The Land of Little Rain | Page 5

locality where shallow wells would have saved them. But how
were they to know that? Properly equipped it is possible to go safely
across that ghastly sink, yet every year it takes its toll of death, and yet
men find there sun-dried mummies, of whom no trace or recollection is
preserved. To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to
the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running
water--there is no help for any of these things.
Along springs and sunken watercourses one is surprised to find such
water-loving plants as grow widely in moist ground, but the true desert
breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat. The angle of the
slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure of the soil determines the
plant. South-looking hills are nearly bare, and the lower tree-line higher
here by a thousand feet. Canons running east and west will have one
wall naked and one clothed. Around dry lakes and marshes the herbage
preserves a set and orderly arrangement. Most species have
well-defined areas of growth, the best index the voiceless land can give
the traveler of his whereabouts.
If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with the
creosote. This immortal shrub spreads down into Death Valley and up
to the lower timberline, odorous and medicinal as you might guess
from the name, wandlike, with shining fretted foliage. Its vivid green is
grateful to the eye in a wilderness of gray and greenish white shrubs. In
the spring it exudes a resinous gum which the Indians of those parts
know how to use with pulverized rock for cementing arrow points to
shafts. Trust Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world!
Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy
growth of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in

the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward
from the meeting of the Sierras and coastwise hills where the first
swings across the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The yucca
bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with
age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which is
slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly
power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come
to flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the size
of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap, the Indians twist it deftly out of
its fence of daggers and roast it for their own delectation.
So it is that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young plants of
Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuccas, cacti, low herbs, a
thousand sorts, one finds journeying east from the coastwise hills.
There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the
sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more
room. So much earth must be preempted to extract so much moisture.
The real struggle for existence, the real brain of the plant, is
underground; above there is room for a rounded perfect growth. In
Death Valley, reputed the very core of desolation, are nearly two
hundred identified species.
Above the lower tree-line, which is also the snowline, mapped out
abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of pinon, juniper,
branched nearly to the ground, lilac and sage, and scattering white
pines.
There is no special preponderance of self-fertilized or wind-fertilized
plants, but everywhere the demand for and evidence of insect life. Now
where there are seeds and insects there will be birds and small
mammals and where these are, will come the slinking, sharp-toothed
kind that prey on them. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely
land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.
Painted lizards slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white
hot sands. Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub;
woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless
waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer

and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange,
furry, tricksy things dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the
conning towers of the creosote. The poet may have "named all the birds
without a gun," but not the fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, furtive,
small folk of the rainless regions. They are too many and too swift;
how many you would not believe without seeing the footprint tracings
in the sand. They are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot
and white. In mid-desert where there are no cattle, there are no birds of
carrion, but if you