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.

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.