The Land of Little Rain | Page 6

go far in that direction the chances are that you will
find yourself shadowed by their tilted wings. Nothing so large as a man
can move unspied upon in that country, and they know well how the
land deals with strangers. There are hints to be had here of the way in
which a land forces new habits on its dwellers. The quick increase of
suns at the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and
effects a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes
necessary to keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring
in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the
nest of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very
slender weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at
mid-day they stood, or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully
parted bills, between their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of
them together with wings spread and half lifted continued a spot of
shade in a temperature that constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to
spare them a bit of canvas for permanent shelter. There was a fence in
that country shutting in a cattle range, and along its fifteen miles of
posts one could be sure of finding a bird or two in every strip of
shadow; sometimes the sparrow and the hawk, with wings trailed and
beaks parted, drooping in the white truce of noon.
If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in
the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there
and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there.
None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections.
The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the
spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once
inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing
that you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and

cattlemen, will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing
the land and going back to it. For one thing there is the divinest,
cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God's world. Some day the
world will understand that, and the little oases on the windy tops of
hills will harbor for healing its ailing, house-weary broods. There is
promise there of great wealth in ores and earths, which is no wealth by
reason of being so far removed from water and workable conditions,
but men are bewitched by it and tempted to try the impossible.
You should hear Salty Williams tell how he used to drive eighteen and
twenty-mule teams from the borax marsh to Mojave, ninety miles, with
the trail wagon full of water barrels. Hot days the mules would go so
mad for drink that the clank of the water bucket set them into an uproar
of hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of harness chains, while Salty
would sit on the high seat with the sun glare heavy in his eyes, dealing
out curses of pacification in a level, uninterested voice until the clamor
fell off from sheer exhaustion. There was a line of shallow graves along
that road; they used to count on dropping a man or two of every new
gang of coolies brought out in the hot season. But when he lost his
swamper, smitten without warning at the noon halt, Salty quit his job;
he said it was "too durn hot." The swamper he buried by the way with
stones upon him to keep the coyotes from digging him up, and seven
years later I read the penciled lines on the pine head-board, still bright
and unweathered.
But before that, driving up on the Mojave stage, I met Salty again
crossing Indian Wells, his face from the high seat, tanned and ruddy as
a harvest moon, looming through the golden dust above his eighteen
mules. The land had called him.
The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly of
lost treasure. Somewhere within its stark borders, if one believes report,
is a hill strewn with nuggets; one seamed with virgin silver; an old
clayey water-bed where Indians scooped up earth to make cooking pots
and shaped them reeking with grains of pure gold. Old miners drifting
about the desert edges, weathered into the semblance of the tawny hills,
will tell you tales like these convincingly. After a little sojourn in that

land you will believe them on their own account. It is a question
whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of the
desert that