The Land of Little Rain | Page 7

goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the
tradition of a lost mine.
And yet--and yet--is it not perhaps to satisfy expectation that one falls
into the tragic key in writing of desertness? The more you wish of it the
more you get, and in the mean time lose much of pleasantness. In that
country which begins at the foot of the east slope of the Sierras and
spreads out by less and less lofty hill ranges toward the Great Basin, it
is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood and delicate joys, to
pass and repass about one's daily performance an area that would make
an Atlantic seaboard State, and that with no peril, and, according to our
way of thought, no particular difficulty. At any rate, it was not people
who went into the desert merely to write it up who invented the fabled
Hassaympa, of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as
naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance. I, who must have
drunk of it in my twice seven years' wanderings, am assured that it is
worth while.
For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep
breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one
with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a
desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars
move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured.
They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some
stately service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the
sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you
who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the
scrub from you and howls and howls.

WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO
By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are worn to a
white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and fanwise toward
the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel. But however faint to

man-sight, they are sufficiently plain to the furred and feathered folk
who travel them. Getting down to the eye level of rat and squirrel kind,
one perceives what might easily be wide and winding roads to us if
they occurred in thick plantations of trees three times the height of a
man. It needs but a slender thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail
in the forest of the sod. To the little people the water trails are as
country roads, with scents as signboards.
It seems that man-height is the least fortunate of all heights from which
to study trails. It is better to go up the front of some tall hill, say the
spur of Black Mountain, looking back and down across the hollow of
the Ceriso. Strange how long the soil keeps the impression of any
continuous treading, even after grass has overgrown it. Twenty years
since, a brief heyday of mining at Black Mountain made a stage road
across the Ceriso, yet the parallel lines that are the wheel traces show
from the height dark and well defined. Afoot in the Ceriso one looks in
vain for any sign of it. So all the paths that wild creatures use going
down to the Lone Tree Spring are mapped out whitely from this level,
which is also the level of the hawks.
There is little water in the Ceriso at the best of times, and that little
brackish and smelling vilely, but by a lone juniper where the rim of the
Ceriso breaks away to the lower country, there is a perpetual rill of
fresh sweet drink in the midst of lush grass and watercress. In the dry
season there is no water else for a man's long journey of a day. East to
the foot of Black Mountain, and north and south without counting, are
the burrows of small rodents, rat and squirrel kind. Under the sage are
the shallow forms of the jackrabbits, and in the dry banks of washes,
and among the strewn fragments of black rock, lairs of bobcat, fox, and
coyote.
The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs and paws, snuffs
and paws again at the smallest spot of moisture-scented earth until he
has freed the blind water from the soil. Many water-holes are no more
than this detected by the lean hobo of the hills in localities where not
even an Indian would look for it.
It is the opinion of many wise and busy people that the hill-folk pass

the ten-month interval between the end and renewal of winter rains,
with no