The Land of Little Rain | Page 4

is the Country of Lost Borders.
Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into
the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit.
Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better
word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man;
whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven.
Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.
This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt,
burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted,
aspiring to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains
full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze.
The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava
flows. After rains water accumulates in the hollows of small closed
valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness that
get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep and the
rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter, rimmed
about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin crust of it lies
along the marsh over the vegetating area, which has neither beauty nor
freshness. In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand drifts in
hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and between them the soil shows
saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than water
work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a
year's redeeming. In all the Western desert edges there are essays in
miniature at the famed, terrible Grand Canon, to which, if you keep on

long enough in this country, you will come at last.
Since this is a hill country one expects to find springs, but not to
depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and
unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you
find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where the air
has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and
breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling
up into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cries
for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of
lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be
come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it.
This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies
hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on
until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows;
from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive.
These months are only approximate; later or earlier the rain-laden wind
may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the Gulf, and the land
sets its seasons by the rain.
The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the
seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they
do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. It is
recorded in the report of the Death Valley expedition that after a year of
abundant rains, on the Colorado desert was found a specimen of
Amaranthus ten feet high. A year later the same species in the same
place matured in the drought at four inches. One hopes the land may
breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but to do.
Seldom does the desert herb attain the full stature of the type. Extreme
aridity and extreme altitude have the same dwarfing effect, so that we
find in the high Sierras and in Death Valley related species in miniature
that reach a comely growth in mean temperatures. Very fertile are the
desert plants in expedients to prevent evaporation, turning their foliage
edge-wise toward the sun, growing silky hairs, exuding viscid gum.
The wind, which has a long sweep, harries and helps them. It rolls up
dunes about the stocky stems, encompassing and protective, and above

the dunes, which may be, as with the mesquite, three times as high as a
man, the blossoming twigs flourish and bear fruit.
There are many areas in the desert where drinkable water lies within a
few feet of the surface, indicated by the mesquite and the bunch grass
(Sporobolus airoides). It is this nearness of unimagined help that makes
the tragedy of desert deaths. It is related that the final breakdown of
that hapless party that gave Death Valley its forbidding name occurred
in a