not for a play hour, but for the wild and lonely place and
a different kind of freedom from that about which we had been preaching.
Our choice of the wild and lonely place was circumscribed by the fact
that we had been offered the use of an automobile from Los Angeles.
The automobile was a much appreciated gift, but we regretted that Los
Angeles had to be the starting point because southern California is
the blissful goal of the tired east and the tired east was what we
needed to escape from. We left home without plans--too many plans in
vacation are millstones hung around your neck--sure only that such
places as Santa Barbara, Redlands, Riverside, and San Diego would be
for us nothing more than points on the way to somewhere else. An atlas
showed a great empty space just east of the Sierra Nevada Range and
the San Bernadino Mountains vaguely designated as the Mojave Desert.
It was surprising to find the greater part of southern California,
the much-advertised home of the biggest fruit and flowers in the
world, included in it. A few criss-cross lines indicated mountains;
north of the Santa Fé Railroad, which crosses the Mojave on the
way to the coast, the words Death Valley were printed between two
groups of them; in the south a big white space similarly surrounded
was the Imperial Valley; the names of a few towns sprangled out
from the railroad--nothing else. Was the desert just a white space
like that? The word had a mixed connotation, it suggested monotony,
sterility, death--and also big open spaces, gold and blue sunsets, and
fascination. We recollected that some author had written about the
"terrible fascination" of the desert. The white blank on the map looked
very wild and lonely. We went to Los Angeles on the Santa Fé in order
to see what it might contain.
We looked at it. After leaving the high plateau of northern Arizona
the railroad crosses the Colorado River and enters the lowlands of the
Mojave Desert. That is the first glimpse the tourist has of California,
but he hardly realizes that it is California, for it is so different
from the pictures on the time-tables and hotel folders. At Needles
he usually pulls down the window shades against the too-hot sun and
forgets the dust and heat in the pages of the last best seller, or
else he goes out on the California Limited which spares its passengers
the dusty horrors of the desert by crossing the Mojave at night. His
California, and ours when we left Chicago, consists of the charming
bungalows with date palms in their dooryards and yellow roses climbing
their porches, the square orange groves all brushed and combed for
dress parade, the picturesque missions, and the white towns with
streets shaded by feathery pepper trees west of the backbone of the
Sierras, not the hundreds of miles of desolation east of them. Hour
after hour we pounded through it in a hot monotony of yellow dust.
Hour after hour great sweeps of blue-green brush led off to mountains
blue and red against the sky. We passed black lava beds, and strange
shining flats of baked clay, and clifflike rocks. It was very vast. The
railroad seemed a tiny thread of life through an endless solitude. The
train stopped at forlorn stations consisting of a few buildings stark
on the coarse, gravelly sand. Sometimes a gang of swarthy Mexicans
stopped work on the track to watch us go by, sometimes a house stood
alone in the brush, sometimes a lonely automobile crawled along the
highway beside the railroad. It was empty and vast, and over it all the
sun poured a white flood.
In spite of the dust and glare a fascinated curiosity kept us looking
out of the dirty windows all day. Occasionally dim wagon tracks led
toward the mountains, some of which were high and set on wide, solid
foundations. They were immovable, old, old mountains. Shadows cut
sharply into the smooth brightness of their sides. Their colors changed
and the sand ran between them like beckoning roads. "Come," it seemed
to say, "and find what is hidden here." Once we saw a man with three
burros loaded with cooking utensils and bedding. He was traveling
across country through the sagebrush. Where could he be going?
Unconsciously I asked the question aloud and Charlotte answered:
"He is a prospector looking for a gold mine. Don't you see his pick on
the second mule?"
"Please say burro," I pleaded. "It gives a better atmosphere. Besides
it is not a mule, it's an ass."
"Those are the Old Dad Mountains over there, those big rosy ones.
That's where he is going, up the long path of sand. He will camp there.
Perhaps he is not a prospector, he may have a mine already."
"Of course he has one," I assented. "All the prospectors are dead. They
died of thirst in Death Valley."
"My prospector did not. He is going to his mine. He tries to work it
himself but it does not pay very well because he can't get enough out,
and he can't sell it because too many booms have failed, and nobody
will invest. So he goes up and down in the sun and has a good time."
Perhaps you could have a good time going up and down in the sun through
those empty spaces that stretched so endlessly on either side of the
track. I wondered if we might not go to the Imperial Valley and see
that strange thing, the new Salton Sea, a lake in the desert; but
Charlotte objected because that part of the white blank was partially
under irrigation, too near the coast, and would be too civilized and
full of ranches. I doubted much if the tired east went there for I
thought that it was the desert like this, only hotter, worse. She
declared that the tired east went everywhere that it could get to.
Evidently it could not reach Mojave, for certainly it was not rushing
around in automobiles trying to be happy, nor pouring the savings
for its short holiday into the money bags of conscienceless hotel
companies. Mojave was indeed a blank, a wild and lonely place.
"I think," Charlotte remarked after a time, "that we will go to Death
Valley."
"Why?"
"Because I am tired of looking at the Twenty Mule Team Borax boxes and
wondering what kind of place they came from that could have a name like
that."
I thought it was not a sufficient reason for me to risk my life.
"I think," she said, "that it is the wildest and loneliest place of
all. Nobody goes there except your prospectors, and you say they are
all dead. Think of the gold and jewels they did not find lying around
everywhere. Think of the hotness and brightness. It must be an awful,
lonesome, sparkling place."
It must be! Those reasons appealed to me, but the idea was a bit
upsetting considering that we had started for a happy-go-lucky
vacation, a little like playing with a kitten and having it turn into
a tiger. Mojave was like a tiger, terrible and fascinating. From
the windows of the Santa Fé train it was a savage, ruthless-looking
country, naked in the sun. It repelled us and held us, we could not
keep our eyes off it. They ached from straining to pierce the distances
where the beckoning roads were lost in brightness. Mountains and
valleys full of outdoors, nothing but outdoors! What was the feel of
being alone in the sagebrush? How free the sweep of the wind must be,
how hot the sun, how immense the deep night sky!
Thus the wild and lonely place was selected. A strange outdoors for a
holiday truly, and we had an adventure with it.
II
_How We Found Mojave_
When the automobile was delivered into our hands at Los Angeles we
wanted to turn around immediately and drive back through the Cajon Pass
into the Mojave Desert, but our inquiries about directions met with
discouragement on every side. It seemed to be unheard of for two women
to attempt such a thing; the distances between the towns where we could
get accommodations were too great and the roads were apt to have long
stretches of sand where we would get stuck. Our friends drew a dismal
picture of us sitting out in the sagebrush beside a disabled car and
slowly starving to death.
"You could not fix it," they said, "and what would you do?"
We suggested that we might wait until somebody came along.
They assured us that nobody ever came along.
We went to the Automobile Club; they received us with enthusiasm and
told us about all the places California is proud of and how to get to
them, but California seems not to be proud of the desert, for when we
mentioned it our advisers became gloomy. They seemed to have no very
definite information and were sure we would not like it. In the face
of so much discouragement we hardly dared to ask about Death Valley
and when we did, hesitatingly, the question was ignored. We simply
could not get there, nobody ever went. The Imperial Valley seemed to be
almost as bad. One of the maps they gave us showed a main highway from
San Diego over into it, but they said that it was only a gravel road,
mountainous and steep, and that we had better stick to the main routes.
Evidently they had no faith in our skill as drivers, nor belief in our
purpose, so we soon gathered up the maps and innumerable folders about
resort hotels, thanked them, and went our way.
The collection contained no map of the Mojave. She had called us,
but not loudly enough as yet, and now that we no longer saw her we
remembered her terribleness more than her fascination. We would content
ourselves with the Imperial Valley, at least for a beginning; but
we said nothing more about it and started down the coast with every
appearance of having a ladylike programme. In our then mood we hated
the coast and were guilty of speeding along the fine macadam between
Los Angeles and San Diego in our eagerness to leave it. We turned
due east from the green little city on the shores of its beautiful
harbor and headed for the desert. Our unsatisfactory interview at
the Automobile Club had led us to believe that the Imperial Valley,
irrigated or not, was a wild and lonely place, the desert itself, for
it seemed to be surrounded by difficulties.
The road from San Diego proved to be good, presenting no hindrances
not easily surmounted, and as we drove along it we told each other
what we thought about the Automobile Club. Gradually the character of
the country changed. A little of the prickly, spiky desert vegetation
with which we were to become so familiar appeared. The round hills
gave way to piles of bare, colored rock, the soil became a gravelly
sand on which scrub oak and manzanita grew. The houses became fewer. In
one place we had to detour and found deep, soft sand, nothing to the
sand of a real desert road, but we did not know that then. The change
was subtle, yet we felt it. The country took on the harshness that had
repelled us from the train-windows. Being alone in it was at first a
little dreadful.
After a day or so of leisurely driving we came suddenly to the edge
of the valley. The ground fell before us, cut into rough canyons and
foothills, two thousand feet to a blue depth. It was like a great hole
full of blue mist, surrounded by red and chocolate-colored mountains.
Nothing was clear down there though the mountains were sharply defined
and had indigo shadows on them. The valley was a pure, light blue,
of the quality of the sky, as though the sky reached down into it.
We lingered a long time eating our lunch on a jagged rock, trying to
pierce the blue veils and see the Salton Sea, a big salt lake which we
knew was there with the tracks of the Southern Pacific beside it, the
sand dunes we had heard of, and the town of El Centro where we were
to spend the night. We could see nothing of them, only a phantasy of
changing color, an unreality.
We found the whole desert full of drama, but the Imperial Valley is
perhaps the most dramatic spot of all, except Death Valley, that other
deep hole below sea-level which is so much more remote and so utterly
lonely. The great basin of the Imperial Valley was once a part of the
ocean until the gradual silting up of its narrow opening separated it
from the Gulf of California. The bottom of the valley then became an
inland sea which slowly evaporated under the hot sun, leaving as it
receded a thick deposit of salt on the sand. At last the valley was
dry, a deep glistening bowl between chocolate-colored mountains, a
white desolation undisturbed by man or beast, covered with silence. For
ages it lay thus while morning and evening painted the hills.
Then the railroad came with its thread of life, connecting Yuma with
San Bernadino and Los Angeles. Soon a salt-works was built in what had
once been the bottom of the ocean, and later an irrigation-system for
the southern end of the valley from the Colorado River which flows just
east of the Chocolate Mountains. The white desolation was made to bloom
and, in spite of the intense heat of summer, has become one of the
richest farming districts of California. But the drama is still going
on. A few years ago the untamed Colorado River that had fought its way
through the Grand Canyon and come two hundred miles across the desert
turned wild and flooded into the Imperial Valley. It was shut out
again, but it left the new Salton Sea in the old ocean bed. Its yellow
waves now break near the irrigated area; it drowned the salt works.
The Salton Sea is slowly vanishing as its predecessor did; in a little
while the valley will again be dry and white and glistening.
The road descended before us in jigjags to the blue depth. It was a
good road but narrow in places, dropping sheer at the edge, and steep.
Very carefully we drove down, emerging at last through a narrow, rough
canyon onto the sandy floor of the valley. A macadam road led like
a shining band through the sagebrush. This evidence of civilization
was strange in the surrounding wilderness, for as yet we could see no
sign of life in the valley. The sand came up to the edge of the road
and was blown into dunes between us and the new sea. There was nothing
but sunshine and sagebrush and flowers. The flowers amazed us, for
why should they grow there? There was a yellow kind that outshone our
perennial garden coreopsis, and numberless little flowers pressed close
to the sand with spread-out velvet, or shining, or crinkled blue or
frosted leaves. We had to get out of the car to see them, and whenever
we got out we felt the heat blaze around us. We were below sea-level
and even in February it was very hot. The light was almost blinding,
and a silver heat-shimmer swam between us and the mountain-walls. The
mountains seemed to be of many colors which changed as the afternoon
advanced. The sun set in a more vivid purple and gold than we had ever
seen.
We lingered so long looking at the strange plants and flowers that
twilight found us still alone with the desert. Only the white macadam
band promised any end to it. Realizing that night was coming and we had
an unknown number of miles before us we stepped on the accelerator with
more energy than wisdom. The result was a loud explosion of one of the
brand-new rear tires. We found the tire so hot that we had to wait for
it to cool before we could change it, and the road hot to touch though
the sun had been down for some time. We called ourselves all manner of
names for being such fools as to try to drive fast on that sizzling
surface. It was the first practical lesson about getting along on the
desert.
Soon after that we came to an irrigation-ditch. Instantly everything
was changed and we were in a farming country. El Centro is a hustling
town with a modern four-story hotel. We wished it were not four stories
when we learned that part of it had recently been shaken down by an
earthquake, and especially when we experienced three small shocks
during that night. The earthquakes themselves did not seem surprising,
they were a fitting part of the weird experiences of the day. We felt
as though we had been very near to the elemental forces of nature; we
had been with the bare earth and volcanic rocks and strange plants that
flourish in dryness, and felt the unmitigated beat of the sun. It was
like seeing the great drama of nature unveiled, fierce and beautiful.
We stayed several days in the Imperial Valley, visiting the Salton
Sea, figuring out the beach lines of that other more ancient sea, and
walking among the sand dunes. We found that we always went away from
the farms into the desert. She was calling us loudly enough now. We
heard her and were determined to find more of her. When we tried to
go on, however, we met with the same universal discouragement. In El
Centro they said that the road out through Yuma to the desert east
of the Chocolate Mountains was very bad, and the road up the Valley
through Palm Springs and Banning no road at all. Besides, there was
no water anywhere. Later we found out that none of these things were
exactly true, but it probably seemed the best advice to give two lone
women with no experience of desert roads. Our appearance must have been
against us. Certainly it was no lack of persistence, for we interviewed
everybody, hotel-managers, ranchers, druggists and garage-men. They all
looked us over and gave the same advice. As far as we could learn, the
Mojave Desert which we tried to go to in the first place was where we
should be. We suspect now that they wanted to get rid of us.
We returned to Los Angeles and attacked the Automobile Club again.
As before we had to listen to arguments about the roads and the sand
and the distances and the accommodations, but this time we listened
unmoved. With a defiant feeling very reminiscent of youth we purchased
a shovel and two big canteens to fasten on the running-board because
we had observed that all the cars in the Imperial Valley were thus
equipped. These implements gave us a feeling of preparedness. We also
bought some blankets and food lest we should break down on a lonely
road. We knew what we wanted now and the Automobile Club found a map.
It was an inspiring map covered with a network of black roads and
many towns in bold type. We studied it and found that we could never
get more than thirty miles from somewhere, and we thought we could
walk that if we had to. For some reason no one told us to beware of
abandoned towns and abandoned roads, perhaps they did not know about
them. One of the black lines led straight toward Death Valley. Once
more we said nothing about our destination, and started.
A good road led through the Cajon Pass to Victorville and thence over
sand dotted with groves of Joshua palms to Barstow. A Joshua palm is
a grotesque tree-yucca which appears wherever the mesas of the Mojave
rise to an elevation of a few thousand feet. It becomes twenty feet
high in some places and its ungainly arms stick up into the sky. It has
long, dark green, pointed leaves ending in sharp thorns like the yucca.
It attains to great age and the dead branches, split off from the trunk
or lying on the ground, look as though they were covered with matted
gray hair. Charlotte and I never liked them much, they seemed like
monsters masquerading as trees; but in that first encounter, when we
drove through them mile after mile in a desolation broken only by the
narrow ribbon of the gravel road, they were distinctly unpleasant and
we were glad when we left them behind at Barstow.
There seemed to be a choice of routes from that town so we had an
ice cream soda and interviewed the druggist, having discovered that
druggists are among the most helpful of citizens. He proved to be an
enthusiast about the desert, the first we had met, and we warmed to
him. He brought out an album full of kodak-pictures of the Devil's
Playground where the sand-dunes roll along before the wind. He grew
almost poetic about them, but when we spread out the map and showed
him the proposed route to Death Valley he grew grave. He said the road
was so seldom traveled that in places it was obliterated. We would
surely get lost. Silver Lake, the next town on it, was eighty-seven
miles away. There was one ranch on the road but he was not sure any one
was living there. He was not even sure we could get accommodations
at Silver Lake. Yes, it was a wonderful country; you went over five
mountain ridges. He forgot himself and began to describe it glowingly
when a tall man who was looking at the magazines interposed with:
"Surely, you would not send the ladies that way!"
The two words "get lost" were what deterred us. We felt we could cope
with most calamities, but already, coming through the Joshua palms, we
had sensed the size and emptiness of Mojave. At least until we were a
little better acquainted with the strange land where even the plants
seemed weird, we needed the reassurance of a very definite ribbon of
road ahead. We decided to go to Randsburg, then to Ballarat and try to
get into Death Valley from there. The druggist doubted if we could get
into the valley at all. We began to suspect that it might be difficult.
Randsburg, Atolia and Johannesburg are mining towns close together
about forty miles north of Barstow. The road there was no such highway
as we had been traveling upon; often it was only two ruts among the
sagebrush, but it was well enough marked to follow easily. Great
sloping mesas spread for miles on either side of the track, rising
to rocky crowns. All the big, open, gradually ascending sweeps are
called mesas on the Mojave, though they are in no sense table-lands
like the true mesas of New Mexico and Arizona. The groves of Joshua
palms had disappeared; we were lower down now where only greasewood and
sagebrush grew. The unscientific like us, who accept the word "mesa,"
lump together all the varieties of low prickly brush as sagebrush.
The little bushes grew several feet apart on the white, gravelly
ground, each little bush by itself. They smoothed out in the distance
like a carpet woven of all shades of blue and green. The occasional
greasewood, a graceful shrub covered with small dark green leaves,
waved in the wind. Unobstructed by trees the mesa seemed endless. We
stopped the car to feel the silence that enveloped it. The place was
vast and empty as the stretches we had seen from the railroad, and now
we found how still they all had been. The strong, fresh wind pressed
steadily against us like a wind at sea.
Atolia was the first town, golden in the setting sun, on the shoulder
of a stern, red mountain. Before it a wide valley fell away in whose
bottom gleamed the white floor of a dry lake. All the mountain tops
were on fire. The three towns were very close together, separated by
the shoulder of the red mountain. Randsburg was the largest, whose one
street was a steep hill. It had a score of buildings and two or three
stores. Johannesburg, just over the crest, had six buildings, among
them an adobe hotel and a large garage. All three towns ornamented
the map with big black letters. We thought we were approaching cities
and found instead little wooden houses set on the sand with the great
simplicity of the desert at their doors.
According to that map Death Valley was now not more than sixty
miles away. We thoroughly startled the inhabitants of Johannesburg,
familiarly known as Joburg, by the announcement that we were going
there. We did not yet know how startling an announcement it was; but
these real dwellers on the desert, intimately acquainted with her
difficulties, met our ignorance in a more helpful spirit than any of
our other advisers had, even the agreeable druggist. Hardly any one
ever goes to places like Joburg just for the pleasure of going, and
they seemed pleased that we had come. They described the Panamint
Mountains which shut off the valley from that side with a barrier
nearly 12,000 feet high. There are only two passes, the Wingate Pass
through which the borax used to be hauled and which is now blocked
with fallen rocks, and a pass up by Ballarat. They had not heard of
any cars going in for some time. Unhappily Ballarat had been abandoned
for several years and we could not stay there unless we could find the
Indians, and no one knew where they were. None of the Joburgians whom
we first interviewed had ever been to Death Valley.
It was discouraging, but we persevered until we found a real old-timer.
He was known as Shady Myrick. We never discovered his Christian name
though he was a famous desert character. Wherever we went afterward
everyone knew Shady. Evidently the name was not descriptive for all
agreed on his honesty and goodness. He was an old man, rather deaf,
with clear, very straightforward-gazing eyes. Most of his life had
been spent on the Mojave as a prospector and miner, and much of it
in Death Valley itself. The desert held him for her own as she does
all old-timers. He was under the "terrible fascination." As soon as
we explained that we had come for no other purpose than to visit his
beloved land he was eagerly interested and described the wonders of
Death Valley, its beautiful high mountains, its shining white floor,
its hot brightness, its stillness, and the flowers that sometimes deck
it in the spring.
"If you go there," he said, "you will see something that you'll never
see anywhere else in the world."
He had gem mines in the Panamints and was in the habit of going off
with his mule-team for months at a time. He even said that he would
take us to the valley himself were he a younger man. We assured him
that we would go with him gladly. We urged him--you had only to look
into his eyes to trust him--promising to do all the work if he would
furnish the wagon and be the guide, innocently unaware of the absurdity
of such a proposal in the burning heat of Death Valley; but he only
smiled gently, and said that he was too old.
Silver Lake turned out to be the place for us to go after all. He
described how we could drive straight on from Joburg, a hundred and
sixteen miles. There was a sort of a road all the way. He drew a map on
the sand and said that we could not possibly miss it for a truck had
come over six weeks before and we could follow its tracks.
"It ain't blowed much, or rained since," he remarked.
"But suppose we should get lost, what would we do?"
"Why should you get lost? Anyway, you could turn around and come back."
We looked at each other doubtfully. In the far-spreading silence around
Joburg the idea of getting lost was more dreadful than it had been at
Barstow. There was not even a ranch in the whole hundred and sixteen
miles. We hesitated.
"You are well and strong, ain't you?" he asked. "You can take care of
yourselves as well as anybody. Why can't you go?"
"You have lived in this country so long, Mr. Myrick," I tried to
explain, "you do not understand how strange it is to a newcomer. How
would we recognize those mountains you speak of when we do not even
know how the desert-mountains look? How could we find the spring where
you say we might camp when we have never seen one like it?"
"You can do it," he insisted, "that's how you learn."
"And there is the silence, Mr. Myrick," I went on, hating to have him
scorn us for cowards, "and the big emptiness."
He understood that and his face grew kind.
"You get used to it," he said gently.
It was refreshing to meet a man who looked into your feminine eyes and
said: "You can do it." It made us feel that we had to do it. We spent a
whole day on a hilltop near Joburg looking longingly over the sinister,
beautiful mountains and trying to get up our courage. Happily we
were spared the decision. Two young miners at Atolia sent word that
they were going over to Silver Lake in a few days and would be glad
to have us follow them. Perhaps it was Shady's doing. We accepted the
invitation with gratitude.
We loafed around Joburg during the intervening days. The stern, red
mountains were full of mine-holes, but most of the mines were not
being worked and the three towns were dead. Everywhere on the Mojave
Desert mining activity had fallen off markedly after the beginning of
the war. The population of the three towns had dwindled away and the
few people who remained did so because they still had faith in the red
mountain and hoped that the place might boom again. The big hotel at
Joburg, which was attractively built around a court and which could
accommodate twenty to thirty guests, was empty save for us. We looked
at and admired innumerable specimens of ore. They were everywhere, in
the hotel-office, in the general store, in the windows of the houses.
Everyone had some shining bit of the earth which he treasured. We
bought some of Shady Myrick's cut stones and received presents of gold
ore and fine pieces of bloodstone and jasper in the rough.
We enlisted the services of the garage to get our car in the best
possible condition for the journey across the uncharted desert. The
general opinion held that it was too heavy for such traveling; the next
time we should bring a Ford. When the two young men appeared early on
the appointed morning with a light Ford truck dismantled of everything
except the essential machinery they also looked over our big, red car
questioningly. They feared we would get stuck in the sand and jammed on
rocks; but generously admitted themselves in the wrong when, later in
the day, they stuck and we did not. Of course they had the advantage,
for we would probably have remained where we stopped, while the four
of us were able to lift and push the little truck out of its troubles.
It was the most disreputable-looking car we had ever encountered even
among Fords, a moving junk-pile loaded with miscellaneous shabby
baggage, tools, and half-worn-out extra tires. Our new friends matched
it in appearance. They looked as tough as the Wild West story-tellers
would have us believe that most miners are. We have found out that
most miners are not, though we hate to shatter that dear myth of the
movies. If you were to meet on any civilized road the outfit which we
followed that day from seven o'clock in the morning until dark you
would instantly take to the ditch and give it the right of way.
The drive was wild and fearful and wonderful. The bandits led us over
and around mountains, down washes and across the beds of dry lakes.
Often there was no sign of a road, at least no sign that was apparent
to us. On the desert you must travel one of two ways, either along the
water-courses or across them. It is strange to find a country dying of
thirst cut into a rough chaos by water-channels. Rain on the Mojave is
a cloud-burst. The water rushes down from the rocky heights across the
long, sloping mesas, digging innumerable trenches, until it reaches a
main stream-bed leading to the lowest point in the valley. When you go
in the same direction as the water you usually follow up or down the
dry stream-beds, or washes, but when you cross the watershed you must
crawl as best you can over the parallel trenches which are sometimes
small and close together like chuck-holes in a bad country road, and
sometimes wide and deep. One of the uses of a shovel, which we found
out on that day, is to cut down the banks of washes that are too high
and steep for a car to cross.
Most of the mountains of the Mojave are separate masses rather than
continuous ranges. Between them the mesas curve, sometimes falling
into deep valleys. Instead of foothills, long gradual slopes always
lead up to the rock battlements, the result of the wearing down of
countless ages, the wide foundations that give the ancient mountains an
appearance of great repose. They are solid and everlasting. The valleys
are like great bowls curving up gently to sudden, perpendicular sides.
The mesas always look smooth, beautiful sweeps that completely satisfy
the eye. It rests itself upon them.
When the valleys are deep they usually contain a dry lake, baked mud
of a white, yellow, or brownish-purple color. Crossing dry lakes is a
curious experience. They never look very wide, but are often several
miles across. You need a whole new adjustment of ideas of distance on
the desert for the air is so clear that distant objects look stark and
near. What you judge to be half a mile usually turns out to be five,
and four miles is certainly eighteen. We were always deceived about
distances until we trained ourselves a little by picking out some point
ahead, guessing how far it was, and measuring it with the cyclometer.
Dry lakes are not only deceitful about their size, but also about their
nature. Along the edges is a strange glistening effect as though water
were standing under the shore. Often the rocks and bushes are reflected
in it upside down, and if the lake is large enough the illusion of
water is perfect. You drive across with a queer effect of standing
still, for there is not so much as a stone to mark your progress. It is
like being in a boat on an actual lake. The sunlight is very dazzling
on the white and yellow expanses and the heat-shimmer makes the ground
seem to heave. Sometimes you have the illusion of going steeply up-hill.
Nothing grows in the lake-beds, but the mesas are covered with the
usual desert-growths, sagebrush, greasewood and many varieties of
cacti. A view from one of the ridges is a look into a magical country.
Only enchantment could produce the pale, lovely colors that lie
along the mountains and the endless variety of blues and pinks and
sage-greens which flow over the wide, sagebrush-covered mesas. The dry
lake far down in the bottom of the valley shines. The illusion of water
at its further edges is a glistening brightness. It is hard to tell
where the baked mud ends and the sand begins. It is hard to tell what
are the real colors and shapes of things. If you can linger a while
they change. The valley never loses its immense repose, but it changes
its colors as though they were garments, and it changes the relations
of things to each other. That violet crag looks very big and important
while you are toiling up the mesa, but just as you are crossing the
ridge and look back for the last time you see that the wine-red hill
beside it is really much larger.
For a short distance we followed the old trail over which the
borax used to be hauled from Death Valley. The familiar name,
"Twenty-Mule-Team Borax," was touched with romance. Out of the bottom
of that baffling, inaccessible valley, through a pass by the high
Panamint Mountains where it is sixty miles between the water-holes,
and over this weird country unlike any country we had dreamed existed
in the world, this prosaic commodity was hauled by strings of laboring
mules. They tugged through the sand day after day and their drivers
made camp-fires under the stars. We can never see that name now on a
package of kitchen-borax, humbly standing on the shelf, without going
again in imagination over those two old, lonely ruts.
We lunched at a spring under a cottonwood tree--Two Springs is its
name, the only water on the route. Some one once tried to graze cattle
there, and the water came through a wooden trough into a cement basin.
During lunch the bandits entertained us with tales of the desert. It
has its own ethics. You are justified in killing a man who robs your
camp or steals your burros. Out there at Two Springs we realized that
it was right. If you lose your food or your pack-animal you may well
lose your life. Many a prospector has never returned. The elder of the
bandits remarked thoughtfully that he was glad he had never had to kill
a man. He knew a fellow who had and who was hounded to death by the
memory. He was justified by desert-ethics, but he had no peace in his
sleep.
Toward sunset we went down an endless slope among mountains, some of
which were red, some yellow, some a sulphurous green, and some black.
A black mountain is a sinister object. There is a kind of fear which
does not concern itself with real things that might happen, but is a
primitive fear of nature herself. Even the bandits admitted feeling
it sometimes. It is a fear of something impending in the bare spaces,
as though the mountains threatened. A little creeping chill that had
nothing to do with the cool of evening kept us close behind the Ford.
At the bottom of the rough slope lay a somber basin full of shadow,
beyond which rose an abrupt, high ridge of sand. In spite of us the
Ford gained there and we saw it far ahead crawling up the ridge like a
black bug. It seemed to stop and jerk and stop and jerk again. Then it
disappeared over the top. For a few fearful moments we were alone with
Mojave. How could rocks and sand and silence make us afraid and yet be
so wonderful? For they were wonderful. The ridge was orange against a
luminous-orange sky, the sand in the shadowy basin reached right and
left, mysteriously shining, to mountains with rosy tops. The darkness
around us was indigo, the two crooked ruts of the Ford were full of
blue.
Apprehensively, jerking and stopping, stopping and jerking, as the
Ford had done, the engine clanking as though it would smash itself to
pieces, the radiator boiling frantically, we bucked our way to the
summit of the ridge. It looked down on an immense dry lake in a valley
so big that the mountains beyond were dim in the twilight. At the far
side of the lake stood a group of eight or ten portable houses, bright
orange beside the purple darkness of the baked-mud lake. It was the
town which we had made that incredible journey to reach. Below us we
could see the little truck struggling through the sand. Presently it
reached the hard edge of the lake and merged with its dark smoothness.
We followed down the ridge in its ruts and drove for three miles
straight across the hard lake-bed toward the town, where now a few
lights gleamed. The orange faded from the houses and the whole valley
became a rich plum-color. It was dark when we came out onto the sand
again and drove into the lonely hamlet.
A kindly German couple received us. They were as amazed to see two
women arrive in a big car as we were at arriving. Once two men had come
in a Cadillac just to see the desert, but they could remember no other
visitors with such an unusual object. Mrs. Brauer doubted if we would
find much to look at in Silver Lake. We assured her that we found much
already and hoped to find much more.
"And where did you think you vas going?" her husband asked, chuckling
vastly in the background.
"To Death Valley."
"Mein Gott!"
They conducted us to a one-room shack beside the tin can dump and
bade us be at home. Strangely enough we felt at home. The door of the
shack faced the open desert, the threshold only three inches above the
sand. It stretched away white and still, radiating pale light. The
craving which had made us seek a wild and lonely place responded to
it. The night was a deep-blue, warm and luminous. A hard young moon,
sharp as a curved knife blade, hung over the hills. We went out into
the vague brightness among the ghostly bushes, and at last onto the
darkness of the lake-bed. Beyond it the sand gleamed on the ridge
we had come over. On either side the mountains we had feared were
strong, beautiful silhouettes. In the northwest stood the mass of the
Avawatz, a pure and noble skyline glowing with pale rose. The Avawatz
had been the most fearful mountain of all in the sultry afternoon, a
red conglomeration of volcanic hills. We walked on and on, full of a
strange, terrible happiness. The trackless, unbroken expanse of the
lake seemed boundless, the mountains were never any nearer. We kept
looking back for the reassuring gleam of the lamp we had set in the
window; presently it was lost. Nothing indicated the whereabouts of
the town, we left no footprint-trail on the hard mud, every link with
mankind was gone. Before starting we had located the little houses in
relation to a certain peak and we felt like navigators in an uncharted
sea.
"We must learn to steer by the stars," Charlotte said. "We must always
remember that."
We stood still listening to the silence. It was immense and all
enveloping. No murmur of leaves, nor drip of water, nor buzz of insects
broke it. It brooded around us like a live thing.
"Do you hear the universe moving on?" Charlotte whispered.
"It is your own heart beating," I told her, but I did not believe it.
We had found Mojave.
III
_The White Heart_
We had indeed found her. The morning sun came up over the immense
valley ringed with beautiful, reposeful mountains. The big, empty
mesas swept up to them, streaked with purple and green like the
sea. Sometimes shining sand led between them to indistinguishable
rose and blue. Such a palace of dreams beckoned toward Death Valley
behind Avawatz, the sultry, red mountain that had been so magical in
the night; and another called southward to the white desolation of
the Devil's Playground beyond the far end of the lake where stood
a symmetrical, black, mountain-mass with a tongue of bright sand
running up it. The black mountain and the shining tongue of sand were
reflected in an expanse of radiant blue water. This was astonishing
and we hastened to inquire the name of the river or lake that lit the
distance with such heavenly brightness. The old German chuckled so
much that he seemed about to blow up with access of mirth. Finally he
was able to explain that it was only a mirage. We watched it all day
and saw it change to a thin streak at noon and widen again at evening.
The reflections of the bushes at its edge were so magnified that they
looked like trees. To Brauer's endless entertainment we insisted that
trees grew there.
Ever since leaving Barstow we had been penetrating further and further
into the Mojave. With every mile she had become more terrible and more
beautiful. The colors which had delighted us at Joburg were pale beside
the colors around Silver Lake, the mountains were hills compared to
these beautiful, sinister masses. The sun had been brighter there than
any eastern sun, here it was a hot, white blaze. All the way Mojave had
asserted herself more and more. In the Imperial Valley, at Joburg and
Barstow, we had felt men upon the desert, the drama was partly their
drama; now, though they might still make roads and build houses, they
seemed insignificant. We had but to walk two or three hundred yards
from Silver Lake to forget it and be wrapped in the endless stillness.
There was something awful in the silence, the awfulness which our
savage ancestors felt and bequeathed to us in our intangible fear of
the dark and of the wilderness, and the fear of being alone which many
people have; but there was greatness in it too, the greatness which is
always to be found in the outdoors. Balzac remarks that "the desert
is God without humanity." Truly the earth lives, and the sun and the
stars, a rhythm beats in them and unites them. They are the drama and
the human story is only a scene.
The town of Silver Lake, such a little oasis of life in the solitude,
is owned by the Brauers who operate a general store and give board
to the few travelers who come to the mines in the neighborhood. They
are mostly silver-mines, whence the name. A few years ago there was
considerable activity when the Avawatz Crown and the big silver mine at
Riggs were in operation. Miners came to "town" in Fords which no doubt
resembled the junk pile we had followed from Joburg, and sometimes
with pack-trains. The pack-train on the desert always consists of a
string of burros. The burro in spite of his Mexican name, is nothing
more than a donkey, the biblical ass. He seems to be native to all
primitive places, the first burden-bearer. The prospector of the early
days with his pick and shovel was a picturesque figure traveling
across the sandy stretches from water-hole to water-hole. It is often
a hard day's-journey between the infrequent springs, sometimes a
several-days'-journey. He dug and broke the rock, and sometimes he
made his "strike." Then the boom on the desert would begin. Settlers
came in, roads were built and towns sprang up. The brutalities of
mining-camps which we read of were probably reflections of the
inhospitality of the land. The very characteristics which make the
desert dramatic and beautiful make it terrible for mankind to overcome.
The expense of mining operations in that hard country proved to be too
great unless the vein were exceptionally rich, and most of the small
mines are now abandoned. Nevertheless you still occasionally meet a
prospector with his burros, and in remote places like Silver Lake the
Ford has not entirely done away with the pack-train.
[Illustration: SOME HALF-WILD BURROS WANDERED AROUND SILVER LAKE]
A number of half wild burros wandered around among the little houses
attracted by the watering-trough though there was hardly anything
for them to eat. The soil is said to be so alkali that nothing will
grow there even under irrigation. A patch of grass six feet by two,
carefully cherished by the Brauers, was the only green thing in town.
We saw the list of electors nailed to the door of the general store.
There were seven names on it.
A lonesome little railroad comes along the edge of the Devil's
Playground from Ludlow on the Santa Fé, past Silver Lake to the mining
camps of Nevada. All the supplies for the neighborhood are hauled
in on it through a country of shifting sand where no wagon-road can
be maintained. Even a railroad, the symbol of civilization, cannot
break the solitude. Great arteries of life like the Santa Fé and the
Southern Pacific become very tiny veins when they cross the desert;
the little Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad hardly seems to exist. You do
not see the track until you stumble over it, the telegraph poles are
lost in the sagebrush. There are two trains a week, up in the morning
and down at night. During breakfast on train-day a long hoot suddenly
cuts the stillness you have grown accustomed to. You jump. Mr. Brauer
chuckles at you and finishes his coffee and his anecdote, and gets up
ponderously and knocks the ashes out of his pipe and says:
"I guess she'll be here pretty soon now."
Presently you see him sauntering over to the station. In about fifteen
minutes an ungainly line of freight-cars with a passenger-coach or two
in the rear comes swaying along. Mrs. Brauer gathers up the dishes
leisurely. She hopes they have brought the meat. The last time she had
boarders they didn't bring any meat for two weeks. If they bring it she
promises to make you a fine German dinner. She never goes out to look
at the train. Nobody does, except you, who stand in the doorway and
wonder at it. Ever so long ago you used to see things that resembled
it. It is a curiosity like the strange, long neck of the giraffe. Like
the giraffe it has a momentary interest. It goes, and the silence
settles down again with a great yawn.
The dry lake on whose shores the town is situated is three miles wide
and eighteen miles long, of a brownish-purple color. The surface is
hard and covered with little ripples like petrified waves. It is the
sink, or outlet of the Mojave River, whose wide, torn bed we had seen
at Barstow spanned by an iron bridge. The river-bed had been as dry as
any part of the desert, and we had supposed it was just an unusually
wide, deep wash. We now learned that in times of heavy rains or much
snow in the northern mountains the Mojave River thunders under the iron
bridge. On a later trip, when we were staying at the Fred Harvey Hotel
in Barstow, we once saw it come to life over-night. In the evening its
bed lay dry and white under the moonlight, in the morning it was full
of hurrying, turbid water. From Barstow the river-bed winds through
the desert to the purple-brown basin at Silver Lake. Were the Mojave
a normal river its water would always flow down there and the hard dry
lake would be blue with little white waves running before the wind, but
it is a desert-river and gets lost in the sand. Occasionally the water
flows past Barstow, but it hardly ever arrives at Silver Lake. It came
once in the memory of the present inhabitants, and covered the dry lake
to a depth of three or four feet. The water gradually evaporated and in
a few weeks was gone. Our kind entertainers showed us pictures which
they had taken of the real lake with boats on it. At that time both
the town and the railroad were in the lake-bed and had to be hastily
removed before the oncoming flood. An amusing incident happened one day
at dinner when an artist from San Francisco, who had stopped off on his
way to paint in Nevada, was boasting of the marvels of his city risen
from the great fire and earthquake.
"Well," remarked our host with the same subterranean chuckle that he
lavished upon us, "Silver Lake ain't so bad. We pulled her up out of
the water once already."
We tried to imagine the great expanse of living water, how it would
ripple and shine at its edges, and the purple mountain-tops would be
mirrored in it. Once the mirage had come true.
Every day we watched the dream water increase and diminish at the base
of the black mountain with the tongue of silver sand running up it. The
illusion was always best in the morning, but never quite vanished while
the sun shone. It was so perfect that incredulity at last compelled us
to drive down the eighteen miles of the lake-bed and explore it.
Brauer's eyes twinkled as he filled our gasoline tank. "You think the
lake ain't dried up yet, hey?" We kept our thoughts to ourselves.
The first surprise was when we reached the end of the lake and had not
reached the mountain. It looked just the same except that the water
had vanished--hidden maybe by the brush that covered the sand. Our
host had said something about a road, but we had been so sure that the
mountain was at the edge of the lake that we had not listened carefully
enough and failed to find it, so we left the car and walked through
the brush. The bushes were very small and starved, growing several
yards apart on ground that was hard and covered with little bright
stones like packed-down gravel. The most flourishing shrub was the
desert-holly with gray, frosted leaves shaped exactly like the leaves
of Christmas holly, and small lavender berries. The following Christmas
Mrs. Brauer sent us great wreaths made of it and tied with red ribbons
to decorate our homes, a happy present that brought the hot brightness
of the desert into the gloom of an eastern winter. As we walked among
the little bushes the sun was very hot and the mountain seemed to
travel away as fast as we approached it. The second surprise was when
it also vanished entirely and three black hills stood in its place.
They were ugly and looked like heaps of coal. The beautiful peak which
we had seen was some ten miles further back on the main range which
shut off the Devil's Playground. It had composed with the three black
hills to form the symmetrical mass. There was no water either, and no
trees.
The desolation was stark and sad; sand and sand with hardly any
brush reached to the distant range. The palace of dreams was gone.
Disillusioned, we climbed upon the nearest coal-pile, then suddenly
we saw the miracle again, in the north this time, whence we had come.
The town of Silver Lake was mirrored in blue water as shining and as
heavenly as the vision which was lost. The houses had weathered a deep
orange and burned in the sun. The white tank set upon stilts above
the well was dazzling to look at. Trees grew beside the glistening
dream-water. It was brighter than any town or lake could possibly be;
it was magical.
Thus the desert keeps beckoning to you. Either the unknown goal, or the
known starting-point, or perhaps both at the same time, are magical;
only "here" is ever dreary. While we sat on the coal-pile Mojave
related a parable:
"Once three brothers slung their canteens over their shoulders and
came to me. They traveled many days toward my shining. They were often
thirsty and very tired. Presently they came to a spring, and when they
had rested a dispute arose. The eldest brother wished to hasten on,
but the second said that my shining appeared no nearer than at the
beginning. Nay, he did not believe in it, he would stay where he was.
The youngest, however, agreed to accompany his eldest brother and the
two set out once more. They crossed high mountain-ranges and deep
valleys, but my shining was always before or after. In the seventh
valley the youngest brother also began to doubt me and refused to go
any further.
"'I will stay here,' he said, 'these bushes have little cool shadows
beside them, and the ground is bright with little colored stones and
there are flowers. Stay also and let us be happy.'
"But the eldest brother would not stay.
"He traveled all the years of his life toward my shining. The second
brother turned the spring into a lake and built himself a house with
orange-groves around it. The third brother rested in the cool shadows
and rejoiced in the little bright stones."
We listened intently, but there was no moral.
* * * * *
In spite of our host's "Mein Gott!" we still persisted in our idea
of going to Death Valley. It was now only thirty miles away where a
shining such as had led the brothers on beckoned beyond the Avawatz.
We learned that this route was impossible for a car, and so dry that
even pack-animals could hardly enter the valley that way. However, we
could make a detour of nearly two hundred miles, striking the Tonopah
and Tidewater Railroad again at Zabrisky or Death Valley Junction,
and possibly get in that way. During the debate the sheriff of Silver
Lake, a silent person decorated with pistols, volunteered to go with
us beyond the Avawatz as far as Saratoga Springs, and as much further
as we could drive the car. He would promise nothing as he had not been
there for some time and was a cautious man, but he thought we might
find it worth while. Any one of those bright paths was worth while to
us, and we eagerly agreed.
That day's excursion proved even more memorable than the drive from
Joburg. It was like a continuation of it, becoming ever wilder and
stranger. We had already heard a few of Mojave's songs, bits of her
color-songs, and her peace-songs, and underneath like a rumbling bass
her terror-song--but we were as yet only acquaintances on the way to
intimacy. Ever since leaving Barstow we had felt that we were advancing
through progressive suggestion toward some kind of a climax. Mojave was
leading us on to something. Her heart still lay beyond.
A good enough track led north along the railroad for a few miles and
then swung around the base of the Avawatz. We drove up an interminable
mesa where the alleged road grew always rougher and less well-marked,
and the engine had an annoying tendency to boil. The wind was from
behind and the heat of the sun radiating up from the white ground made
it impossible to keep the engine cool. We crossed a ridge among red
and purple hills of jumbled rock and began to descend into an oblong,
sandy basin. The road became so unspeakable that the Sheriff advised
leaving it for the white, unbroken sand of a wash. For miles we made
our own track, winding around stones and islands of brush. We were in
a sort of outpost-valley south of Death Valley itself, and separated
from it by what looked like a low ridge of gravel, but we no longer
believed in the reality of what we thought we saw. As a matter of fact
the ridge was succeeded by others, and the only way to get into the
main valley was through an opening with the startling name of Suicide
Pass. The valley we were in is usually considered to be a part of Death
Valley; on many maps the low basins stretching north from the Avawatz
for nearly a hundred miles are included under that name.
On both sides of the outpost-valley stood mountains of every hue.
They were maroon, violet, or black at the base shading into lighter
reds and clear yellows. One yellow mountain had a scarlet spot on its
summit like a wound that bled. The dark bases of the mountains had a
texture like velvet, black and purple and olive-green velvet, folded
around their feet. As we descended the wash toward sea-level the heat
and brightness of the sun steadily increased. Each color shown in its
intensity. The bottom of the valley was streaked with deposits of white
alkali that glistened blindingly. The whole world was an ecstasy of
light.
Saratoga Springs is a blue pool with green rushes growing around it, in
the angle of a dark red mountain. The water bubbled up from the bottom
of the little pool. A marsh full of green grass and coarse, white
flowers led back from the pool, spreading out into a sheet of clear
water which reflected the bare mountains and the vividly green rushes.
Though this real lake in the desert was a pure and lovely blue, and
dazzlingly bright, it had none of the magicalness of the dream-water by
the three black hills. Somehow it just missed enchantment. Henceforth
we would be able to distinguish mirage by this indescribable quality.
Saratoga is the last appearance of the Armagosa, or Bitter River,
before it loses itself in Death Valley. Like the Mojave River the
Armagosa gets lost. It flows southward through the desert, sometimes
roaring down a rocky gorge, sometimes vanishing completely for miles
in a sandy stretch, then reappearing unaccountably to form oases
like the one at Saratoga. Opposite the southern end of Death Valley
it suddenly changes its mind and turns north on itself to enter
the valley where it makes a great bog encrusted with white, alkali
deposits. The Armagosa flows through an alkali desert carrying along
minerals in solution, which give its water the taste that has gained
for it the name of Bitter River. The water of Saratoga Springs is
flat and unpleasant, though it is fit to drink. There are stories of
poison-water in Death Valley, but most of the springs are merely so
full of alkali and salt that they are repulsive and do not quench
thirst. At Silver Lake the water is strongly alkali. Everybody uses
it, but when a supply of clear spring-water can be hauled in from the
mountains they all rejoice. The Sheriff's partner, Charley, had a
barrel full which he shared with us while we were there. The pool at
Saratoga was full of little darting fish, strange to see in the silent,
lifeless waste. The Sheriff saved some of his lunch for them and sat
a long time on the edge throwing in crumbs. Once, he told us, he had
camped there alone for three months prospecting the hills, and they had
been his friends.
We attempted to drive beyond Saratoga Springs. There was supposed to
be a road, but neither Charlotte nor I could discern it. We bumped
along over ground so cut by shallow water-channels that after about
seven miles we dared not proceed, for a wrecked car in that shining
desolation would stay forever where it smashed. We tried to walk to
the top of the gravel-ridge that seemed to shut off the main valley.
It looked near and innocent enough, but when we tried to reach it over
the dazzling ground under the blazing sun we found, to our surprise,
that we could not. The temperature was about 95 degrees, and the
air very dry. The heat alone would have been quite bearable had it
not been augmented by the white glare. Suddenly we realized that
the little ridge was inaccessible; all the little yellow hills and
ridges, and the rocky crests that shone like burnished metal, were
likewise inaccessible. The realization brought a terrifying sense of
helplessness. Here was a country you could not travel over: though
your goal were in sight you might never reach it. The strength and
resourcefulness you relied on for emergencies were of no avail; an
empty canteen, a lost burro, a smashed car, and your history might be
finished. We began to understand why this place, so gay with color, so
flooded with light, so clean, so bright, was called Death Valley.
Before us was the opening in the mountains where the terrible valley
itself lay. It was magnificent in the biggest sense of that big,
ill-used word. On the east side rose the precipitous Panamints with a
thin line of snow on their summits; opposite them the dark buttresses
of the Funeral Mountains faded back into dimness. Between the ranges
hung a blue haze of the quality of the sky, like the haze that had
obscured the hot Imperial Valley. The mountains were majestic,
immovable, their summits dwelt in the living silence. The haze had
the magicalness of mirage. We longed to go on while the sun went down
and the silence turned blue, for now we were certain that under that
haze, between those imposing walls, lay the climax to which Mojave had
been leading us, her White Heart. She could never be more desolate, or
stiller or grander. It was the logical journey's end, and what had been
at first merely a casual choice of destination became a fixed goal to
be reached through any hazards.
"If you go there," the old prospector had said, "you will see something
you won't see anywhere else on earth."
IV
_The Outfit_
Death Valley was the goal, but after the day at Saratoga Springs
one thing was certain: no matter if we could get there in an
automobile--and various expedients were suggested to make it possible,
even safe--not thus would we enter the White Heart, not with the
throbbing of an engine, not dependent on gasoline, not limited in
time, not thwarted by roads. When we went it would be slowly, quietly,
camping by the springs, making fires of the brush, sleeping under the
open sky, listening, watching. We had found the outdoors on the desert
a wonderful thing and we wanted to live with it a while. If the White
Heart was the climax of Mojave we felt that it must be a climax of the
feel of the outdoors, one of its supreme expressions. We were going on
a pilgrimage to that.
Such a pilgrimage meant an outfit, either a wagon or a pack-train, and
a guide. We needed a man accustomed to living on the desert, who knew
the valley thoroughly, who could work in its heat and brightness, and
who had the courage to take two ignorant enthusiasts there. We had lost
the easy assurance with which we had talked at Joburg about going to
Death Valley. No wonder the inhabitants of that town had been stunned
when we said that we were on the way there! The unspeakable road beyond
Saratoga Springs and the little gravel-ridge which we could not climb
were sufficient warning of the nature of the undertaking. Mojave is not
easily to be known as we would know her. She keeps herself to herself.
The season added a further complication. Soon it would be April and the
heat in the valley would be too great for us to endure. The pilgrimage
must start no later than January. That meant going home and coming
back. As usual the way to the valley bristled with difficulties.
We talked to the Sheriff about it. Julius Meyer was nearing fifty, a
lean, strong-looking man. He had a fine face, very somber in repose as
though he had met with some lasting disappointment, but wonderfully lit
by his occasional smile. His eyes had the hard clearness which living
on the desert seems to produce. They looked straight at you. He said
little, the kind of man who announces his decisions briefly and carries
them out. Mrs. Brauer said of him: "Julius is good." Beyond her praise
and the impression which he made we knew nothing of him except the
incident of the little fishes and that he had lived twenty years on the
desert and had once traveled the length of Death Valley with burros;
but we had no hesitation in asking him to be our guide. He said it was
a mad idea. Nobody ever went to Death Valley unless they expected to
get something out of it, and then they took a Ford if they could find
one and hurried.
"We are just like the rest of them," we told him. "We expect to get
something out of it, but we can't get it in a Ford."
He finally agreed to go if we would take a wagon. He refused to
consider a pack-train, saying that we would never be able to pack
burros, and walk beside them and ride them in the heat of the valley.
He did not take the discussion very seriously, for he evidently did not
expect us to return. He thought the glamor of Mojave would wear off.
Nevertheless it was a promise, and we were certain that when such a man
promised we would see the White Heart. During the following summer and
autumn we kept hearing snatches of Mojave's songs. A bit of pure cobalt
in the depths of the woods, the flash of the sun on the tops of waves,
the clear lovely blue of ruts in a sandy road echoed her. Thinking of
her the eastern sun seemed a trifle pale, the gay brightness of summer
a little dim. We loved the familiar, dear New England landscape, but we
were under the "terrible fascination." Only the sea was like Mojave.
Often Charlotte and I would take our blankets to a lonely part of the
beach and spend the night there. Never before had we slept outdoors, on
the ground under the stars. Knowing Mojave even a little had made us
feel that it might be worth while. We found that it was.
"We have to get used to it," we told our astonished friends. "When we
go to Death Valley with the wagon we will have to sleep on the ground."
We did get used to it and in December wrote the Sheriff. This telegram
came:
"O. K. Julius Meyer."
When we appeared for the second time at Silver Lake in the big
automobile we were greeted with even greater amazement than before. We
had driven over from Barstow and traveling on the desert for pleasure
is so novel an idea that everybody thought us insane. There were a few
more people in town than we had found on our former visit, a commercial
traveler and three or four miners, among them a brigand known as French
Pete, with his head tied up in a red handkerchief. They all took a
lively interest in the proposed expedition and gave advice. They were
courteous, but amusement contended with wonder behind their friendly
eyes. They tried to be kind and searched their minds for something good
to say of the frightful valley. Each one separately told us what was
its real, true attraction.
"You see the highest and the lowest spots in the United States at the
same time. Mount Whitney, you know, and the bottom of the Valley."
Since we had never been able to see Mount Whitney in any of our travels
on the Mojave, we wondered how we should be able to see it from the
deep pit of the valley with the Panamints between, but receptivity
was our rôle. The highest and lowest became a sort of slogan. Sooner
or later everybody we met at Silver Lake or on our way to the valley
said it. We waited for them to say it and recorded it in our diaries:
"Explained about H. and L."
The Sheriff had procured a wagon drawn by a horse and a mule to start
from Beatty, a hundred miles further up the Tonopah and Tidewater
Railroad, and much credit is due him for the gravity with which he
embarked on the folly. After the O. K. telegram he never expressed the
slightest doubt of the feasibleness, the sanity, and even the usualness
of the proceeding. What we needed more than anything else was a real
reason for going, seeing the desert and having an adventure with the
outdoors being no reasons at all. He furnished even that. Charlotte had
brought her sketching-box; he saw it among the camping-paraphernalia,
asked what it was, and instantly spread the report that we were artists
in search of scenery. We had the presence of mind never to deny this
and by refraining from exhibitions were able to be both notorious and
respectable.
We abandoned the automobile and traveled up to Beatty on the railroad,
a seven hours'-journey. On the morning of train-day our bed-rolls and
duffle-bags on the station-platform, and ourselves getting into the
coach in knickerbockers and tough, high shoes created more excitement
than Silver Lake had known for some time. Even Mrs. Brauer came out,
and Mr. Brauer stood with his hands in his pockets, beaming on the
crazy line of freight cars and the heads stuck out of the windows of
the coaches, chuckling and chuckling. There was a Pullman from Los
Angeles hitched to the tail of the train, very grand, with all the
window-shades still pulled down so early in the morning. Our guide,
who felt his responsibilities, was chagrined because he could not
get us places in it; but we were more than content, especially when
the conductor, who had a black mustache worthy of one of Stevenson's
pirates and wore no uniform, assured us that the coach was not supposed
to be a smoking-car so our presence would interfere with no one's
happiness. It was full of old-timers who were all remarkable for the
clearness of their eyes. They were friendly and courteous, men past
middle age, dressed in overalls and flannel shirts, who got off at
Zabrisky and such places, where it is hard to see that a town exists.
The younger men, and the more prosperous looking in business-suits were
mostly bound for Tonopah, one of the most active mining-centers left in
the country. During the day many of our fellow-passengers talked to us,
stopping as they went up and down the aisle to sit on the arm of the
opposite seat. The talk was of mining prospects, the booms of Goldfield
and Tonopah, speculation in mining-shares, the slump after the war
began, the abandoned towns, the river of money that has flowed into the
desert and been drunk up by the sand. They all agreed that Death Valley
was a desperate place, there had never been any mining there to amount
to anything. To encourage us they never failed to mention H. and L.,
but they thought we would find more to interest us in the mining towns
of Nevada. They made them picturesque with pioneering stories.
The railroad runs along the east side of Death Valley, separated from
it by a range of mountains. It follows the course of the Armagosa River
as it flows south through the desert. In some places the river-bed was
full of water, in others it was a dry wash. Where the water is certain
large mesquites and cottonwood trees grow and the mining stations,
consisting of a store and one or two houses, are nearby. The mountains
along the route are scarred with mines and prospect holes. At Death
Valley Junction a branch road goes to the large borax-mine at Ryan on
the edge of the valley.
The country is very desolate. Soon after leaving Silver Lake we
passed a group of big sand-dunes with summits blown by the wind into
beautiful, sharp edges. From that viewpoint they seemed to guard the
shining illusion that always beckoned behind the Avawatz. We had seen
them on the way to Saratoga, but so far off that they had looked like
little mounds. They are a miniature of the Devil's Playground, that
utter desolation of shifting sand south of Silver Lake where no roads
are. Now we passed near enough to see their impressive size and how the
wind makes their beautiful outlines. When the sand is deep and fine
the wind is forever at work upon it, blowing it into dunes, changing
their shapes, piling them up and tearing them down. It gradually moves
them along in its prevailing direction by rolling their tops down the
lee side and pushing up the windward side for a new summit. The dunes
literally roll over. The artist who had boasted of his city at Silver
Lake called them the "marching sands." North of the marching sands we
traveled through gray-green mesas much broken by rugged, mountainous
masses, a forbidding and stern land.
[Illustration: BEATTY, AT THE BASE OF A BIG RED MOUNTAIN]
Beatty has a magnificent location at the base of a big, red mountain
in front of a greater, indigo mass. It was once a prosperous mining
town, but was at that time partly deserted and many of the small wooden
houses stood empty. Every effort had been made to give the appearance
of streets by fencing off yards around the houses, but it was hard to
get the scheme of Beatty. The first impression was of houses set down
promiscuously on the sand. Some of the yards had gardens where, by
means of constant watering, fruit-trees and roses were made to grow.
Beatty is at a considerable altitude so that while the noonday sun
was hot the nights were cold, sometimes below freezing. The air was
marvelously clear. On the brightest days in the east flowers and shrubs
look as though they were floating in a pure, colorless liquid, and the
vistas are softly veiled. The air seems to have substance. Among the
mountains of the desert it is a flawless plate glass through which you
look directly at the face of the world. Distant outlines stand out
boldly, and every little shining rock and bush is set firmly down.
Prohibition had hit Beatty hard. Most of the ground-floor of the hotel
consisted of a big poolroom and bar over which hung an air of sadness.
We had an impression of moving-day in that forlorn hour when everything
is dismantled and the van has not come. The landlady apologized for the
accommodations which, however, were excellent.
"We used to keep it up real nice before mining slumped," she said, "but
now there is prohibition, too, and we are clean discouraged."
She was an ingenious person. In her front yard, one of the prettiest in
Beatty, the walks and flower-beds were edged with empty bottles driven
in neck down. They made a fine border, durable, with a glassy glitter
in the sun.
At Beatty we first encountered Molly and Bill. Molly was a white mule
and Bill a big, thin, red horse. They were hitched to an ordinary
grocery wagon. Our guide seemed pleased with them, but we were
doubtful. He had rented them from an Indian and said that they were
absolutely desert-proof, they could live on nothing at all and drink
soda-water forever. Bill looked as though he had always lived on
nothing at all, and Molly laid back her long, white ears in a manner
unpleasantly suggestive. Moreover, it did not seem possible that the
frail-looking wagon could carry the supplies and the camping equipment.
We had purchased food for a month. It was both heavy and bulky; bacon,
ham, potatoes, flour, canned milk and vegetables, four pounds of butter
and six dozen eggs. It was the Sheriff's selection; Charlotte and I had
not expected to travel de luxe like that. Indeed we had brought some
dried potatoes and vegetables and had not dreamed of things like milk
or butter or eggs. He made quite a stand for the real potatoes, so they
had to go along. In spite of their bulk the canned milk and vegetables
are almost necessities on the desert, where the water is scarce and
bad, for things that have to be soaked a long time and cooked in the
alkali water are hardly edible. He had a weakness for green California
chilies and horehound candy, so they also were included. Charlotte
insisted on dried fruit, especially prunes. The grub alone made a
formidable pile on the porch of the general store. In addition there
was a bale of hay and a bag of grain. It looked like very little for
the dejected Molly and Bill, but the Sheriff said that we could buy
more at Furnace Creek Ranch in the bottom of the valley, and that
we need only feed them while we were actually in the valley, for as
soon as we went up a little way on either side they could forage. We
looked anxiously out over the environs of Beatty, which is fairly
high-up. They were precisely like the environs of Silver Lake, where
the half-wild burros can scarcely find a living. We began to worry in
earnest. By the time the food for man and beast was on the wagon worry
turned to despair. It was full, and the three beds, the duffle-bags,
the sketch-box which we clung to as the only proof of sanity, and the
three five-gallon gasoline cans for carrying water were still on the
ground.
"It can't be done," we told the Sheriff. "You will have to make some
other arrangement."
"Now look here," he replied. "You stop worrying. Nobody in this outfit
is to worry except me. That's my job. It's what I'm for."
His hard blue eyes looked into ours with determination, then he grinned
and from that moment became the Official Worrier.
Slowly and patiently he built up a monumental structure and cinched it
with rope and baling wire. Everything found a place. As we expected
to make a spring that night it was not necessary to fill the gasoline
cans. They were hung on the back of the load with more baling-wire.
Remembering the day when it had been 95 degrees at Saratoga Springs
we tried to leave our heavy driving-coats behind, but were forcibly
forbidden to do so. They were added to the topmost peak.
For two days all Beatty, from the leading citizen who sold us our
supplies to the Mexican cook in the railroad restaurant who told us
that it was so hot in Death Valley the lizards had to turn over on
their backs and wave their feet in the air to cool them, had been
much cheered by our presence. Nobody expected us to be gone very long
and they watched the loading up of the month's supplies with amused
interest. When we were ready we had to pose beside the wagon in the
middle of the street to have our picture taken. Then somebody cried
"Good luck!" and at last we started.
As soon as a turn in the road hid Beatty the silence closed around
us. The crisp, clear air made our blood tingle. We walked the first
few miles while the Worrier drove. The sun, the wind, and the scarred
old mountains became the only important things in the world. We were
committed to sunrise and sunset, rocks and brush were to be our
companions, lonely springs were to keep us alive, the roots of the
greasewood were to warm us, all our possessions were contained in one
frail wagon. In half an hour the desert claimed us. The sun that loves
the desert clothed it in colored garments.
V
_Entering Death Valley_
The way to Death Valley from Beatty is across a shallower valley and
through Daylight Pass at an elevation of 4,317 feet. First the road
winds down around small, rough hills, at whose base the deserted
town of Ryolite is situated. Ryolite is what remains of a mining
boom. It is pushed into a cove of a rose-colored mountain--but desert
mountains change their hues so often that it may not always be rose.
Ryolite is a typical American ruin. Its boom was very brief. The town
sprang up over-night. Money was poured in. Water was brought for
miles in a pipe-line, a railroad from Beatty begun, and permanent
buildings erected--it had the pride of a "thirty thousand dollar
hotel," and a bank to match. Immense energy and enthusiasm of youth,
middle-aged greed, too, with its eye on the immediate main chance,
went into its making. No doubt some people profited by the building
of Ryolite. It was a tumult of "American initiative"--then it did
not pay. It is easy to picture the promoters, their important hurry,
their "up-to-date methods," their big talk. It is easy to picture the
investors too. Nearly everybody who has money to invest buys stock in
a gold mine once. Great hopes converged on the desert here from many a
board-sidewalked town and prairie-farm; futures were built on it. There
is a throb in the throat for Ryolite, fading into the mountain, its
corrugated-iron roofs rusting red like the hills. The desert is licking
the wound with her sandy tongue until not even a scar will remain.
Sooner or later she heals all the little scratches men make on her
surface.
The dead town faced a wide valley stretching like a green meadow to the
opposite mountains. The thick sagebrush melted together into a smooth
sward over which cloud-shadows floated. The sun evoked lovely, changing
color-tones from it, like a musician playing upon his instrument,
making harmonics of violet and brown and sage-green flow beneath a
melody of pure blue. A perfectly straight road cut a white line through
the meadow. The distance was ten miles, but no one unaccustomed to the
clear air of the desert would guess it to be more than three. The road
appeared level with a slight rise under the western mountains which
had strong, dark outlines on the sky. They looked purple and their
lower masses kept emerging from the main range and fading again as the
shadows circled.
It took Molly and Bill a long time to travel the straight, white line.
By turn we drove and walked, as the three of us could not ride in the
wagon at once. Already the superiority of this mode of travel over
Fords was being demonstrated. We felt the simple bigness of the desert,
and were intimate with the indigo shadow under each little bush, and
the bright-colored stones; we had time to make digressions to some
new cactus or strange-looking rock while Molly and Bill plodded on.
For hours we crossed the valley, hardly seeming to progress. The same
landscape was always before us, yet we were in the midst of a changing
pageant. Soon Ryolite was lost in a mass of pale rose and blue that
seemed like a gate to another world. The knowledge that the mountains
were made of dull-red, crumbling rock, and that only Beatty lay behind
them could not destroy the illusion. It grew fairer as we left it. The
dark mountains in front became formidable silhouettes as the afternoon
sun inclined toward them. We could never quite see the canyon by which
we were to reach the pass; several times we thought we saw it, only to
lose it again in the subtleties of shifting shadows.
[Illustration: THE OUTFIT]
Soon after crossing the middle of the valley the road began a long,
brutal ascent. Mile after mile it steadily climbed until the sweat made
furrows in the shaggy coats of Molly and Bill; but to us, walking ahead
of the wagon, the valley looked level as before, and only our greater
exertion convinced us of the rise. Here was one of the characteristic
mesas of the Mojave; nothing is quite flat there except the narrow
bottoms of the valleys. Suddenly the road reached the outposts of the
mountain and became much steeper through the sandy wash of a canyon.
The walls on either side gradually grew higher and the sand deeper. The
ungainly load proved almost too much for the desert-proof steeds. At
times we all three had to push, and we often had to stop to rest. Night
came while we were still toiling upward. It was cold, and a bitter wind
blew between the walls. During one of the halts the Worrier gathered up
some bits of wood by the roadside, the remains of a ruined shack, and
thrust them under the cinch-ropes.
"We'll need them," he said, buttoning his inadequate coat to the chin.
"We're in luck."
"You'll find we're always in luck," we told him through chattering
teeth.
At last Molly and Bill succeeded in reaching the top of the pass. The
spring was still half a mile away in the side of a mountain. We did
not attempt to take the wagon there, but the Worrier took the tired
animals and brought back the water while Charlotte and I found a place
fairly sheltered from the wind in the bottom of a wash, lugged down
the bits of firewood and the "kitchen," and began to cook our first
meal on the desert. Soon we heard the Worrier shouting unintelligible
things. Much alarmed we scrambled hastily up out of the wash to find
him returning, followed by a troop of wild burros. They were not in
the least discouraged by his violent remarks, but came all the way
and stood in a half-circle around the wagon, twitching their furry
ears. He was noisily vehement. He said that they would steal and
eat anything from our blankets to his precious chilies sealed up in
tin cans; that they had no conscience, they were the pirates of the
desert. During dinner he kept making excursions to the top of the wash
to throw stones at them. He guarded the wagon all night by sleeping
under it, a practice which he continued throughout the trip, greatly
tranquilizing our minds. Burros and coyotes were the only marauders,
and we knew that they would have a hard time of it. Charlotte and I
dragged our bed-rolls a little way down the wash. It was a wild night.
The stars had an icy glitter and the wind made dismal noises among the
fearsome-looking mountain-tops; before morning it snowed a little, but
we were too tired to care.
The rising sun awoke us. It leapt up over the mountains; soon every
trace of the light snow was gone, the ground dry, and the air warm.
From Daylight Springs a fairly good track led down eight miles to
the northern rim of Death Valley. Near the end of the descending
canyon Corkscrew Mountain appeared, a symmetrical mass, striking
both on account of its red color like crumbling bricks and for the
perpendicular cliff which spirals around it like a corkscrew. Through
the field-glass the cliff was a dark violet and might be a hundred
or more feet high. Corkscrew Mountain stands out boldly from its
fellows, nor while we were in the valley did we ever lose sight of its
sun-bright bulk. It became our landmark in the north.
Opposite Corkscrew Mountain the road turned abruptly around a point of
rock. Charlotte and I were walking ahead of the wagon, we went gayly to
the end of the promontory and were brought to a sudden stop by what we
saw. There, without any warning of its nearness, like an unexpected
crash of orchestral music, lay the terrible valley, the beautiful, the
overwhelming valley.
The Official Worrier stopped the wagon. Though he thought us insane,
though he declared he could see none of the colors and enchantments we
had been pointing out to him, he was moved. From the look that came
into his eyes we knew that, whether he admitted it or not, like Shady
Myrick he was under the terrible fascination of Mojave. That, after
all, was why he had been willing to come with us to the White Heart.
"Well," he said brusquely, "that's her!"
We all stood silent then. We were about three thousand feet above
the bottom of the valley looking down from the north over its whole
length, an immense oblong, glistening with white, alkali deposits,
deep between high mountain walls. We knew that men had died down there
in the shimmering heat of that white floor, we knew that the valley
was sterile and dead, and yet we saw it covered with a mantle of such
strange beauty that we felt it was the noblest thing we had ever
imagined. Only a poet could hope to express the emotion of beauty
stronger than fear and death which held us silent moment after moment
by the point of rock. Perhaps some day a supreme singer will come
around that point and adequately interpret that thrilling repose, that
patience, that terror and beauty as part of the impassive, splendid
life that always compasses our turbulent littleness around. Before
terror and beauty like that, something inside you, your own very self,
stands still; for a while you rest in the companionship of greatness.
The natural features which combined to produce this tremendous effect
came slowly to our understanding. They were so unlike anything in our
experience, even of the wonders of the outdoors, that they bewildered
us. The strange can only be made comprehensible by comparison to the
familiar, and perhaps the best comparison is to a frozen mountain-lake.
The smooth, white bottom of the valley looks more like a frozen lake
than like anything else, and yet it looks so little like a lake that
the simile does not come easily to the mind. Death Valley is level like
a lake, it is bare like a lake, cloud-shadows drift over it as over
a lake, the precipitous mountains seem to jut into it as mountains
jut into a lake, but there the comparison ends and its own unfamiliar
beauties begin.
Evanescent streaks and patches of color float over the shining floor
between the changing hills. It reflects them. Sometimes a path made
of rose tourmalines crosses it, or a blue patch lies near one edge
as though a piece of the sky had fallen down. Lines of pure cobalt,
pools of smoky blue, or pale yellow, or pink lavender are there, all
quiveringly alive. At times the white crust shines like polished
silver, at others it turns sullenly opaque. Now a blue river flows down
the center--now it moves over under the western wall--now it gathers
itself into a pond around which green rushes grow.
High above the middle of the valley tower the Panamint Mountains. That
winter their summits were covered with snow as white as the white
floor, and as shining. Without apparent break into foothills they
rise nearly 12,000 feet. Seldom, even in the highest ranges, can you
see so great a sheer rise, for most mountains are approached from
a considerable elevation. In Death Valley the eye begins its upward
journey below sea-level. Down there the white floor shimmered and
seemed to move while above it the two peaks of Telescope and Mount
Baldy, joined by a long curving ridge of snow, were a remote, still
whiteness.
The eastern wall of the valley is not so high, but is hardly less
impressive. The Funeral Mountains are steel-blue with layers of white
rock near their summits. Both the mountains and the valley were named
because of tragedies down on that white floor during pioneering and
prospecting days. It is impossible to get the details of the stories
from the old-timers, each has a different version and no one is very
clear even about his own. One story is of a party of emigrants, men,
women, and children, on the way to the gold-fields with all their
household goods, who entered the valley by mistake and could not find a
way out; another is of a party who were attacked by Indians and fought
in a circle they made of their wagons until the last man was killed.
The remains of the wagons are said to be buried in the sand near a
place called Stovepipe Wells. We never could learn the exact location,
though on a later trip we met a man who said that he had once actually
found them, and that he had seen Indians around there wearing jewelry
and using utensils which they could only have obtained from the white
man sometime in the fifties. There are also stories of individual
prospectors who perished on the burning sands. It does not matter which
particular tragedy fastened such names on this region of celestial day,
they commemorate all whose last sight of the earth was that lonely
splendor.
The Funeral Range is separated by a deep canyon from the Black
Mountains which continue the eastern wall of the valley. This wall is
from five to six thousand feet high, jutting into the basin in great
promontories as mountains jut into a rock-ringed lake. The range across
the southern end is not so high and was half hidden by an opalescent
haze. All the time we were in the valley that haze persisted. Only
rarely and for short periods could we see any detail in the depths
of the hot basin, though the foreground sparkled in the stark, clear
air. The Imperial Valley and Death Valley are always hung with misty
curtains.
A long, long slope leads from the rock promontory from which we first
saw the valley down to that shimmering pit. It is very rocky, cut by
washes and sparsely covered with sagebrush and greasewood. Occasional
little yellow or blue hills rise like islands from blue-green waves.
The ground is covered with little stones of every conceivable color,
which flash back the sunlight from their polished surfaces. Unfamiliar
green and purple stones lie around, and bright red stones, and a stone
of a strange orange-color like flame. A mass of this is what we must
have seen at Saratoga Springs on the mountain that bled. The impulse
to pick up specimens was irresistible. This proved to be the curse of
walking over the bright mosaics. Each little stone was of a color or
texture more alluring than the last until our pockets became unbearably
heavy. Every resting-time was spent in trying to decide which ones to
throw away, but as we could not possibly throw one away on the same
day that we picked it up, this was a fruitless occupation.
About noon we lunched in the shade of one of the little hill-islands.
During the descent the heat had steadily increased and the sun shone
with white, blinding intensity. The Official Worrier grew expansive
and happy. He described himself as a "desert rat," and said that the
hot brilliance suited him entirely. He called it a pleasant, warm day.
Charlotte and I were continually looking at the little blue spots of
shade behind a bush or projecting rock to rest our eyes. We could no
longer look away over the valley, objects merged and vanished there.
One of my recurring dreams since childhood is of trying to walk or run
in a light so dazzling that I could not keep my eyes open for more
than a few seconds at a time. That day my dream strikingly came true.
Everywhere bright heat-waves ran over the ground. The surface of stones
and the tips of leaves glittered dazzlingly. It was probably no hotter
than it had been at Saratoga, but the reflection of light from the
immense white bottom of the valley was an almost unbearable brightness.
Our destination was an abandoned gold-mine on the side of the Funeral
Range. From the lunch-place the Keane Wonder Mine looked on a level
with us and quite near, but we traveled two hours and made a stiff
climb to reach it. This was the hardest bit of marching that we did,
for we were too ignorant of the effects of such a combination of heat
and blinding light to know how to conduct ourselves. We thought we were
sick or overtired, and being much too proud to let the Worrier suspect
such a thing, pressed on without stopping often enough to rest. We had
not yet learned that the wagon was always accompanied by a blessed bit
of shade that we could sit down in any time. Later we appreciated fully
this happy attribute of wagons. More than once we were grateful to the
Worrier for refusing to come with a pack-train.
The mine was a large plant which had paid well. A mess of buildings,
some half-blown-down, pieces of machinery and the big red mill huddled
at the mouth of the canyon where the mountain rises steeply from the
mesa. The mine itself was higher up the canyon down which the ore was
swung in huge buckets that ran on iron cables. Water had been piped
from a spring a mile away, but the pipe was broken. The ground was far
too rough to allow us to take the wagon to the spring, so once more
the Worrier led off Molly and Bill and brought back water in a pail.
Earlier in the day we had lamented the necessity of camping among
wreckage, but when we reached the first building, which once had been a
barn, its oblong, indigo shadow was Heaven. We lay prone on the ground
behind it until the sun went down, not attempting to unload the wagon
or do any useful thing. The Worrier found us thus on his return and
gravely opined that we had better stay a while at Keane Wonder and try
to get acclimated.
[Illustration: THE CAMP BEHIND THE BARN]
During the three days that we camped behind the barn we were living
about a thousand feet above the bottom of that amazing valley, looking
down into it and up at the still, white peaks of the Panamints above
it. Opposite Keane Wonder what looked like a low, sandy ridge
separates the main sink of Death Valley from a similar though smaller
and less striking basin called the Mesquite Valley. The high Panamints
end in a stern red mass near the sand-ridge, beyond which a long slope
like the one we had come down leads to more distant mountains which,
however, are a continuation of the range. Emigrant Pass through the
mountains over to Ballarat starts from the slope and winds around
behind the stern, red mass. That may well have been the way out which
the party of emigrants who perished sought and did not find. Most of
the time the steadily pressing wind of the desert blew through the
great, bright space. Often we saw it pick up the sand far down at the
edge of the valley and whirl it along in tall wraiths that looked like
ghosts walking over the white floor.
On the second evening a bell sounded in the dusk. When you travel with
burros on the desert it is the custom to put a bell on one of them
at night so you can find them in the morning, and often the bell is
left on during the day's journey. That sound meant that someone was
coming to our camp-fire. Soon a frail old man with two loaded burros
and a little dog appeared. It was "Old Johnnie," an habitué of Death
Valley, coming home. He had an unworked gold-mine near Keane Wonder and
he spent his life looking after his property. Apparently he was also
the official caretaker of Keane Wonder itself. He performed his duties
by looking over our camp and guarding every bit of wire and every old
rusty nail as though they were gold itself. He hovered around us,
especially at departure, so we only succeeded in stealing one iron bar
for our fireplace, and we needed two. We cast longing eyes at a certain
chipped, granite kettle, but finally had to borrow that, promising
solemnly to return it at Beatty on our way back. Perhaps he was unduly
suspicious because the Worrier had taken a bit of some very ancient and
hopeless-looking hay, which we found in the barn, to cheer up Molly and
Bill.
"How could I know he lived here?" he apologized to us. "Anyways, there
wasn't but two mouthfuls."
But "Old Johnnie" was hospitable, as all old-timers are. He urged
Charlotte and me to move into the superintendent's house. It had been
a good house once, but in its present condition we preferred the open
sand, nor could we bear even for a night to have a roof between us and
the blue deeps of that star-filled sky. He was a garrulous talker and
very friendly. He claimed that his mine was richer than Keane Wonder
ever dreamed of being. Once some one had offered him $300,000, but his
partner would not look at it. His tone implied that it was a paltry
sum anyway. He was an inventor, too, and had sold a patent for an
automobile-part which he described in great detail. We asked him if he
still hoped to sell the mine. He seemed not to know what he intended
to do. Plainly he was another victim of the "terrible fascination." He
related how he had lately been to Tonopah and got sick and almost died
from lack of air in the clutter of things. The Worrier said that he had
money put away somewhere, but money or no money, whether he ever sold
the mine or not, he would hang around Death Valley the rest of his
life.
"Old Johnnie" rose to fine heights as a story-teller when we invited
him to dinner next day. We had brought some fresh meat which had to
be used up early on the trip, and the Worrier achieved a magnificent
meal. Usually I was the cook, but that dinner was far beyond me. He
invaded the ruined boarding-house, wrestled successfully with the rusty
stove, and produced a roast surrounded by potatoes and onions to be
long remembered. We ate it at the board table in the dining-room. "Old
Johnnie" changed his coat for the festivity; he beamed upon us and
talked. He had the good story-teller's gift of suggestion and in the
midst of that blazing emptiness steeped in a silence broken only by
the wind clanging rusted cables and rattling the loosened iron roof,
he peopled the dining-room again. We saw the faces of the men crowding
in for their supper and heard their voices. Once more the camp-cook in
white apron and cap, for "Old Johnnie" described it as a fine camp "run
right," leaned over the table to pour soup into granite bowls. Keane
Wonder came to life while the obliterating desolation crept in at the
door.
He told stories of other mining camps and of the struggle of individual
prospectors with the valley. You outwit its wickedness or you are
outwitted by it. It was alive, a sort of fascinating enemy. His words
took us with him and his burros down its white length. The enemy had
uncanny powers. She played strange tricks on you. If she could not get
you one way she tried another.
"You find fellers dead down there," he said. "And they don't die of
thirst, either. Sometimes there's water in the canteens. They just go
crazy. She gets 'em."
He leaned closer across the table and his voice became lower.
"And you hear 'em in the night," he whispered.
"Hear who?"
"Them. I call it the Lonesome Bell."
"What is the Lonesome Bell?" We found ourselves whispering too.
"You hear it. It's a bell. It rings regular, far off. Sometimes you
hear it all night. It sounds like the bell on a burro. But it ain't
nothing. Once I had a young feller for a partner, and when he heard it
he got up and made coffee for the outfit that was coming. He wouldn't
believe me when I told him it wasn't nothing but the Lonesome Bell. He
waited and waited and nobody came. And the next morning he packed up
and beat it."
Old Johnnie's eyes glittered with unnatural brightness. He was telling
his own secret. Very vividly he made us see a man alone in the blue
night, dim sand spreading away, dark-blue mountains on blueness. Not a
sound, not even the breath of the night stirring the sagebrush. Through
white, empty days and blue, empty nights he is always alone. He listens
to his own heart beating. Then, far off, the faint sound of a bell.
Then again. He listens intently because it is the only sound for such a
long time. It comes again. It grows louder. He strains to hear. A bell
belongs on a burro--he hears the tramp of burros' feet.
With awe we looked at those bright, intent eyes and that thin body bent
tensely forward. Some night the Lonesome Bell will be true, but "Old
Johnnie" will not hear it. A belated traveler with his pack-train will
find a dead camp-fire and an old man asleep forever beside it. "Old
Johnnie" has outwitted the valley so long that he thinks he can always
do it, but she will get him in the end.
After dinner "Old Johnnie" unlocked the mill and showed us the costly
machinery inside, explaining in careful detail the processes of
milling gold. The canyon behind Keane Wonder is narrow and precipitous
as though it had been gouged out by a giant's trowel. High up on
the mountain-side the dumps of iridescent rock around the mine-pits
shimmered. We sat with him on a beam of the ruined mill while he
pointed things out in the valley. He showed us where Furnace Creek
Ranch lies on the sand by the opening of the canyon between the
Funeral Range and the Black Mountains, but we could not see it because
of the heat-shimmer and the misty veil. He said that the stern, red
mass opposite was called Tucki Mountain, an Indian word for sheep,
because the Panamint Indians used to hunt wild mountain-sheep in its
fastnesses. The smooth, bare slope beyond the Mesquite Valley, he said,
was really very rough, cut by deep water-channels and covered with
brush; and rose in that gradual way nearly 3,000 feet before it reached
the mountains. The curious streak in the bottom of the Mesquite Valley
was the swamp of Salt Creek, where the water was so bad you could not
drink it. It joined the morass in the bottom of Death Valley. There
were quicksands there, that you could not get out of if you got in. Men
and burros had been lost that way. He pointed out little, white heaps
down by Salt Creek and said they were sand-dunes a hundred feet high.
While we sat there a storm swept down the big slope and around on
the face of the high Panamints above Death Valley. First the wind
lifted the sand in the tall whirling wraiths that fled before the
pursuing host of the rain. It came on like an army of giants in bright
armor, dust-clouds swirling before their horses' galloping feet, the
sun gleaming on their million spears that reached higher than the
mountain-tops. In the midst of blazing sunshine the shadow of their
passing was dark on the valley; for a few moments they obliterated the
mountains.
"Surely," Charlotte said, "it is pouring rain over there, yet they told
us it never rains in Death Valley."
"That's some rain," he admitted, "but maybe it ain't wetting the sand.
I've been in storms like that when the water all evaporated before it
got down."
"But it must rain sometimes and the water get down," I objected to both
of them, "for Shady Myrick said that he had seen the valley full of
flowers."
"I've seen 'em," he assented, with a sudden eager lighting of his
face--"yes!"
They did not happen to bloom while we were there but we believe in
them. Anything might happen, anything could be true in that terrible,
bright place.
VI
_The Strangest Farm in the World_
On the fourth day we bade "Old Johnnie" farewell, and descended into
the quivering white basin. The next camp was to be at Furnace Creek
Ranch, the irrigated farm in the bottom of the valley established long
ago in connection with the original borax-works of the Twenty-Mule-Team
brand. The water for irrigation is brought down in a ditch from Furnace
Creek in the canyon between the Funeral Mountains and the Black
Mountains and the ranch is a large, green patch on the sand. In any
ordinary place, or in any ordinary light it would be a conspicuous
feature of the landscape; but, though "Old Johnnie" had pointed it
out so carefully, we could never distinguish it nor could we see it
during our approach that day until we were within half a mile of it.
Throughout the journey the valley-floor presented the same unbroken,
white expanse.
For several miles our way continued down the mesa. Here was no road,
only a lurching and grinding down a rocky wash, crawling over the
edge in the hope of something better and returning again to the ills
we knew. It seemed as though the slender-spoked wheels must collapse
under the strain. Our tower of baggage swayed dangerously. The Official
Worrier was a skillful driver and he needed to be, not only on this
day but on several subsequent ones which surpassed it. About noon we
reached the road that leads from Salt Creek at the southern end of
Mesquite Valley across the northern end of Death Valley and along
its eastern side to the ranch. This road was an improvement on the
uncharted wash. There were no rocks in it; but it soon became sandy,
two deep ruts meandering off toward the white floor.
Presently we came to its edge and skirted the swamp of the Armagosa
River, the morass of mud and quicksands which fills the whole bottom of
the valley, an immense expanse covered with large white crystals and
a powdery substance that looks like coarse salt. The valley probably
was once the bed of a salt-lake whose slow evaporation left the thick
alkali crust. The ruts were very deep and the ground soft to walk on,
spongy and hummocky. The Worrier said that if the wagon were to get
out of the ruts it easily might be mired. "Old Johnnie" told us that
in some places in the middle of the bog a team or a man walking could
be sucked down out of sight and one of his tales was of finding a dead
man's face looking up at him out of the ground.
"He was a Swede with yellow hair," he said, "and he stared at the sun.
He sank standing up."
The road which crosses the valley below the ranch near the Old Eagle
Borax Works is said to be almost the only way to get over the swamp.
The Panamint Indians are supposed to have known this route and to have
crossed the valley to escape from their enemies, who dared not follow
them.
A Government bench-mark by the roadside indicated 258 feet below
sea level. The heat was oppressive, and the white ground reflected a
blinding light. At one place, rounding the base of a hill which shut
off the view of the nearby mountains, we found ourselves in the midst
of miles of the shining whiteness. It spread in every direction,
reaching to the distant Panamints across the valley and to the hazy
outline of the low range at the southern end. The hill which we were
passing rose into the sky, white as the plain except for a few streaks
of ugly, greenish-yellow-like sulphur. No living green thing appeared.
The white expanse was unbroken by a bush or even by an outjutting rock.
The desolation was complete. An intense silence lay over it. If we
dropped far enough behind the wagon not to hear the creaking of its
wheels, we felt utterly alone, the only survivors in a dead universe.
That day the sky was a hot purplish-blue; no cloud shadows drifting
over the valley relieved its blinding monotony. The rose and silver
which we had seen from above were gone, not even the illusion of water
far off remained. The sun stared steadily down. It was the far-spread,
motionless silence of the last days when the whole earth will be dying.
Winding around the hill we came to the ruins of a borax-works. This had
been the first plant in the valley, then the Eagle Borax Works south of
the ranch was operated, but now the borax comes from the mines in the
mountains at Ryan. Nothing was left of the old borax-works except a few
roofless stone buildings and the ruins of the works which looked like a
row of immense vats embedded in the side of a low ridge. The vats and
the ridge had the same sulphurous color, and melted together. Around
the buildings the ground was covered with tin cans and broken bottles,
but the square of dark-blue shade beside each house was a blessed
relief from the burning sun.
Beyond the old borax-works the road wound through sand covered with
large mesquites and greasewoods. Though the mesquite is called a tree
it looks more like an overgrown, thorny shrub. It grows near swamps and
dry lakes and is supposed to be a sure indication of water, but its
roots go down very deep and it appears in desolations of sand where
it would be unwise for the wayfarer to dig. Those mesquites in Death
Valley looked very hopeless indeed, sprangling, thorny, leafless things
with a hillock of sand blown around the roots of each.
As we descended into the valley and came along the edge of the morass
a feeling of deep lassitude and inertia gradually crept over Charlotte
and me. It had been very hard to leave the dark squares of shade at the
borax-works, and now as we crawled along among the mesquites we felt
that the white monotony would go on forever. It pressed upon us like a
weight that never, never could be lifted. We stared down at the sand
with unseeing eyes and went on because we were in the habit of going
on. The ranch was only an imagining, born of vain hope.
And then the strange-looking, tufted tops of some tall palms appeared
against the sky. They were very striking and we thought they must still
be far off or we would have seen them all day, but not a quarter of an
hour later we reached the fence which separated the desert from the
emerald-green fields. The sudden springing up of the ranch was as
unreal as any imagining. The fence was a sharp line of demarcation. On
one side the sand drifted up to it, on the other were meadows and big
willow trees. It was evening when we arrived, so we camped at once by
the irrigation-ditch which made a narrow green ribbon across the sand
with grass and trees growing along its banks. We built our fire between
an encampment of Indians and the white adobe ranch-buildings beyond the
fence. The water rushed down the ditch, clear and cool. How marvelous
this running water seemed! How marvelous to dip out all we wanted to
wash ourselves and our clothes and our dishes!
Our felicity, however, was short-lived. The Panamint Indians, in
common probably with all Indians, do not count cleanliness among their
virtues. The rising of the fierce, hot sun brought millions of flies
which converted our dishes and camp equipment into black masses that
crawled. Between the Indians and the large herd of cattle at the ranch,
camping by the irrigation-ditch was impossible. We spent most of the
forenoon moving a mile or two away among the mesquites. We were on
the gradually sloping ground which leads up from the valley-floor to
the rock-walls of the Funeral Mountains. Here in the valley we found
that our impression from the Keane Wonder Mine of mountains rising
precipitously from the flat white floor had been an illusion. The
characteristic mesa of the Mojave curves up on both sides, sandy,
covered with stones, but often entirely bare of vegetation. Death
Valley is always full of such illusions. Even afterwards, when we knew
better, we could never look down into the valley from a height without
feeling that the mountains rose precipitously out of it. That camp
among the mesquites blazed. The yellow sand seemed to smite our eyes.
Across the valley under the edge of the Panamints the mesa looked a
beautiful dark-blue, but around us was an even greater ecstasy of light
than we had known at Keane Wonder. Everything blazed, the sand, the
slow waves of the heat shimmer, the little rounded stony hills between
us and the Funeral Mountains, and the steel-blue battlements of the
mountains themselves.
The Indians at the ranch are employed as laborers, when they will
work. The superintendent, a vigorous, silent Scotchman, was extremely
pessimistic about them. While we were there they had "the flu" and all
we ever saw them do was sit around the corral waiting for supplies
to be handed out. The women and girls, with heavy melancholy faces,
gathered and stared at us. They stared with the stolid curiosity of
cattle, not like burros who twitch their ears saucily, though they
have the burro's reputation for thievishness. The superintendent kept
everything under lock and key. The only Indian who showed a sign of
life was an old fellow who prowled around with a gun after the birds
and wild ducks that make the ranch a resting-place in their flights
across the desert. We were told that there was only one gun in the
whole encampment and that the younger men hunted with bows and arrows.
Most of them looked stunted and their faces were wrinkled like the
skins of shrunken, dried-up apples, as though the valley were taking
toll of the generations of their race.
The valley takes its toll. Most white men cannot live there long. The
vigorous Scotchman had been at the ranch eight years and thought he
could remain, but no one else had ever stayed such a length of time,
and he had difficulty in finding anybody to keep him company for more
than a few months. He told us that no white woman can stand it at all
in summer. As Charlotte and I were almost prostrated even in early
March, we are willing to accept the statement. Nothing that anyone
can tell us of the evil effects of living in the valley is beyond our
imaginations. At times the thermometer goes up to 130 degrees, but
there is something worse than the heat. The Worrier claimed that 130
degrees was not uncommon in Silver Lake, and that he spent his summers
there without suffering as people do in the valley. The mercury never
rose above 98 degrees while we were at the ranch, a temperature by
no means unknown in eastern summers, yet our feeling of lassitude
increased daily, combined with a faintness and giddiness that we could
hardly combat. The blazing light had much to do with it, and we were
below sea-level. A learned, scientific man has since told us that so
small a drop in elevation could not be noticeable. Those old-timers
who went insane on the hot sands knew that it was noticeable. You feel
that if you were to go out into that blazing silence you could easily
go insane, or succumb to the deadly inertia which paralyzed Charlotte
and me. Too easily you could lie down in the thin, delusive shade of
some little bush and forget. Even beneath the willow trees beside the
flowing water we could scarcely move, our minds were dazed so we could
neither read nor think. We understood "Old Johnnie's" feeling about the
valley. Something hostile lives there.
The ghastly, shining swamp and the pools of poisonous water are
horrible to the imagination because of their unnaturalness in the midst
of such choking thirst. Only the perverted brain of a demon could have
invented such a monstrosity. Water is in your thoughts all the time.
From morning until night you are thirsty in the dry heat, and you look
out over the shimmering miles and know that, though there is water here
and there, if you leave the irrigation-ditch you cannot quench your
thirst. You cling to the narrow green line where the mountain-water
flows down. The feeling grows on you that you are visiting some
sinister world which can be no part of your beloved earth.
And then night comes. A miracle happens and you know this is the same
outdoors you love, only its trappings are put off, it is stripped
of obscuring verdure, naked, and you find it more terrible than you
thought it could be and more beautiful than you thought it could be.
The rising and the setting of that cruel sun are great splendors, that
dark night sky is bigger and deeper than in kinder countries. The stars
are very near, floating in a sea so deep it reaches to infinity; they
are twice as big as ordinary stars, they look like silver balls. The
sky is a deep, dark blue. The whole valley is blue in the night and
luminous like a sapphire. The going-down of the sun is a pageant; its
uprising is a triumph. You feel as though you ought to clash cymbals,
you feel as though you ought to dance and sing when the sun looks over
the mountains. You have been remiss in worship all your life because
you have not learned to dance and sing in honor of the rising sun. The
sun-god was worshiped on the desert for there the sun is a cruel, great
god. His glory consumes the earth, but he is so absorbed in rejoicing
in his glory that he does not know it.
One night we camped a little way up the canyon behind the ranch in the
vain hope of finding a cooler spot. The canyon entered the mountain
beside a precipitous, jagged cliff made of crumbling yellow rock, so
steep that we could scarcely climb its sides. We attempted it late in
the afternoon in the hope of getting a view of the whole valley at
sunset, but its knife-edge ridges were so sharp and crumbling and our
endurance so slight after the burning day that we could not reach a
satisfactory summit. Being shut up in a canyon was no part of our plan
and we made the Worrier help us lug our beds quite a way from camp to
the top of a little hill overlooking at least part of the valley.
"Why don't you take them to the top of that there peak?" he inquired
sarcastically, pointing at one of the steel-blue crests of the Funeral
Range. We could not help it if he scoffed, we had to see the drama
of the coming of night. Panting from these exertions added to our
fruitless effort to climb the cliff, we brought up a canteen and the
few things we needed and bade him go back and sleep happily under the
wagon.
We ourselves had very little sleep on the hilltop for the drama was too
stupendous. Slowly the mountains turned blue, and then bluer. Their
beautiful skyline was drawn with a pencil that left a golden, luminous
mark. Pale blue crept into the valley, indigo lay in pools among the
foothills. The whole night was a succession of studies in blue like
the blue nights some artists paint, but every shade of blue that an
artist could mix on his palette was there. Layers of different blues
lay one above another, and changed, and mingled. The enormous stars
came out and hung in the sky like great lamps. The sapphire valley
glistened beneath them. The lamps swung slowly toward the west and then
were gradually extinguished. The sapphire turned into a moonstone,
palely glimmering, and then into an opal full of flashing fires. The
cruel, great god was coming. He came, and we were two tongue-tied fools
longing to celebrate him and only standing mute and bewildered.
We always felt that longing and that bewilderment during the evenings
and nights and mornings in the White Heart. They overwhelmed us and
hurt us. We were like prisoners shut in by the walls of ourselves,
unable to break through and be one with such beauty. We could not rest
in it as we had rested for long minutes by the red promontory where we
first saw the valley; there was too much beauty. We clutched at each
changing, evanescent moment, spectators watching through tiny loopholes
in the walls a pageant which passed too quickly and was too big for our
understanding.
The White Heart exceeds the imagination every way. It is too terrible
and too splendid. It asserts itself tremendously; the green patch of
the ranch lying on the baked sand beside the shining swamp seems more
ephemeral and unimportant than any of man's efforts to tame the desert;
it is an unreality, a dream, and the dwellers on it are shadows in
a dream. The majesty of the valley completely overshadows the row of
tall palms against the background of the snowy Panamints, and the
little oasis of alfalfa-fields, willow-trees, and white ranch-buildings
blessed with shade. They might vanish like a mirage and never be
missed. The magnificent procession of the nights and days passes over
the white terror, more magnificent than other nights and days precisely
because of the glowing of that terrible sand and those terrible
mountains, perfect for its own sake, and utterly indifferent whether or
not eyes and hearts can endure it.
VII
_The Burning Sands_
Every day that we stayed in Death Valley seemed more awful than the
last. From ten o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon we
existed in a blind torpor. Eyes and brain and pumping heart could not
bear it. At noon we always planned to leave immediately, we panted
to escape; then the enchantment would begin and we would forget all
the plans. Soon, however, it became evident that we must get up into
the coolness of the mountains on one side or the other of the burning
basin, for there was no such thing as becoming acclimated. In the
stupor in which we lived the plans we made were extremely incoherent.
We only knew that the mantle of snow on the peaks of the Panamints, so
serene above the quivering heat of the valley, was the most desirable
thing on earth. To reach it with the wagon we had to circle the
northern end of the morass, cross the low ridge into the Mesquite
Valley and go up the great mesa leading to Emigrant Pass behind the
mountains. There we would bury ourselves in the cold, wet snow, and rub
it on our faces and fling it about, strong again and able to laugh at
midday. The Worrier pooh-poohed this plan when it finally emerged, for
snow has no allurement for a "desert rat." He suggested that we go on
up the canyon in which we were camped and thus quickly escape, but we
refused to consider that. We had come for the purpose of knowing the
feel of the valley and we must travel over the burning sands.
The Worrier was amenable; he always was, but he liked to be persuaded.
We went back to Furnace Creek Ranch from the camp in the canyon and
stocked ourselves with hay and drinking-water, as we would find no more
good water until we reached Emigrant Springs some fifty miles away.
The journey over that difficult country would take the better part of
four days. Two of the camps would be by so-called "bad water," which,
however, animals can drink--the first at Cow Creek not far from the
ranch, and the second at Salt Creek in the southern end of Mesquite
Valley. The third would be a "dry camp," somewhere on the big mesa we
had seen from the Keane Wonder Mine.
Leaving the ranch rather late on the same day we passed the old
borax-works again, wound round the white and sulphur-colored hill
through the spongy, borax-encrusted ground and along the edge of the
sandy mesa where it begins to rise from the level bottom of the valley.
Cow Creek is a little green spot at the base of the Funeral Mountains
about two miles from the road. Though it is near the ranch we stopped
there in order to break the long pull from Furnace Creek to Salt Creek.
In Death Valley every blazing mile is to be reckoned with and it is
worth while to shorten a day's journey from twenty miles to sixteen. No
track led to Cow Creek from the road, and the mesa, which looked quite
level, turned out to be as steep as usual. It was broken by little
washes and thinly covered with brush. Bumping over it under the hot
sun we felt again as though we were in the midst of an interminable
monotony. The mountain seemed unattainable. Charlotte and I, suffering
from the usual lassitude and complete lack of ambition, wanted to stop
and camp on the sand beside a large mesquite, the only thing anywhere
that cast a big enough shadow to sit down in, and we had a sharp
argument with the Worrier.
[Illustration: THE ALKALI BOTTOM OF DEATH VALLEY]
"You can't do that," he said. "It don't matter so much to-day, the
water ain't far, but to-morrow you got to go on and you better do it
now. When we start you've got to get there, or we don't start."
That was unanswerable and we dragged ourselves on until we reached a
large rock near the spring with a square of blue darkness beside it.
He was satisfied with our endeavor and let us make camp there while
he took the horses to the spring. Cow Creek is chiefly memorable for
another argument, a long, warm debate as to whether or not Molly and
Bill could haul the outfit up the four-thousand-foot rise to Emigrant
Springs. Charlotte maintained that they could not. She based her
argument entirely on the appearance of Molly and Bill and she had
a good one; but I, inspired by the band of snow on the tops of the
Panamints and the mountain-climber's zeal, met it with spirit. I said
that Molly and Bill could do it because they were "desert-proof Indian
horses." The Worrier lay at full length on the sand, apparently lost
to the world. I demanded what he thought about it. He replied sleepily
that you "never can tell 'til you try." All the time we were in the
valley we argued, and it is to the credit of all three of us that the
arguments never degenerated into quarrels. Our nerves were very near
the surface. Everything was difficult to do, packing and unpacking,
cooking, shaking the sand out of the blankets, hitching-up, getting
anywhere, gathering brush for our poor little fires. We all did the
minimum of work, and the desert demands very little of the camper-out,
but under the weight that seemed to be always pressing down on us that
little was hard even for the Worrier.
Next morning we arose with the dawn and hastened to get underway
during the cool hours. The road lay over miles and miles of sand,
dotted in some places with sad-looking brush and streaked sometimes
with the white borax deposit. As always, the morning was radiant.
The valley was beautiful, wrapped in its lonely silence, and for the
first few hours Charlotte and I forgot our discomforts in the circle
of high mountains, blue and red in the sunshine, and the clean sweep
of the sand; but by noon we could not see anything and had to ride
ignominiously in the wagon with our eyes on the very tiny oblong shadow
that traveled beside it. Charlotte had dark glasses, but she seemed
to suffer as much as I, who lived again through the nightmare of my
childhood's dream. A hot haze lay over all the distances, though the
air was clear, and the nearby little stones and bushes blazed. The
wagon crawled on, the sand falling in bright showers from the slowly
turning wheels, until Molly and Bill stopped. We shook the reins with
what energy we had left, and the Worrier came up and shouted and threw
stones, but they only looked around at us pathetically.
"We might as well eat lunch here and let 'em rest," he said.
There was no shade except the bit beside the wagon. We sat in that and
leaned against the wheels. They would not move for Molly and Bill hung
down their heads and the sweat streamed off them. The sand glittered
with little particles of mica, which added to the glaring brightness.
Toward the south the illusion of water appeared once more, not blue
but a glassy gray with several strange-looking shrubs reflected in it
upside down. There was nothing between us and the ranch to look so
large, unless it were magnified like the stunted little bushes in the
mirage at Silver Lake. The Worrier decided that these appearances could
only be the palm trees, though they did not look in the least like palm
trees nor could we see a sign of the green patch of the ranch. It is
curious that we never saw Furnace Creek Ranch from any of the places
where we had views of the valley, either before we had been there or
afterwards, or while we were approaching or leaving it. It sprang from
the earth by magic for our bewilderment and vanished the instant we
went away.
That lunch-place was in the middle of Death Valley at the northern
edge of the morass. Ever since coming down from the Keane Wonder Mine
we had been below sea-level. Tradition has it that the lowest part
of the valley is south of the Ranch, near the old Eagle Borax Works,
but the bench-marks of the government's survey indicate that the part
opposite the white and sulphur-colored hill by the borax-works which we
had passed is the lowest. Two iron posts driven into the ground along
the road had read respectively 253 and 257 feet below sea-level. The
lowest point, 280 feet, was in the morass at our end of the valley not
very far away. Whether being below sea-level has an effect or not we
all suffered that day. The Worrier guessed the temperature at about 105
degrees, but said that it felt like 120 degrees at Silver Lake. The sun
seemed to stand still in a hard sky. The heat rose solidly from the
endless white sand, the vast glistening swamp and the metallic-looking
mountains. We were in the midst of an immense movelessness, in a
silence never to be broken.
After an hour's halt we started on again, Charlotte and I in the wagon,
though we could hardly bear to be dragged through the heavy sand by
that unhappy horse and mule. Even in the wagon our heads swam, the
ground would not stay still under us, the sun seemed to drink every
bit of moisture from our bodies so we burned in the heat instead of
perspiring. The skin of our faces and hands felt dried up and as though
it might chip off. We were blind and parched with thirst. The water
in the canteens was hot and did not help us much. Molly and Bill kept
trying to stop, and little stones the Worrier threw as he walked behind
whizzed past our heads and thudded on their tired flanks. We had to
fight the hope that they would stop for good and let us creep under the
wagon and shut our eyes; but we never suggested doing it. "When you
start you got to get there."
The Worrier himself suggested stopping two hours after lunch in the
shade of a little grove of mesquites, though they were not much good
as shade-trees. They were about ten feet high, each one with a little
hummock of sand blown around its roots, and branches armed with long
sharp thorns spreading close to the sand. We could not get under them,
but for some reason they were more comforting than sitting beside the
wagon.
"We'll stay until the sun gets above Tucki Mountain," he said. "We're
getting along fine, if Molly and Bill don't lay down."
"Suppose they should lie down?"
"You'd stay by the wagon and I'd go back for help." He spoke cheerfully
as though the idea of walking back over the burning sands was perfectly
commonplace.
"I suppose you could walk out of the valley from anywhere?"
"Sure. Got to. I walked thirty miles once without no water. Blazing hot
as this and not a bush big enough to get more than my head under. I
laid down by a greasewood most all day. But I made it."
Walking through the valley at that season was nothing to an old-timer.
They often cross it in June, July and August. Death is lurking behind
the bushes then, waiting for them. Along the way from Furnace Creek we
had passed two of the sun-bleached boards set upright in the sand which
mark graves on the desert.
As the day cooled we wandered a little way from the road among the
mesquite and suddenly came upon another one. Near it lay the skeletons
of two burros tied to a bush and a little further off a coffee pot
beside the stones that had been a fireplace. Someone had written with a
pencil on the board: "John Lemoign, Died Aug. 1919."
The Worrier had known John Lemoign. He described him as a regular
old-timer who owned a mine somewhere in Tucki Mountain. Our friend
seemed sorry, but his final comment was:
"He ought to have known better. But they never learn. They always think
they will make it this time."
Everywhere that attitude toward accidents on the desert was typical.
"Old Johnnie" told his most gruesome tales as though the victims were
to blame. The valley was an enemy to be out-generaled; if you were
a fool, of course she would get you. It was a pity when she did,
inevitable and not very important. They were not callous, for they
included themselves in the "inevitable and not very important." When
we had first talked to them they seemed to us singularly care-free and
their faith in their own sagacity and prowess pathetically blind, but
we found that we shared somewhat in their attitude as we crossed the
burning sands. We felt able to take care of ourselves--could there
be a more pathetic and blind faith?--and if by some remote mischance
we should not be able, it would be only another painful but trifling
accident. The sun-bleached boards made us sorry, but they did not seem
especially tragic.
The point of view is born of the desert herself. When you are there,
face to face with the earth and the stars and time day after day, you
cannot help feeling that your rôle, however gallant and precious, is
a very small one. This conviction, instead of driving you to despair
as it usually does when you have it inside the walls of houses,
releases you very unexpectedly from all manner of anxieties. You are
frightfully glad to have a rôle at all in so vast and splendid a drama
and want to defend it as well as you can, but you do not trouble much
over the outcome because the desert mixes up your ideas about what
you call living and dying. You see the dreadful, dead country living
in beauty, and feel that the silence pressing around it is alive. The
Worrier said one night:
"My, ain't it awful! Them stars and everything. Makes you feel kind of
small."
"Do you like to look at them?"
"Yes, I do."
"Why do you?"
"I dunno."
VIII
_The Dry Camp_
When the sun stood over Tucki and the mesquites began to have real
shadows beside them we resumed our journey. The little ridge which
separates Death Valley from Salt Creek had looked very insignificant
from the Keane Wonder Mine, but we climbed for more than an hour to
cross it. It was entirely bare and covered with small flat stones of
pale colors, lavender, light-blue, gray and buff, pressed down into a
hard mosaic. Instead of being polished smooth the delicately-colored
little stones were marked with intricate patterns which looked like
the impressions of leaves and sections of plants, as though a vanished
vegetation had left its record upon them. We were not scientific enough
to know whether they were really fossils or whether the markings were
due to the action of water or some other cause. So lovely were they
that in spite of the heat which still beat up from the bright ground
Charlotte and I walked behind the wagon in order to examine them.
There, on that hard ridge, where not even one sickly sagebrush grew, we
saw the fronds of ferns and the stems and cups of flowers finely etched.
From the top of the ridge the dim wagon-track which we had been
following pitched down an almost impossible hill to Salt Creek, a marsh
formed by a stream that keeps itself mostly underground. Coarse grass
grew in it, looking very green in the surrounding waste, alternating
with streaks of white alkali. The marsh winds down from the Mesquite
Valley and cuts through the ridge into Death Valley. The surrounding
country is utterly barren. A little way off up the bog we could see
the beginning of the sand-dunes which "Old Johnnie" had pointed out,
opposite us rose the immense mesa leading up past Tucki Mountain to
Emigrant Pass through the Panamints, at the left just beyond the swamp
stood the harsh, red mass of Tucki, first a smooth-looking bare
slope, then towering buttresses and crags of rock. Our side of Salt
Creek was a jumble of little stony hills. Save for the grass and a few
dead-looking mesquites in the swamp we could not see a growing thing in
the whole waste.
You have to dig a well to get the water from Salt Creek. Several
shallow holes had been dug where the road began to cross the marsh,
and, as one was clean enough for our use, the Worrier was spared the
exertion of making another. Stove Pipe Wells, near which the ring of
wagons is said to be buried, is a little further up Salt Creek where
some prospector once drove down a length of Stove Pipe to preserve
his water-hole. All the water in Salt Creek is bitter and salty,
intolerable to drink. We had thought that we might at least use it for
cooking, but one taste killed that hope. We feared we could not eat
potatoes boiled in it, and knew that tea would be impossible, so once
more we drew upon the fifteen gallons which we had brought from Furnace
Creek Ranch.
Poor Molly and Bill had no choice in the matter. They had to drink the
loathsome stuff which the Worrier drew up for them from the uninviting
hole. However, they seemed much pleased with the coarse, green
grass, the first forage they had had since leaving Daylight Springs.
Henceforth they would have to get their own living with occasional
small feeds of grain, as we could not carry enough hay to last for
more than another two days. By that time we should be well up in the
mountains; still, remembering Beatty and the thin pickings at Daylight
Springs, and looking out now over the discouraging bareness, their
prospects seemed far from cheerful.
When we had located our camp as far as possible from the tin cans and
ancient rubbish of other camps, the Worrier took his shot gun from
under the wagon seat and went off to hunt ducks. Ducks! How could the
desolation of Salt Creek, after that journey over the burning sands,
yield ducks? At every green place like Furnace Creek Ranch and Saratoga
Springs, we saw birds. They flashed in the sun and their twitterings
broke the silence. While we unloaded the wagon that evening we saw
small yellow birds like wild canaries light on the mesquites in the
swamp, and many tiny blue birds; but it was hard to believe in wild
ducks, even harder there than it had been at the ranch where the old
Indian snooped around with his gun.
The Worrier's assurance was so surprising that we put off getting
dinner and dragged ourselves to the top of one of the stony hills
overlooking the winding of Salt Creek toward Death Valley to watch
him. From that viewpoint the swamp coiled between high, perpendicular,
sulphur-colored bluffs like a poisonous snake glistening with green
and white spots. One small blue pool far off was its eye. The Worrier
was working his way toward that from grass-tussock to grass-tussock.
Presently he reached it and vanished in a bunch of rushes at its edge.
While we sat and waited the enchantment of sunset began. The sky
became orange and green, the terrible valley that we loved and hated
began to put on its sapphire robe, the sulphurous walls that prisoned
the snake turned pink, the poisonous blue eye, too blue, too bright,
softened--the enchanter almost had us by the throats again, ready to
choke us until tears came in our eyes, when two shots spilt the spell.
We sprang up, startled; we had forgotten that a man was hunting ducks
in a swamp. A scramble then, back to the fireplace, a hasty match, the
red fire kindled and leaping up, the smoke-blacked pot balanced on the
iron bar stolen from "Old Johnnie," the soft clash of tin dishes, and
soon a proud hunter coming home through the sapphire night.
Early next morning we were underway, floundering across the swamp. The
Worrier fulfilled his function by doing a little worrying there, for
he remarked afterwards that he might have lost Molly and Bill. Salt
Creek marsh is a little sample of the giant bog that makes the bottom
of Death Valley fearful. The road usually traveled to Emigrant Pass
leads along the edge of the marsh and through the sand-dunes before it
begins to ascend the big mesa, but "Old Johnnie" had instructed us to
avoid the heavy sand by keeping to the base of Tucki Mountain. There
was a sort of track in some places, but mostly we ground among rocks
and made detours to avoid gullies too deep to cross. The base of the
mountain had looked smooth, instead it was cut by wide, deep washes
full of rolled-down boulders. For nine miles we skirted Tucki before
we began the ascent of the mesa itself. Not till then did we pass a
bench-mark indicating that at last we were as high as sea-level. Except
that the road around the mountain was rocky instead of sandy there was
very little difference between the morning's journey and the one across
Death Valley. The light and heat were intense and we suffered from the
same feeling of depression. Even when we began to ascend the mesa we
were hardly conscious of any relief. Though we climbed two thousand
feet that day we were still on the burning sands under the pitiless
sun. Everything burned, rocks were hot to the touch, the endless stony
ground was a hot floor. Tucki Mountain showed a dull red as though it
smoldered, and the hot blaze on the mountains beyond the great mesa was
smoke rising out of furnaces.
After passing the bench-mark we were in the midst of an immense space
far away from any mountains, toiling for miles up a stony barrenness
where only scattered sagebrush grew. The road was so washed out that
often no trace of it showed and the Worrier steered by intuition. The
wagon groaned and swayed, and Molly and Bill stumbled and sweated.
In the roughest places we led them. We all walked most of the day to
lighten their load. A long spur of Tucki Mountain reached up the mesa
several miles to the left, ending in a red promontory which we must go
around, and that point became our goal. We toiled and toiled, but it
was never any nearer. A quarter of an hour, a day, a year of putting
one foot heavily in front of the other, and we would look up expecting
some reward for so much labor, and the red promontory would be exactly
where it was before.
In the afternoon we saw a cloud of dust moving. We hoped it might be
wind coming to cool us, but it turned out to be a cattle outfit cutting
across the mesa to our road. The dust cloud looked near, yet it was
fully two hours before we met the cattlemen. The sight of the big herd
of cattle on the desert was stranger than the yellow and blue birds
or the fabulous wild ducks had been. They were being driven over this
awful country to a spring feeding-ground in Wild Rose Canyon, and they
were white with dust, limping on sore, cut feet. Two men and a boy in
big hats and with pistols at their belts rode small shaggy horses,
galloping through the brush and shouting when the tired cattle tried
to stop or scatter at meeting us. Wild Rose Canyon was cold at this
season, the men said, and there was plenty of fine water in it. "A
river runs down the middle," the boy volunteered. We looked out over
the shimmering mesa stretching hopelessly in all directions. A canyon
called Wild Rose where a river flowed between the mountains!
We inquired further into the fairy tale. The Canyon was about forty
miles away by the route which we would have to take with the wagon.
It led up into the high Panamints. There was a spring by some old
charcoal-kilns right under Mt. Baldy. The cattlemen knew nothing of
Telescope Peak. They had never heard of any one climbing the mountains.
They supposed it was easy enough when the snow was gone. No doubt
prospectors had been up, but there was nothing there, it was no good.
We saw them eying the Worrier curiously, evidently wondering what
manner of creatures he had managed to pick up.
After a mile or two they left us, turning off by an ancient signboard
pointing vaguely toward the long, red spur of Tucki Mountain with the
legend: "Water Eight Miles," and in the opposite direction across the
trackless, torn-up waste: "Water Fifteen Miles." What are eight miles
or fifteen miles to the modern man accustomed to leap over distance?
To the primitive traveler with horses and mules, and until now all
travelers throughout the ages have been thus primitive, a mile is a
formidable reality. Mojave teaches the truth about it. At the end of
those two days, that "Water Eight Miles" was as inaccessible to us as
though it had been fifty. Even if we had been full of vigor we probably
could not have reached it with the wagon over that rough ground. The
cattlemen, however, on their tough little horses, went to it. We did
not attempt to leave the two dim streaks that occasionally marked our
road, but at dusk stopped and made camp beside them.
[Illustration: THE DESERT]
That was our first genuine dry camp, though it was the third time
we had depended on the water carried from Furnace Creek. Water is
the commonest of all commodities, so common that we fail to realize
its meaning until we are without it. All the camps thus far had been
resting-places, homes. We had come to feel that any spot where we built
our fire could be home, for the essentials of home are very simple; a
little water, something to eat, a bit of fire, and good friends. In the
mess at Keane Wonder, in the forbidding inhospitality of Salt Creek,
we had had them all and been at home; but that night, when the Worrier
began to unload the wagon in the stark middle of the solitary waste, we
were not at home. Nor could we make it home, however brightly we urged
up the fire or cheerfully we talked. One of the essentials was missing
and the gasoline cans could not take its place. No water, not even bad
water, not a drop! That mesa was not a human resting-place; we were
aliens in it, transients, one-night-standers. The Worrier laughed at
our restless forlornness. On subsequent travels we have learned to make
dry camps almost as nonchalantly as he does, but they are never home.
In the hot miles between Furnace Creek Ranch and the mountain-spring
we learned the meaning for our little lives of the commonest of
commodities. We had never been so thirsty, no amount of water could
satisfy us, and the supply was limited. We had enough for all our
needs, yet we never could forget that there was an end to it. When the
jolting of the wagon slopped some out around one of the corks we could
have wept. Using any for cooking or washing dishes, and pouring out ten
gallons for Molly and Bill at the dry camp seemed terrible. Until then
we had thoughtlessly turned on a faucet, or drawn a bucket from a well,
or dipped water out of a stream. Now there was no water. The miles were
not only hot, they were dry miles. The diminishing supply of warm,
unattractive liquid in the dented gasoline-cans was our most precious
possession. We would have parted with everything we had, rather than
lose it.
From the camping place the red promontory looked as far away as it had
been at noon; we seemed to have made no impression on our goal. Below
us the Mesquite Valley spread out, immense and still, with the green
thread of Salt Creek crossing it. On the far side rose the Grapevine
Range, of which Corkscrew Mountain is the southern end. The evening air
was so clear that we could see the spiral cliff and the opening of the
canyon that leads to Daylight Pass. It looked very near, yet how many
days'-journeys we had come from there! Heat and thirst and weariness
lay between. The grimness of Death Valley, cool now in the shadow of
the Panamints, was hidden by the buttresses of Tucki. The long line of
sultry red rock that had smoldered and smoked all day slowly turned
blue in the twilight. It seemed as though you might saunter over there
and lay your hands upon it, yet the signboard pointing to the water at
its base had read eight miles. We had long lost sight of the cattlemen.
Suddenly, in the dusky blueness under the mountain, their camp fire
bloomed like a crimson cactus flower.
Evening smoothed the whole mesa into a blue and yellow floor rounding
gently the mountains. It was impossible to believe that it was
everywhere cut into hills and canyons by washes fifteen or twenty feet
deep as it was around our camp. In the bottoms of the declivities large
greasewoods and cacti grew, and occasional tufts of dried grass; but
the wind-swept ridges were bare and every particle of sand was blown
away from among the stones. On one of the beaten-down mosaics near
our camp something gleamed dimly. We went to it and found large white
stones laid in the form of a cross pointing toward the east. Another
traveler, then, had stopped here. Perhaps he had looked at the red
promontory and the spiral cliff and lost hope; perhaps he had prayed
for water; or perhaps he had made it as a thank-offering for the
blessed coming of cool night.
IX
_The Mountain Spring_
The next day's climb was easier, for by the time the sun had asserted
its full vigor we were at an altitude where the air was cool,
tinglingly crisp, and so clear that it seemed not to exist at all. The
earth sparkled with laughter and shouted her joy in the glory of light.
For several hours the red promontory continued to recede, then suddenly
we were rounding it, and soon afterwards entered a gorge whose sides
steadily became higher and higher. The bottom of the gorge was a wide,
sandy wash much cut up by rains, full of boulders and grown over with
brush. The vegetation became ever greener and more luxuriant. The wash
looked like a wind-tossed green river between crumbly, precipitous
mountains of many colors. Some were a dull red, some sage-green, some
buff, some dark yellow, while an occasional purple crag gave the canyon
a savage appearance. These mountains had the velvet texture which we
had seen at Saratoga Springs, especially the sage-green ones. The
colors were not an atmospheric illusion for the mountains were actually
made of different colored rock. We investigated them with great
interest. Though the velvet-textured hills had often been all around
us, they were always too far away or the sun was too fiercely hot for
us to get near enough to touch them. Now we walked along the edge of
the wash picking up the colored rocks while the Worrier led Molly and
Bill up the middle. It was so steep that he often had to rest them.
About three o'clock we came unexpectedly upon a little spring. It
was in a green cleft between a red and a yellow hill where the water
trickled over the rock into a charming basin. Eagerly we dipped in
our cups. It was true! Here at last was a real mountain spring, very
cold, tasteless, a miraculous gift from Heaven. We drank and drank. The
Worrier unhitched Molly and Bill and they broke away from him to rush
at the water. They did not stop drinking until the last drop was gone.
This bit of Paradise was a complete surprise. The map did not show the
little spring, nor did the Worrier know of its existence. It was so
tiny that doubtless it is often dry. Emigrant Springs itself, with a
much more plentiful flow of water, was about a mile further on. There
the canyon narrowed with steep, high sides broken into some beautifully
shaped summits. The spring is only a few miles from a big abandoned
mining camp called Skidoo and used to be an important one for desert
travelers. Someone once built a shack, and nearby was a cave with a
fireplace inside, also a corral, part of whose fence had since been
used for firewood. Like all desert watering places the surroundings
were littered with tin cans, old shoes and rusty iron. We know now
what becomes of all the old shoes in the world; they are spirited
away to the desert. An ancient government pamphlet that we had found
blowing about in one of the shacks at Keane Wonder and carefully
preserved describes very scientifically how to locate water, then
throws science to the winds and says that the tin can is the best of
all methods. When you find a pile of tin cans stop and search. It
is surprising how quickly you cease to see the litter, provided it
is sufficiently ancient not to be actively dirty. The desert has no
foreground; you soon stop looking much for things near at hand and get
the horizon-gazing habit. If a flower or a shining stone is at your
feet you see it joyfully, but if it is a tin can it does not exist.
There are too many far-off, enchanting things to look at. You are never
unaware of the sky, nor the beautiful curves of the mountains; no
forests nor roofs conceal them from you, and your eyes pass untroubled
over small uglinesses.
We made our camp in the shelter of an immense rock that stood alone
in the middle of the wash, and settled down for a long resting space.
The desert was exhibiting her variety in monotony. Between the burning
sands and this mountain coolness what a difference, and yet what an
essential sameness! Here is the same glittering sand, the same colorful
rocks, the same plants, the same bare, crumbling hills. The sun blazes
with the same brightness, turning every projecting edge of rock and
little leaf into a spot of light. The all-enveloping silence is the
same. The distances shine with the same illusion.
All around Emigrant Springs are mountains from five to seven thousand
feet high. One day was devoted to a stiff climb up to the abandoned
mines at Skidoo, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. A trail started
up from Emigrant Springs, but it looked very steep, so we went a longer
way around intending to come down it. Part of the route lay over high
ridges from which we saw the splendid mass of the snowy Panamints,
now close at hand. We passed little patches of snow in the shadows of
the rocks. The sky was a deep blue all day and the air cold with the
mountain sting in it.
The town of Skidoo lay in a high valley shut off from a view by the
surrounding hills. They were barren and made of crumbly yellow rock.
The long narrow basin itself was covered with sagebrush like a blue
carpet. The town had consisted of one wide street along which several
buildings were still standing. An incredible number of stoves, broken
chairs and cooking utensils were strewn about. The most imposing
building had been the saloon, behind which a neatly piled wall of
bottles, five feet high and several feet wide, testified to past good
cheer. The Worrier said that four thousand people once had lived here.
They had brought water twenty-eight miles in a pipe-line from a spring
near Telescope Peak. During the war the pipe was taken out and sold
to the government, but we could see the trench plainly, perfectly
straight, leading off toward Mt. Baldy across high ridges. With the
taking out of the water Skidoo died.
The place was littered with paper-covered books and old magazines. In
one house we found a pile of copies of a work entitled "Mysterious
Scotty, or the Monte Cristo of Death Valley." Needless to say we stole
one, which became a treasure to be brought out in idle hours by the
camp-fire. "Scotty" was a boon to the Worrier who did not hold much
with the sort of literature that we carried around. Early in the
expedition he had glanced over our library and preferred meditation. We
had a few slim volumes of verse, "Leaves of Grass," some wild tales of
Lord Dunsany's and a learned treatise on how to paint. This last helped
us to keep up the fiction of artistic greatness.
From Skidoo we traversed the top of a long ridge from the precipitous
end of which we had a superb view over Death Valley. We owed this
to "Old Johnnie" who had told us to go there, for among the tumbled
peaks of the Panamint Range around Skidoo you could wander a long time
without getting a commanding view of the valley. The point from which
we saw it that day was opposite Furnace Creek Ranch, but even with
the glass we could not distinguish the green patch of the ranch, nor
could we see the Eagle Borax Works lower down. The bottom looked like
a white plain with brown streaks around and across it. Death Valley is
always different. That afternoon there was no play of color, no magical
mirage. From there, looking straight down seven thousand feet, it was
ghastly, utterly unlike anything on the earth as most of us know her.
It was like the valleys on the dead, bright moon when you look at them
through a powerful telescope.
We stayed too long watching the shadow of the Panamints, as sharp and
stark as a shadow on the moon, encroach on the white floor. Twilight
had begun by the time we reached Skidoo again to hunt the trail down
to Emigrant Springs. We tramped around the rough hills searching for
it until darkness made it impossible to distinguish it even if we had
found it. There below lay our camp. Could we have gone down a ridge or
a canyon to it we would have defied the trail, but it was necessary to
go crosswise over several of the ridges that buttress the mountain, and
up and down their steep dividing canyons. Even the Worrier hesitated
to attempt this in the dark. Getting lost is one of the easiest things
you can do in desert mountains for they are very broken, flung down
seemingly without plan, cut by deep, often precipitous gorges. The same
old, tattered pamphlet that gives advice about tin cans also advises
about getting lost. It says that persons not blessed with a good sense
of locality had better find some other place than the desert for the
"exercise of their talents." Standing on top of a mountain you think
you know very well where to go, but when you get into those clefts
among those hills that look all alike you find you do not know. Any
moment you may meet a barrier to be climbed over with great labor or
gone around at the risk of getting involved in little canyons leading
off in the wrong direction.
There was nothing to do but skirt around the mountain and try to get
back onto the path by which we had come. During the quest we had our
reward and were glad. Just as night was closing in a shadow rose like a
curtain beyond the mountain-tops that shut Death Valley from us. It was
a blue shadow and a rose-colored shadow. It was both those colors and
yet they were not merged to a purple. It seemed to rise straight up, a
live thing, as though the spirit of the valley were greeting the stars.
The beautiful apparition remained less than a minute; always after that
we looked toward deep valleys at evening hoping to see it again, but we
never saw it, though night made wonderful shadows and blue pools of
darkness in them. Death Valley is a thing apart. It is a white terror
whose soul is a miracle of rose and blue.
About an hour later we came upon the cabin of "Old Tom Adams," another
old-timer guarding his own mine and Skidoo. He came out and made a
great fuss about finding "ladies." He had heard of us before. He
offered to make coffee, but a deep craving for more substantial food
forbade any delay. He talked incessantly and would hardly let us go; no
doubt we were the most exciting event for a long time. He described a
way to get down the mountain by following the tracks of his burros. He
swore we could not miss it, you just "fell down" right into Emigrant
Springs. He went a little way with us to be sure we started down the
right ridge; after that we "fell down" in about two hours and a half.
It was the worst, the rockiest, the steepest series of hills and
gullies we ever encountered. Presently the deceitful moon turned the
bushes into white ghosts and fooled us about the angle of ledges.
From time to time we saw burro tracks in the sand, but we suspect that
a herd of wild burros pastures around there. The Worrier's opinion of
"the old fool" was unmentionable, nor did it soothe him to suggest that
the old man had tried to do his best.
Next day Old Tom appeared at Emigrant Springs wanting to know if we had
seen a white burro and a black burro. We had that very morning.
"They're mine," he said, "but I can't keep 'em home."
Hunting burros seemed to be his life work. Two weeks later we heard of
him twenty miles away still hunting his burros. The Worrier opined that
he had no burros, but our guide was prejudiced.
We learned to appreciate what it meant to hunt burros, for though our
burros were horses, the Worrier spent most of the days in camp looking
for them. It was amazing how far they could travel with hobbles on.
They were clever at hiding, too, but we were assured that they were
dull compared to burros. Everybody on the desert seems to have burros
somewhere that he expects to use some day. They are all delightfully
casual about them:
"Did you happen to see a bunch of burros in the gulch youse come
through?"
"No. Have you lost yours?"
"Yes. Gone about a week. I thought maybe they was over there."
The hope seems to be that they will come back for water. Generally they
do, but sometimes they go to some other water hole and leave you to
guess which one. At Silver Lake the brigand called French Pete had come
from thirty miles off looking for his burros.
"You ought to put a bell on them," our hostess had told him.
"I did, but it's no use. You can't find 'em, anyway. They're too smart."
"Do they hide?"
"Hide! The one with the bell gets behind a rock and holds his neck
perfectly still while the others bring him food!"
[Illustration: A PACK-TRAIN CROSSING A DRY LAKE]
Another day at Emigrant Springs was spent in climbing Pinto Peak, 7,450
feet high. We chose it because it was the highest point anywhere
around, and we hoped for a good look at Mt. Baldy and Telescope Peak
in order to lay out a route by which to climb them. Pinto Peak is on
the west side of Emigrant Pass, overlooking the Panamint Valley and all
the region to the foot of Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. The peak
is not visible from the spring and we had to guess at a possible way
up. We began by ascending a steep ridge leading in the right direction,
over and among several little summits. The ridge brought us to a large,
high plateau set round with little peaks and cut at the sides by deep
canyons. The top of the ridge and the plateau were dotted over with
cedar trees, for on the desert, where everything is different, you do
not climb above the timber, you climb up to it. Between six and seven
thousand feet the trees begin, and sometimes in sheltered corners
become twenty or thirty feet high. They are not large nor numerous
on Pinto, but there are enough of them to give the ridge a speckled
appearance from below. The plateau sloped gradually up toward the
west and we selected the furthest little rounded rise as probably
Pinto Peak. For two miles we walked toward it over comparatively
level ground. From that side Pinto is not especially interesting as
a mountain, being only a higher point in a big table-land, but its
western side is a precipice falling two thousand feet into a terribly
rocky and desolate canyon. Not until we reached the extreme edge of the
plateau did the view open. It appeared suddenly, black mass after black
mass of harsh mountains leading over to Mt. Whitney, serene and white
on the wall of the Sierras. The Sierra Nevada are the barriers of the
desert. Beyond that glistening wall lie the lovely and fertile valleys
of California. Over there at that season the fruit trees were beginning
to bloom, on this side was only bareness, black rocks, and deep pits of
sand.
Mt. Whitney is toward the southern end of the high peaks of the
Sierras. That day they bit into the sky like jagged white teeth.
Southward the range is lower, rising again in Southern California to
the peaks of San Bernadino and San Jacinto. We could vaguely see San
Bernadino Mountain, mistily white, mixed up with the clouds. Below us
lay the Panamint Valley under the western wall of the steep Panamints
which separate it from Death Valley. This basin is neither so low nor
so large as the famous one east of it, but is of the same character.
At its edge, pressed against the mountain, we could make out with the
glass the once prosperous mining town of Ballarat, the Ballarat that we
had so gayly started to drive to from Johannesburg. With the Worrier's
help we traced the route we would have come over. He pointed out the
red mountain on which the three mining towns are perched, then came
a line of low hills, then an immense dry lake where the Trona Borax
Works are located, then a range of ugly-looking black mountains, then
a long mesa which he said is almost as rough and difficult as the one
we had recently come over, then the Panamint Valley, shimmering hot,
glistening white, first cousin to Death Valley itself. It would have
been a magnificent drive, but suppose we had undertaken it in the
sublime innocence that was ours at the time! We had never crossed a
dry lake, never wrestled with a mesa, never in our wildest imaginings
pictured such a place as the Panamint Valley,--and at the end we would
have found the town deserted!
"You wouldn't have made it," the Worrier teased us, "you would have
turned back before you got to Trona."
"We would not!" But in our hearts we knew how we would have been weak
from pure fear of the ugly-looking black mountains. The terrifying
approach to Silver Lake was nothing compared to them, nor would we have
had a friendly little Ford chugging along ahead.
As we had hoped, the top of Pinto commands a fine view of Telescope
Peak and Mt. Baldy joined by the beautiful, long ridge which reposes so
splendidly above Death Valley. From this side they looked higher and
snowier. We studied them carefully with the glass. The great mass of
snow was discouraging, but it seemed to be blown off the sharp ridges
which showed black. We planned to move the outfit as far as possible up
Wild Rose Canyon which branches off from Emigrant Canyon about twenty
miles above Emigrant Springs and leads up to the far, high peaks. From
there we thought we could climb the rounded summit of Mt. Baldy and
walk along the splendid curve to the slender pyramid of Telescope. No
lover of mountains could look at those pure, smooth lines as long as we
had looked at them and from as many aspects without being filled with
the desire to set his feet upon them.
It is not the height of a mountain nor its difficulty which makes it
desirable, but something in the mountain's own self. The Panamints are
neither very high nor very difficult, but they are dramatic and alone.
Besides the contrast of their snow with the burning sands beneath,
we wanted the feel of a truly lonely mountain top. The Panamints are
truly lonely. They are not objects of solicitude to any mountain club;
no tourist keen for adventure, nor boy scout outfit, nor earnest-eyed
mountaineer who carves the record of his conquests on his pipe-bowl
or his walking-stick, have left their names up there. No trail leads
up the Panamints, nor are their summits splashed over with paint like
the stately, desecrated summit of Mt. Whitney. We would not be forced
to know in letters a foot high that on August 27th, John Doe made the
ascent. We do not hate John Doe, but we prefer to meet him under roofs.
If he loved the mountain, rather than so disfigure it, he would throw
ink at his most cherished possession; and only lovers of mountains have
the right to invade their loneliness. The Panamints, with their feet in
the burning heat of Death Valley and their heads in the snow, almost
unknown to any save a few prospectors, guarded on all sides by the
solitudes of the desert, seemed utterly desirable to us.
We sat on a rock studying the map, which was no help at all, and
eating the big, sweet, California prunes of which we always carried
pockets-full as aids to wayfaring. The Worrier acquiesced in our
mountaineering project, though without enthusiasm. He bade us not
forget that it would be cold up there. The sight of the snow had
already set him shivering. We twitted him with being a "desert rat."
"You may have got along better than we did in Death Valley," we said
to him, "but it's our turn now; that's fair."
The Worrier scorned prunes and always looked on with dour superiority
during our consumption of them. Soon he left us and went to hunt
the "lost mine." There are many legends of lost mines in the
desert-mountains and we paid no especial attention to this one, being
weary enough to sit still, munching prunes, and looking out over the
fearful, majestic landscape. In an hour he came back with a handful of
rocks. He laid them solemnly before us. They were pieces of gold ore
which he had found in a hole a little way below the summit.
"The lost mine," he said.
"You had better come back and work it," we laughed.
"I'll have them assayed." His manner was serious.
"Why, you don't think----"
"I don't know. But anyways, we'll call it the Prune Stone Mine."
As a matter of fact he did have them assayed and did go back with his
partner; but the Prune Stone Mine, like so many mines in the Death
Valley Country, failed to fulfill its first promise.
During the week that we camped at Emigrant Springs we saw no wild life
except a few little brown birds that made a happy twittering in the
mornings. Sometimes in the blue night we heard the distant howling of
coyotes, and once an owl mocked us with a cry that sounded ridiculously
like "Hoo, Hoo, Skidoo!" He was a native, no doubt, and old in wisdom.
In the rambles among the mountains we found our first wild flowers.
They were small except one striking crimson-velvet one with a ragged
blossom like garden balsam. It grew in clumps about six inches high
and made vivid spots of color against the rocks. Later, as the spring
advanced, we found a great variety of flowers, but never this one
except at high altitudes. Seeing it was always a joyful heart-beat. The
graceful greasewood was in bloom, covered with small yellow flowers
that looked like little butterflies perched on the slender branches.
The nights were still very cold, often freezing the water in the pail,
but the days were pleasantly warm. The sun shone with such dazzling
brightness that during the middle of the day the shady sides of rocks
were the best resting places. A fresh, steady wind blew nearly always
up or down the canyon, sometimes piling great white masses of clouds
in the sky, always scouring the world incredibly clean. Each night was
a blue wonder. The mountains were delicate, luminous shapes in front
of a sky infinitely far away. The big stars hung low and burned with a
steady, silver shine.
Every day we climbed one or another of the ridges and smaller mountains
close to the spring. It was good to lie on their summits in the sun.
From any one of them we could look down the canyon and see the whole
length of the Mesquite Valley, always the same, yet, like Death
Valley, always different. You can look day after day at the deep, hot
basins of the desert without ever knowing them. Quickly enough you
can see the obvious features of the Mesquite Valley--the continuation
of the Panamints on the west, the wine-red Grapevine Mountains on
the east, the low blue hills in the north, the level bottom of the
valley streaked with white alkali where Salt Creek crosses it and "Old
Johnnie's" big sand-dunes are glistening little ant hills--but you must
stay all the hours of a long day to find out what she really is, and
then you will not know. Listen:
"Behold me! You think that I am an arid valley with a white alkali
streak down the middle of my level-seeming floor. You think that
I am surrounded by red mountains, or perhaps you think they are
blue, or purple--well, not exactly--more rose.
"Come down to me! I am very deep between the mountains. I am very
white. But if you do not like me so I can be a wide, level plain
covered with velvet for you to lie on.
"Come down to me! Rest beside this lake. See how it shines, how
blue it is! I am all in white like a young girl with a turquoise
breastpin. You don't believe that? I am a Witch, I can be
anything. My wardrobe is full of bright dresses. I will put them
on for you one by one.
"See, I know more colors of blue than you ever dreamed of. When
you tire of blue I change to ripe plums. Now I throw gray gauze
over my purple. I look like a nun, but am not. Here is my yellow
gown. You do not like it? See, I have all degrees of red, fire red
and crimson and pink, the color of bride roses. Here is my finest.
It is made of every color, but the tone of it is the gray breast
of a dove. You did not know that the breast of a dove could be
made of all colors, but now I show you.
"Do you not love me? You remember too well that I am hot as a
bake-oven. You think that if any one were fool enough to come down
to me I would steal behind and grip him by the throat.
"What of it? Why do you question me so much? You see how old I am,
how many storms have left their scars on me, and you think I am
wise. But I am only fair. Is it not enough to be old and yet fair?
"Beauty is sitting on my topmost peak making the enchantments that
confirm your dreams. She experiments with many materials; she
makes new combinations forever.
"Behold all the desolate places how they are hers--the lonely
hills, the lonely plains, the lonely green sea, the lonely
sands--she clothes us in gorgeous raiment, she makes us content
with death. Where she is your heart can pasture even to the
emptiness between the stars."
A lifetime is not long enough to listen to the songs of the desolate
places. A whole sunny, timeless day is too short to hear the Mesquite
Valley. The days and nights of the desert merge into each other. They
are like perfectly matched pearls being strung on an endless string.
You delight to run your fingers over their smooth surfaces and detect
no difference.
"Do we move to-morrow?" Thus the Worrier.
"Why to-morrow?"
"We have been here a week."
That is not possible! How could a week slide into past things so soon?
X
_The High White Peaks_
Wild Rose Canyon has a lovely name, justified by a small clump of
bushes that may bear wild roses sometime. The canyon, where it branches
east from Emigrant Pass, is very narrow with precipitous sides.
Emigrant Canyon itself at this point is walled by high cliffs so close
together that the wagon track fills the gorge. A considerable stream,
bordered with feathery trees, flows through the lower end of Wild Rose
Canyon and down Emigrant Pass toward the Panamint Valley and Ballarat,
but dies before it emerges from the cliff-like hills onto the long,
stony slope that leads into the valley. Once more we had been deceived.
From Pinto Peak the rocky cliffs appeared to rise directly out of the
Panamint Valley, but a walk down the western descent of Emigrant Pass
revealed the same long, brush-covered slope that we had learned to
know so well.
The cattlemen had been there and gone away, leaving the cattle in
Wild Rose for their spring range. The young steers huddled together,
staring with their expression of fierce innocence. They had tramped the
stream-bed into a bog and otherwise made camping at the mouth of the
canyon unpleasant. A stone shack with an iron roof was located near the
spring. It was rather a magnificent shack with two rooms, the inner one
windowless like a cave. For some reason that seems to be the approved
way of building sleeping-rooms on the desert. At Keane Wonder veritable
black holes were the sleeping-quarters near the boarding-house. The
shack had no floor and the uneven ground was littered with rubbish, as
indeed were all the surroundings. The mess around the spring at Wild
Rose bothered us more than the litter anywhere else. Perhaps it was
because we were shut in on all sides by high walls, and there were no
vistas nor even any beautifully shaped summits to look at. For once
the desert was all foreground, little trees along the stream, little
bushes, little stones. A tin can in such a small environment can hardly
be ignored.
As soon as possible therefore, we pushed on up the canyon which widened
into what looked like a plain surrounded by mountains. In reality it
was level nowhere, but rounded down like a giant oval basin about five
miles wide and seven or eight miles long. The mountains on the east and
south were covered with cedars whose vanguard dotted the edge of the
mesa under Mount Baldy, now become a great white mass, very near, led
up to by a precipitous ridge broken into jagged peaks. Telescope Peak
lay behind Baldy and was not visible. There was more snow than we had
supposed in our survey from Pinto Mountain, it lay all along the jagged
ridge, coming down in some places almost to the mesa. The northern wall
of the canyon was composed of lower mountains. The one furthest east
was a big, pointed, red mass, polka-dotted with little trees near its
summit. Looking back whence we had come the mountains seemed to close
the narrow gorge.
The cattlemen had told us that Wild Rose Canyon was full of water, but
after we left the spring we found none. The big wash down the middle
was dry--the boy must have seen it on some rare occasion when it had
water in it--and the great bowl far too large and too rough to admit
of much scouting for springs at the bases of the mountains. We had
thought that we would see the deserted charcoal-kilns and thus find
the spring which the cattlemen had described, but there was no sign of
any kilns. We supposed that they were somewhere along the bottom of
the precipitous ridge that led up to Mount Baldy. In that direction
the mesa was so terribly cut up that we could not attempt to take the
wagon there until we had first explored it, so we made a dry camp in
the middle of the basin under the shelter of the eight-foot-high bank
of the wash.
The wind had blown harder than usual all day with an icy bite from
the snowy heights. During the night a racing cloud deposited snow
on the northern hills which before had been bare. A real storm now
became our fear, for a little more snow would defeat our project.
Moreover Wild Rose Canyon is at an altitude where the cold at that
time of year is intense, and we had to depend on the sun's fires to
warm us sufficiently during the day to make life possible through the
night. The "desert rat" became a bundle of misery. We had not realized
the paralyzing effect cold would have on him. He sat and shivered,
apparently unable to move or to think, so utterly wretched that
Charlotte and I offered to give up the Panamints and "beat it" to a
more salubrious climate. We could not bear to see our friend suffer;
but he flatly refused, angry with us for even making the suggestion,
saying that when he started to do a thing be generally did it.
The next morning was as cold as ever. Still the Worrier refused to
consider moving out, and when the sun had warmed the great windy bowl
a little, he went back to fetch more water from the spring by the
old shack. We explored the base of the long ridge under Mount Baldy
as well as we could, but failed to find the charcoal-kilns. However,
it was possible to get the wagon over there, so in the afternoon we
moved the whole outfit up to the first cedar trees. There the mesa
became so steep that Molly and Bill could no longer pull the load. The
Worrier had brought ten gallons of water, enough for several days, and
the "desert-proof" horses were turned loose to find their way back to
the spring at the mouth of the canyon. What either they or the cattle
ate at Wild Rose remained a profound mystery to us. The mesa was
covered with low, dry brush, interspersed occasionally with bunches
of yellow grass. We could see the dark backs of the steers like spots
moving through it, but it looked like anything rather than a spring
feeding-ground.
Camp-in-the-Cedars was charming. A real tree had become a wonderful
object. For once there was plenty of wood and the Worrier kept himself
warm chopping and carrying. After the feeble little fires of roots
and twigs to which we had been accustomed, that blazing, crackling
camp-fire was a rich luxury. Dinner was a banquet. Our bed was laid
under a big piñon tree through whose tufts of fine needles the
enormous stars looked down. We had a glimpse through the far-off mouth
of the canyon of distant peaks, vague in the starlight. The wind rose
and fell softly through the pines and cedars, like the breathing of the
great white mountain beneath whose side we slept.
The white dawn of a clear day filtered through the blue darkness.
Before the sun had climbed over the ridge we were started on our long
anticipated adventure. It began with a stiff scramble up the first
buttressing ridge, then a long pull to the crest of the barrier that
walls the southern side of Wild Rose Canyon. The steep inclines of
gravelly rock were varied with ledges. Soon we reached the snow, so
hard that steps had to be dug in it with much scuffling of hobnailed
shoes. The green trees growing out of the white snow were very lovely,
and also useful to hold on to. When they were far apart we had some
exciting moments when we zigzagged over the smooth, white crust, which
was as steep as a shingled roof. In about two hours we reached the top
of the ridge. Until then we had faced the white slope, working too hard
to look back very often at the basin that was falling away below us.
Suddenly we stood on top. The world opened beyond into an immense white
amphitheater shut in by snowy peaks with the pyramid of Telescope,
visible once more, at the far side. After the hot, dry sands, how
miraculous seemed this glittering winter!
We pressed on toward Baldy along the ridge, which proved to be much
steeper than it had looked. It was covered with trees, and great
patches of snow grown soft now in the sun. However, by keeping a little
below the crest on the southern side most of the snow could be avoided.
There the ground fell so precipitously from the ridge to the canyon
below that only an occasional tree grew on it, and we had an unimpeded
view of the two white summits and the magnificent sweep of snow between
them.
Noon brought us to a little saddle north of Baldy, which connects it
with another rounded summit of the same name. Here were no trees and
the snow was blown off clean. With what eagerness we panted up the
last few yards! The mountain climber has his great reward when he
"looks over." That is his own peculiar joy. He toils for hours with
the ground rising before him to a ridge that seems to cut the sky,
only to find a higher one beyond. He surmounts that, and another and
another, until at last he gains the highest and the mountains yield
their secret. Breathlessly we stood on the little saddle. We looked
down into Death Valley from the still height to which we had looked up
so long. The white floor shimmered through layers of heated air, 10,000
feet below. Again the valley was different. That day it was full of
sky, as the Imperial Valley had been when we first saw it. Nothing was
distinguishable down there, it was a well of clear blue. The Funeral
Mountains looked like hills. Behind them the jagged ranges of desert
mountains spread back with one tall, snowy peak in their midst, Mount
Charleston, sixty miles away on the border of Nevada.
Southward on the saddle the mound of Baldy's summit presented its snowy
side. For the most part the snow was hard enough for us to walk over
the crust, but sometimes we floundered in nearly to the waist. That
was hard work. By one o'clock we reached the top where the snow was
blown off, leaving bare black rocks. It was a quiet day for the desert
and especially for the mountains. A slight wind came from the south;
the sky was cloudless, a deep, still blue. Mount Baldy overlooks all
the country in a complete panorama, save where the beautiful pyramid
of Telescope Peak cuts into the view. The horizon was bounded on three
sides by snow mountains, Mount Charleston, the San Bernadinos and
the wonderful Sierra Nevada. Between these white barriers spread the
desert, deep white valleys, yellow dry lakes, ranges of rose and blue
and dark-violet mountains, all shining in the incomparable brightness
of the sun.
Now, at last, we saw the famous "H. and L." of which we had heard so
much. "You see the highest and the lowest points in the United States
at the same time," everybody had told us. From the top of the Panamints
we could see Mount Whitney towering in the west, while in the east the
mountain sides fall precipitously into Death Valley, 280 feet below sea
level. There must be some more accessible viewpoint which commands
this dramatic spectacle, for it is not likely that our informants
expected us to climb Mount Baldy.
From the summit of Baldy the long curving arête that had looked so
beautiful from Death Valley on one side and from Pinto Peak on the
other led over to Telescope Peak. It was no disappointment. Sloping
sharply down from Baldy, level for a ways, then rising again toward the
white pyramid, it extended for about three miles, precipitous on both
sides, often not more than ten feet wide on top. The exhilaration of
walking thus in the clear air high above the spread-out world is always
a boundless joy; on this shining wall in the middle of the desert the
joy was almost unbearable. The great plain of the world was clear cut,
no veiling haze softened its distances, it flashed and sparkled, full
of strong, austere lines and strong, satisfying contrasts. Like a
victorious lover, you walk the heights of your conquest; everything to
the great circle of the horizon is yours; by right of patience and love
you possess it.
If we could only be like the three old cedars that have withstood the
hurricanes on the ridge and gaze with them until sunset, through the
night and the wonder of morning! They are so gnarled and old, and so
calm. Watchers, they stand on the summit of the world, and they might
tell us, if we could stay, why the mountain-tops are joyful. Instead,
we must drag around these aching bodies clamoring to be kept warm and
to be fed, never letting us listen long enough. Already the sun was
descending toward the west, and we had to hasten on if we wanted to
reach Telescope Peak and get back to fire and food before the cold of
night.
When the arête began to rise it became rapidly very steep. The snow
became harder and harder until it turned to ice. The lovely pyramid,
now directly overhead, shone blindingly in the slanting sun. The
only possible way to its peak was up a sharp knife-edge, from which
both sides fell sheer for thousands of feet. Was it all solid ice?
The conviction that it was had been hinting defeat to each of us
for the last half hour of the climb, but no one cared to speak of
that possibility until we were within four hundred feet of the top,
clinging to trees and slipping badly. The peak rose at a possible, but
terrific angle; the trees for the remainder of the way were much too
far apart to hold on to; the ice was perfectly smooth, and glistened
like a skating rink set on edge. No amount of kicking with hobnailed
shoes could make a foothold on it, and one slip on that knife-edge
either way meant a slide down the ice-sheet to almost sure destruction.
You cannot climb such an ice wall without either an ax or a rope; with
either one we would have tried it. We could have cut steps with an ax,
or we might have been able to lasso the trees above with a long rope,
and pull ourselves up by it. So lately come from the furnace of Death
Valley, how should we suppose that we would need the implements of an
Alpine mountain-climber? Down, down, more than 11,000 feet, lay that
white pit veiled with the smoke of iridescent haze.
The Worrier, who professed deep scorn of all mountains for their own
sakes, looked longingly at the smooth peak. It fascinated us all like a
hard, glittering jewel. He said he "hated to be beat." So did we all
"hate to be beat," but we would have been ungrateful indeed for the
joy of that day had we not been able to turn back and remain thankful.
There was no sense of defeat in the going-down.
The descent was easy except for the heartbreaking pull up Mount
Baldy again. His sides were far too straight up and down to admit of
any going around him. On the summit we made a concession to aching
bodies by taking a long rest and eating what was left of the bread
and cheese and the everlasting prunes. The Worrier had long since
dubbed our route "The Prune Stone Trail." We jested light-heartedly
about building cairns along it with a prune stone carved on the top of
each, and insisted that we owned a half interest in the Prune Stone
Mine, as he would never have found it had we not dragged him up Pinto.
Mountain-hater as he was and heat-loving "desert-rat," he genially
admitted that, snow or no snow, the top of Baldy was "fine." As we sat
there Death Valley turned a dark, deep, luminous blue. We could see the
Avawatz Mountains by Silver Lake and the notch in the hills where the
blue pool of Saratoga cherishes its little darting fish. The slanting
sunlight was resplendent on the arête and the west slopes of Telescope
Peak. The Worrier called him an old rascal; but we were glad to leave
him so, with his white robes unsullied by scrambling feet. His image
would remain always to the inward eye in dull days and difficult days,
a reminder of how beauty watches around the world.
When the sun stood just above the wall of the Sierras we began the long
descent down the rounded, snowy side of Baldy to the little saddle, and
down the long, steep slope and the little, buttress slope where the
cedar trees had been so lovely in the snow. Night came while we were
still going down, and the basin of Wild Rose Canyon was a violet lake.
XI
_Snowstorm and Sandstorm_
Breakfast was late next morning like Sunday breakfasts in houses.
Charlotte asked if it was Sunday. No one knew what day it was in the
far-off world, but we proclaimed it Sunday at Wild Rose. It was a true
Sunday, a day of rest after hard exertion, a still day washed clean by
the mighty sun. Immense and still. The great bowl curved tranquilly to
the tranquil hills, the cedars and piñons along its edge glistened like
little bright fingers pointing at the sky.
During the middle of the day the sun was hot, in the morning and the
evening the big fire blazed. Camp-in-the-Cedars was lovely enough to
stay in forever, but shortly after noon the Worrier announced that
he must find the charcoal-kilns, he could not "be beat" by them. The
little trees were so beguiling, the tranquil brightness of the mesa
so inviting, that we followed him, buoyed up by the cold, clear air.
We wandered along the base of Baldy to where a small, purple mountain
jutted into the great basin. Around that we went, leisurely picking
our way over the rough ground until at the extreme northern end of the
bowl we found an attenuated wraith of a road leading up into a heavily
wooded canyon. A road must once have been the way to somewhere, and
we followed it, climbing steeply for nearly a mile. It brought us
to a small, level spot where, made of rocks like the mountains and
indistinguishable until we were right on them, stood seven immense
charcoal-kilns like a row of giant beehives. They were so big that we
could walk upright through their doorways, that looked like arched
openings in their sides. Old Tom Adams had said that they were used
in the seventies to make fuel of the cedars and piñons, to be hauled
thirty miles to the smelter at a lead mine. They had been deserted so
long that the camp rubbish had disappeared from around them and they
merged into their background, become again a part of Nature herself.
What strenuous endeavor they denoted! Everywhere men have left their
footprints on the Mojave, sojourners always, never inhabitants. The
seven kilns were the most impressive testimony of brief possession that
we saw, more impressive even than the twenty-eight-mile-long trench
that brought the water to Skidoo. We had seen it from there crossing
high ridges; in the great bowl of Wild Rose it was clearly marked,
going from side to side and vanishing up the first ridge which we
had climbed to Baldy. The cost and labor of making it must have been
immense. Mojave was already breaking down the edges preparing to brush
it away, but it will be a long time before she can obliterate those
kilns. They will still be eloquent in that remote fastness long after
Keane Wonder and Ryolite are gone.
Behind the kilns a dim path climbed the mountain-side to a little,
secret spring, an oval rock basin not more than five feet long and so
deftly hidden that we wondered what prospector first had the joy of
finding it. From the elevation of the spring we could look along the
length of Wild Rose Canyon, where the sagebrush smoothed to a blue
and green and purple sea, and through its narrow opening to the white
serenity of Mount Whitney. Thus framed the white peak seemed to float
in the blue sky. Very swiftly Mojave brushes men off, but always with a
fine gesture. From the midst of her most obliterating desolations she
never fails to point at some far-off shining.
Too late we learned that the little spring at the head of the canyon
would have been the place for our camp. Not only would we have had the
delight of its cold, pure water, but the ascent of Mount Baldy looked
shorter and easier from there. Perhaps we each cherished the hope
of moving up next day and trying once more to scale the glittering
ice-wall with the help of our wood-chopper's ax and the rope from the
wagon; but we never discussed the idea for that night the dreaded storm
crept over the mountains. It came stealthily on padded feet, putting
out the stars. At dawn big wet snowflakes gently sifting through the
still air awoke us.
During the day the storm increased. The wind arose and blew in gusts
seemingly from every direction. Fortunately the trees afforded plenty
of big wood, so we were able to keep a roaring fire, though the
heavily-falling, wet snow sometimes threatened to put it out. It snowed
so fast that we were shut in by white walls not more than twenty feet
away. We pitched our tent with the opening toward the fire and tried to
get some shelter in it while the Worrier hunted the horses. The tent
was the only serious mistake in the outfit. It was a light, waterproof
silk tent with a pole up the middle. We had expected to use it as a
shelter from the wind and had tried once before at Emigrant Springs.
On that occasion its light-weight material had flapped and rattled in
the blast until we were glad to creep outside and sleep under the edge
of a rock. Before morning it blew down. The only practical tent for
the desert is a very low one, like a pup-tent, made of heavy canvas,
with extra long pegs that must be driven deep and buried in the sand.
During the eternity of snowstorm in which Charlotte and I waited for
Molly and Bill, we alternated between holding up the pole in the gusts
of wind and rushing out between them to drive in the pegs with the ax.
This, and the necessity of constantly building up the fire, kept us wet
and cold all day, for the snow was not the dry, whirling snow of really
cold climates, but was as wet as a heavy rain. It clung so we could not
shake it off and melted on our clothes. The Worrier did not retrieve
Molly and Bill until four o'clock. It was late to move, but the storm
showed no sign of abatement and we remembered with growing affection
the shack at the entrance to the canyon. Hastily packing in the white
downpour that hissed through the air, we left Camp-in-the-Cedars.
As soon as we had descended a little way into the basin the snow
ceased, but a white cloud continued to hang over the place where our
charming camp had been. During the remainder of the day and throughout
the night heavy clouds veiled all the mountains, occasionally dropping
flurries of snow around us. An icy wind rushed down the canyon. When
we reached the shack it seemed palatial. We cleared out the rubbish
by throwing it down the hill in front of the door, the approved way of
cleaning up on the desert. When there are too many cans you throw them
behind the bushes, and we had learned to do it with great vigor and
accuracy of aim. Much to the Worrier's amusement we scrubbed the table
and tried to wipe off the cracked, rusty stove set up on three empty
gasoline tins. That stove was a marvel in the art of consuming much
fuel without emitting any heat. We took turns huddling close to it. The
walls sheltered us from the wind, but as far as the stove was concerned
we might almost as well have been outdoors.
After supper we had to reckon with the dungeon that was the bedroom.
The Worrier recommended it highly, but we viewed it with a certain
awful apprehension. We had a devil's choice between that and the frigid
outdoors that kept beating on the shack with gusts of wind. We made
the mistake of choosing the dungeon. When the candle was blown out
fear crouched in the blackness. All the tales we had ever read of
prisoners in damp cellars assailed us--horrors, tortures, black holes.
The terrors of these man-made fears in this shut-in, man-made place
were far worse than the wild outdoors. Presently little scratchings
and gnawings apprised us that we were not alone. Unbearable then was
the walled darkness. We gathered up the bed and went outside, stepping
carefully over the Worrier who, forever faithful, was sleeping across
the door.
The clean outdoors! Let it snow, let it hail, let the water run down
the mountain and seep through the bed, let the wind tear at the
ponchos! It was nothing compared to being shut up in a dark place.
About midnight we were suddenly struck awake by a terrific din. After
the first tense moment we recognized it as coyotes howling in the
canyon. That was nothing either compared to vague little scratchings
and gnawings in an eight-by-ten shack.
Next day the storm continued, with clear intervals during which we
rushed out to spread our clothes and blankets in the sun that thirstily
drank up the snow at the bases of the mountains. "Scotty" beguiled
the hours and the weird tales of Lord Dunsany, read aloud beside the
cracked stove, never had a more appropriate setting. All around the
mountains were white except where some insistently black rock heaved
out. Clouds hurried across the sky like Indians galloping on the
war-path, the wind screaming around the rocks was their war-whoop. In
the moments of peace between their raids huge giants of cloud shook
their fists at us over the walls. The silence of Mojave was torn to
tatters. Yet, somehow, we still felt it. Just as the wild tales we read
intimated a stillness behind, so the tumult was a ripple on indomitable
peace. You have seen a little whirlwind plow a furrow through the
water of some glassy lake, making quite a bit of a tumult, but leaving
undisturbed the tranquillity of the surface beyond its narrow path.
Though between the walls of the canyon where we camped we could not see
the still surfaces, we sensed them. The storm was an incident. Mojave
took it and made a strong song.
Wild Rose Canyon was the furthest point of our journey; from the old
shack the going home began. The sun rose brilliantly on the following
morning and deceived us into starting back to Emigrant Springs. As soon
as we had left the narrow canyon and could once more see the expanse of
the sky, we knew that the storm was by no means over. We even debated
returning to our palace, cracked stove, black hole, and all; but when
you have broken camp, found the horses, packed up, and started, a
two-hour-long process, you will risk almost anything rather than turn
back. There were compensations, too, even for the wind which shortly
came to life again and thrust its knife to our hearts. The sky was a
magnificent spectacle. It was not gray, nor overcast, nor brooding, but
full of torn-up, piled-up, tumultuous clouds, a fitting canopy for the
country beneath it. The top of Emigrant Pass is a big mesa surrounded
by all kinds of mountains from the broken, battered buttresses and
steep snow-peaks of the Panamints to smooth, bare, rounded hills
folded over each other and dimpled like upholstered sofas. In bursts
of sunshine the shadows of the clouds raced over them all, snatching
at each other and getting mixed up in the canyons. Sometimes a cloud
spilled out its contents and for a while obliterated one of them.
Toward noon the clouds made a concerted attack on the sun, calling up
new cohorts until at last they succeeded in covering him entirely and
keeping him covered. Then a great change fell upon Mojave. She became
forlorn, her bright colors faded into gray. The brush shivered in the
wind and made a cold, crackling sound. A few immense Joshua palms
scattered over the mesa waved their grotesque arms like monsters in
pain. The wind whistled through their stiff, spiky leaves. They were
in bloom with a heavy mass of waxy white flowers on the end of each
branch. The sun had polished the flowers, tipping every branch with
a silver ball; now they stuck up into the lead-colored sky, dull,
lead-colored things.
All the familiar places that had been drenched with sunshine,
brilliant with color, almost as magical sometimes as the burning sands
themselves, now appeared in this sad, gray mood. After leaving the top
of the pass we crossed a large, high plateau known as the Harrisburg
Flat. On the way over to Wild Rose it had been still and hot, the
openings between the mountains had hinted at the illusions of Death
Valley behind them; now a cloud full of wind and snow rolled up out
of the narrow opening of Emigrant Canyon. Storms were all around us,
but until that moment we had hoped that we might escape. There was no
escape. The Harrisburg Flat became a white, whirling fury. The wind
that smote us was like a solid, moving wall. The cloud was not made of
snow, but of ice, a fine hail that cut our faces. It was so dense that
we could not see ten feet in front of the wagon. We had some difficulty
in making Molly and Bill face it, but it was necessary to go on. All
day the icy wind had been pressing upon us, now it was so cold that we
felt we could not withstand it long. Fortunately the sheltering walls
of the canyon were not far, but the half hour during which we struggled
toward them seemed an eternity. The Worrier shouted at the laboring
horses and for the first time when he knew that we could hear him, he
cursed.
By the time we reached the canyon the hail had stopped but the terrible
wind continued. It seemed as though it would rip the bushes out of the
ground. In place of the ice, fine particles of sand assailed us--had
the wash not been thoroughly wet we would have had more of it. It must
have rained violently in the canyon, or else in the dusk we missed the
particular route among the rocks by which we had come up, for the way
was so washed out that the Worrier could hardly pilot the load.
Every bit of energy we had was centered on reaching the ruined shack
at Emigrant Springs. When we were able to say anything at all we
speculated about how dirty it might be and whether or not there was a
stove in it. The dirt was a certainty, but nobody could remember about
the stove, as we had avoided the shack when we were there before. After
a freezing eternity we came around the last bend of the canyon. Home
was in sight, and our hope perished for smoke was coming out of the
chimney! Not only was there a stove, but there was a man snugly camping
beside it, an unknown man, a usurper, a robber! We were full of angry,
helpless indignation.
"If it's Tom Adams," the Worrier snapped, "we'll throw him out."
But it was not Tom Adams. It was another old-timer, an old man, who
wandered ceaselessly to and fro over the desert. He was a gentle soul,
but we were in no mood to appreciate that then. Of course he offered
to move out of the shack when he saw "ladies" coming on such a bitter
night, and equally of course we could not allow it. If Charlotte and
I chose to invade the wilderness we must take the chances of the
wilderness as other people did. Our pride was involved, but we had to
refuse very summarily, even rudely, before the old man would accept our
objection. Then he retired into the shack with hurt dignity, while we
pulled down some more of the corral fence to make a blazing fire. We
solaced ourselves with the belief that the outdoors was better than the
shack anyway, as it had been better than the black hole. In the course
of time we were warm again and managed to keep warm through the night.
In the morning the innocent usurper sent us, via the Worrier, a pan of
hot biscuits, a most welcome and delicious gift. Charlotte and I called
on him later to thank him and make amends if we could. He entertained
us for two hours with the story of his travels, but he would not accept
our invitation to dinner, saying that he wasn't used to "dining with
ladies." We sincerely hope it was not a sarcasm. The question which the
possession of the shack raised is rather a difficult one. Was our pride
worth more than the true chivalry of a kindly soul? To us it was, to
him it was not.
The wind continued to blow with violence for several days, though we
had no more rain nor snow. It is easy to see how the desert has been
torn to its rough harshness. That steady-blowing wind alone could wear
the mountains to their jagged outlines, crumbling the softer rock down
to fill the valleys. It picks up the sand and uses it to grind the
mountains smooth. It piles it against the cliffs to make new foothills
and hollows it out to make new canyons. It drives the rain against the
mountains to rush down, rolling rocks along the gorges and digging
the deep trenches across the mesas. Where no network of roots holds a
surface soil wind and rain work rapidly. On the homeward journey from
Wild Rose we understood the cut-up mesas and the gouged-out canyons
better.
Down in the Mesquite Valley, where we took the sandy road along the
edge of the marsh instead of the rocky one by which we had come because
Bill had lost a shoe, we saw what the wind can do with sand. In the
afternoon we reached the foot of the mesa that leads from Emigrant
Canyon to the bottom of the valley and were at the beginning of "Old
Johnnie's" sand-dunes. It had been a sparkling day with a clear sky,
but the wind was still blowing. The Mesquite Valley was as hot as we
remembered it, but, after the ice-cloud on the Harrisburg Flat only
two days before, it seemed a delicious hotness. With the assurance of
seasoned travelers able to make a dry camp anywhere, Charlotte and I
insisted on stopping there for the night. Molly and Bill would take
four hours to make the nine miles of deep sand to Salt Creek, and we
always hated to make camp in the dark. The Worrier wanted to go on.
He said he had a hunch that we ought to, but he allowed himself to be
persuaded. We should have heeded that hunch of an old-timer.
Hardly had we unpacked the wagon and made a fireplace before we noticed
that the wind was increasing. Little whirligigs of sand began to
run across the valley. Soon they were charging at us down the mesa.
First they came singly, then merged into a cloud of sand that rattled
against the pots and the wagon. Luckily for us the wind was blowing
from the mountains over the mesa where there was comparatively little
sand to pick up, for had it been coming across the dunes we would have
been buried alive. Of course it was impossible to cook; in a very few
minutes it was impossible to do anything but crouch in the lea of the
sand-heap around the roots of the biggest mesquite. The Worrier seemed
to shrink up and draw in his head like a turtle. He shouted something
at us, of which we could only hear the word "hunch." The air was full
of a rushing, hissing sound.
Charlotte and I covered ourselves with the ponchos, drawing them over
our heads when the sand came hurtling through the top of the Mesquite.
Molly and Bill huddled close together about fifty feet away with their
backs to the blast, and much of the time the sand was so dense that we
could not see them. The Worrier also was lost in the yellow cloud. The
sand was very fine and, in spite of the ponchos, sifted into our hair
and ears and clothes. It gritted in our teeth so we felt as though we
were eating it. We could see it piling up around the next mesquite,
and could imagine it whirling through the valley over the tops of "Old
Johnnie's" dunes.
Often the wind goes down at sunset, but that day the sun sank invisibly
and the fury increased. We felt a queer excitement not unmixed with
fear. Thus, only a hundred times worse, must the sand blow over the
vast Sahara Desert while the Arabs cover their heads, calling on Allah.
When the solid ground itself arises there is no help but Allah.
After sunset the Worrier emerged again from the flying yellow mass.
His shirt was blown tight to him and the loose sleeves whipped in the
wind. He leaned against it bending forward. He shouted that we might
possibly get some shelter by continuing along the road toward Salt
Creek, where it winds further around the side of Sheep Mountain. He
advised us to move, because if the storm continued he could not keep
Molly and Bill.
"Tie them up!" we yelled.
"Can't. Go crazy." Then, as we did not move, his voice rose
peremptorily:
"Come on! If it gets worse we can't go."
We had disregarded his first hunch; now, if he had another, far be
it from us to raise difficulties, though we could hardly see how it
was possible to travel even then. Charlotte and I staggered up from
the mesquite and all three of us packed as speedily as we could. It
was a disorderly packing, as we could scarcely stand before the wind,
and were almost blinded by the sand. Molly and Bill were wild with
excitement. I remember vividly bracing myself against the wall of wind,
holding on to Molly, who objected to backing around to the wagon-pole,
unable to open my eyes and hardly able to breathe.
We all piled into the wagon. The excited horses were willing to travel
with their backs to the wind. There was a track to follow, but its
edges were already rounding full of sand. If the storm should continue
long enough it would be smoothed out.
The Worrier's hope was justified, for at the end of three or four miles
the wind seemed much less furious. We were among the dunes and found
a fairly quiet little gully full of deep sand as fine and soft as the
sand on a beach. Something in the set of the wind through the mountains
left this oasis of peace. We were even able to cook the long-delayed
dinner. We did it by moonlight, slowly and carefully handling things
and keeping them covered as much as possible, like having a picnic on a
windy seashore.
The Worrier suggested that we climb to the top of the dune which
partially sheltered us, if we wanted to see what a sandstorm looked
like. We did so. From that vantage point of comparative calm we saw the
whole Mesquite Valley filled with a dense yellow cloud that completely
shut out the surrounding mountains, rising higher than they, swirling
at the top like smoke ascending into the dark night sky.
In the morning we climbed the dune again and looked across over the
others. The blowing sand was less dense and we could see them all. "Old
Johnnie" had been right, they were a hundred feet high. Their shapes
were very beautiful, with knife-edge tops ridged in pure, clean lines
from which fringes of fine sand blew up like the wind-tossed manes of
white horses. The masses and outlines of the dunes suggested Egyptian
architecture; the pyramids and the crouching sphinx were there. Sand
dunes must have been familiar to the Egyptians dwelling beside the
Sahara. What is the huge sphinx, brooding and massive, gazing with
strong eyes across the emptiness, but an interpretation of the desert
carved in stone?
We reached Salt Creek early and spent the rest of the day there. The
wind continued to blow, the sand still swirled off the dunes, and the
yellow dust-cloud still obscured the mountains; but we were in the
shelter of Tucki and the ground was so stony that we were not much
troubled by the migrating sand. Once more Charlotte and I climbed the
ridge from which we had watched the Worrier's remarkable hunting. The
whole big basin of Death Valley between its high walls of rock was
blurred with dust, clouds of sand with wind-frayed edges rose into the
sky, not a gleam of radiance showed through. The green and white snake
of Salt Creek coiled sullenly among the sulphur-colored hills. Only
the blue eye was bright, poisonous, unwinking. The fair water that was
too polluted for human drinking seemed to mock us. We waited for the
enchanter to come at sunset, but as the day merged into evening the
scene became inexpressibly dreadful.
Suddenly Charlotte arose from the rock on which we were sitting.
"Let us go," she whispered, and without further comment we hurried back
to camp and made the Worrier collect enough wood from the swamp for a
truly cheerful fire.
The following day we traveled once more up the long, northern mesa
of Death Valley, but by a different route from that by which we had
descended. This way was shorter, avoiding the long pull across the
valley, though it was rockier, steeper, and cut by more islands of
hills to cross or go around than the other. In many places the road
vanished utterly, and only a "desert-rat" could have piloted a wagon
safely to its destination over that maze of ridges and gullies.
The day was fine. At last the wind had died down and the dust-clouds
were slowly subsiding. Both Death Valley and the Mesquite Valley were
veiled in heavy haze, but the brightness of their changing color now
shimmered through. All day the white blaze of the sun was around
us and the silence, after a week of tumultuous wind, was a mighty
dreaming. It was the living silence which we had first known on the
night when we wandered away from Silver Lake, the silence in which the
earth moves. The mountains dwelt in it majestically. Mojave was again
making her fine gesture, unconscious of the discomforts and terrors of
small living things. Her pointing at the far-off shining is always a
conquest of grimness, as though sorrow were a stepping-stone to beauty.
By the out-jutting cliff of Daylight Pass, from which we had first
beheld Death Valley, we made a long stop. Familiarity had only enhanced
its splendor. With different eyes we saw the shining floor, the sad
Funeral Mountains, the calm, white curves of the high Panamints. What
had been a picture was now a living experience. The rose and silver
shifting over the white valley-floor had new meaning. We knew that
floor, we knew the feel of it, and its ever-changing beauty was a
miracle. We were justified in the pilgrimage, for only by going thus
to the White Heart, making stones and brush and jagged rocks our
companions, depending on the springs to keep us alive and the roots of
the greasewood to warm us, could we have known what a miracle it was.
The words "terror" and "beauty" which we had spoken during the first
look down into the valley and had thought that we understood, had real
content now. We knew that they belonged together and that one covered
the other and changed its meaning.
XII
_The End of the Adventure_
It was April when we returned to Silver Lake. Spring was walking on
the desert. The sand and the stony mesas were decked with flowers.
Great patches of California-poppies bent on hairlike, invisible stems
before the wind, little floating golden cups. Blue lupins, like spires
of larkspur, glistened in the sun. A four-petaled, waxy flower with
a shining, satiny texture spread in masses on the sand. Daisies with
yellow centers and lavender petals clustered beside rocks. A little
plant like the beginnings of a wild rose tossed tiny pink balloons in
the air. The shoots of the purple verbena ran over the ground, sending
up little stems to hold its many-floretted crowns. Even the thorny
cactus bloomed with a crimson, poppy-shaped flower.
When we went on excursions to the mountains the bayonet-leaves of the
yucca guarded tall spikes which bore aloft white, shining blossoms,
and the grotesque branches of the Joshua palms were tipped with
brightness like lighted candles. Everywhere high clumps of yellow
coreopsis rivaled the sun. Beyond the dry lake at the base of the
sand-ridge which had been so terrifying on our first drive through the
desert stood stately Easter lilies hung with great white bells. Easter
morning we went over there and gathered armfuls for our kind German
hosts. Their house and ours were abloom during our stay, for we could
no more resist gathering these amazing flowers than we could resist
picking up the many-colored stones. Every dish and bowl was full and
tin cans rescued from the dump were promoted to be vases.
The gallant little flowers in such a stern environment! They were
touchingly lovely, blooming wherever they had the smallest chance and
looking trustingly at the sun. It was as though we had never seen
flowers before, never really seen them.
Indeed, until we went on pilgrimage to the White Heart, we had never
seen the outdoors, never really seen it. How could we not see it when
the outdoors is always on the doorstep? We had thought we saw it, we
had talked about it, a place for pleasant dalliance when work inside
the walls was done, or a sort of glorified gymnasium to make the
blood race and the heart beat faster. The outdoors is the awe-full,
magnificent universe moving along, inexpressibly fearful and beautiful!
And we might have seen it anywhere! The drama is always going on with
its terror and beauty. The gentlest countryside is a part of it.
Everywhere the grim touches hands with the fair, storm alternates with
calm, flowers grow out of death, and the fairness, the calm and the
flowers are the stronger. Poets and artists know this when they step
across their thresholds in the morning--whence their unreasonable joy
at being alive--but most of us have to be shaken awake before we can
see what is in front of our eyes.
The desert shook us awake. We had come looking for mysteries and
"terrible fascinations" and found only the mystery of the old outdoors
and the terrible fascination of the old outdoors. Beauty pressing
around sorrow--the desert is simply a very forceful statement about
that.
For the adventure with the outdoors is the adventure with beauty. And
when you have that adventure the jealous walls, however engrossing
their contents, and they may be very interesting and amusing and
serious and exciting, can never bully you again. They have doors and
windows in them and beauty is around them like a garment. You and I,
unaccountably split off from the vast drama and blessedly able to be
aware of it for a little while, shall we let the din and bother inside
the walls, the frantic lunging at the still face of time, raise such a
dust in our eyes that we cannot see?
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know."
Every day while we rested at Silver Lake we looked the length of the
barren lake bed to the bright mirage at the base of the black mountain
that was no mountain at all, and northward over sandy emptiness to the
enchanted pathway leading behind the Avawatz. Fourteen of the still,
bright days of the desert were strung on the endless string before we
had to say good-by to our hosts and to the Worrier.
Never can we forget any of the people whom we met during our adventure
with the outdoors, neither the few whom we have mentioned in this
inadequate telling of it, nor the many whom we have not. They were all
unfailingly kind. It was very hard to part from our guide, and nothing
reconciled us to it except his cheerful promise to act as Official
Worrier again. Our hostess invited us to come any time and stay as long
as we liked, an invitation of which we have gladly availed ourselves.
We piled our baggage into the automobile, abandoned so long at Silver
Lake, and through a whole sunny day drove away from the White Heart.
The dim road led past sinister little craters that long ago spilled
ugly, black lava over the hills, through acres and acres of blue lupins
blown to waves like a sea, across two ranges of enchanted mountains and
down into and over the white Ivanpah Valley where the heavy sand made
the engine boil. Several times we left the car to walk on the savage,
torn-up hills made gentle by flowers. When the noise of the engine was
hushed the silence was full of the singing of birds.
In the rose and orange of evening we reached Needles on the bank of the
red Colorado River, and came out of the wild and lonely place onto the
great highway that joins the Atlantic and the Pacific. The sand and
rock trail follows the steel road of the Santa Fé. Transcontinental
trains roar past and pennants flutter on automobiles from Maine and
Florida, Michigan and Texas, Oregon and California. Dust clouds roll
over the edge of Mojave as America goes by. Some travelers look at
her curiously, some look longingly, some shudder, some pass with the
window shades pulled down. All the time she is singing on her rosy
mountain-tops and in her deep, hot valleys where the blaze of the sun
is white.
APPENDIX
" ... That part of California which lies to the south and east of the
southern inosculation of the Coast Range and the Sierra comprises an
area of fully 50,000 sq.m. For the most part it is excessively dry
and barren. The Mohave Desert--embracing Kern, Los Angeles and San
Bernardino, as also a large part of San Diego, Imperial and Riverside
counties--belong to the 'Great Basin.' ... The Mohave Desert is about
2,000 ft. above the sea in general altitude. The southern part of
the Great Basin region is vaguely designated the Colorado desert.
In San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties a number of creeks or
so called rivers, with beds that are normally dry, flow centrally
toward the desert of Salton Sink or 'Sea'; this is the lowest part of
a large area that is depressed below the level of the sea, at Salton
263 ft., and 287 ft. at the lowest point. In 1900 the Colorado River
(q.v.) was tapped south of the Mexican boundary for water wherewith
to irrigate land in the Imperial Valley along the Southern Pacific
Railway, adjoining Salton Sea. The river enlarged the Canal, and
finding a steeper gradient than that to its mouth, was diverted into
the Colorado Desert, flooding Salton Sea, and when the break in this
river was closed for the second time in February, 1907, though much of
its water still escaped through minor channels and by seepage, a lake
more than 400 sq.m. in area was left. A permanent 60 ft. masonry dam
was completed in July, 1907.
" ... Death Valley surpasses for combined heat and aridity any
meteorological stations on earth where regular observations are taken,
although for extremes of heat it is exceeded by places in the Colorado
desert. The minimum daily temperature in summer is rarely below 70°
F. and often above 96° F. (in the shade), while the maximum may for
days in succession be as high as 120° F. A record of six months (1891)
showed an average daily relative humidity sometimes falls to 5. Yet
the surrounding country is not devoid of vegetation. The hills are
very fertile when irrigated, and the wet season develops a variety of
perennial herbs, shrubs and annuals."
The Encyclopædia Britannica: "California."
"It is often said that America has no real deserts. This is true in
the sense that there are no regions such as are found in Asia and
Africa where one can travel a hundred miles at a stretch and scarcely
see a sign of vegetation--nothing but barren gravel, graceful, wavy
sand dunes, hard, wind-swept clay, or still harder rock salt broken
into rough blocks with upturned edges. In the broader sense of the
term, however, America has an abundance of deserts--regions which
bear a thin cover of bushy vegetation but are too dry for agriculture
without irrigation.... In the United States the deserts lie almost
wholly between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, which
keep out any moisture that might come from either the west or the
east. Beginning on the north with the sagebrush plateau of southern
Washington, the desert expands to a width of seven hundred miles
in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah. In southern
California and Arizona the sagebrush gives place to smaller forms like
the salt-bush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect. Next comes
the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south into Mexico. One
of the notable features of the desert is the extreme heat of certain
portions. Close to the Nevada border in southern California, Death
Valley, 250 feet below sea-level, is the hottest place in America.
There alone among the American regions familiar to the writer does
one have the feeling of intense, overpowering aridity which prevails
so often in the deserts of Arabia and Central Asia. Some years ago a
Weather Bureau thermometer was installed in Death Valley at Furnace
Creek, where the only flowing water in more than a hundred miles
supports a depressing little ranch. There one or two white men,
helped by a few Indians, raise alfalfa, which they sell at exorbitant
prices to deluded prospectors searching for riches which they never
find. Though the terrible heat ruins the health of the white men in a
year or two, so that they have to move away, they have succeeded in
keeping a thermometer record for some years. No other properly exposed
out-of-door thermometer in the United States, or perhaps in the world,
is so familiar with a temperature of 100° F. or more. During the period
of not quite fifteen hundred days from the spring of 1911 to May, 1915,
a maximum temperature of 100° F. or more was reached in five hundred
and forty-eight days, or more than one-third of the time. On July 10,
1913, the mercury rose to 134° F. and touched the top of the tube. How
much higher it might have gone no one can tell. That day marks the
limit of temperature yet reached in this country according to official
records. In the summer of 1914 there was one night when the thermometer
dropped only to 114° F., having been 128° F. at noon. The branches of
a pepper-tree whose roots had been freshly watered wilted as a flower
wilts when broken from the stalk."
--The Chronicles of America.--Volume I. "The Red Man's Continent,"
by Ellsworth Huntington.
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