animal pattering about the camp, or, indeed, to feel it climbing over the blanket in which he was rolled. Jim instantly covers his head, for he believes firmly that the skunk will jump to bite him in the face, preferably seizing his nose.

Among the common animals of the desert that run and skulk are the fleetest of all the wild tribes, the antelope; the bounding black-tailed deer and other deer; the howling coyote, which is sometimes all too bold when hunger or thirst compels him to become an aggressor; the long-legged jackrabbit, the cottontail, an odd fat gray squirrel, the badger, the gopher, the kangaroo-rat, and the prairie-dog. Of all these the prairiedog is the commonest, a lively little sentinel of the desert, sitting with front paws up on the top of his mound, near the front door. He will watch you long and intently, turning his small brown head and blinking his beady eyes; but the moment you stir, there is a blur of brown, and he has gone into his hole. The gophers love to dig about the roots of a cactus or mesquit-bush, and they often raise up large mounds of dirt, which your desert pony, with sure instinct, sees afar off and shies to avoid, for he knows the danger of putting one of his slim legs into a gopher-hole. In its enumeration the animal life of the desert seems somewhat extensive, but it is, in reality, scarce and very shy. A man may travel for days in the desert and see hardly a living thing, except possibly a huge hawk sailing slowly in the clear air above, or a gopher, or a prairie-dog. In some regions jack-rabbits are plentiful; you see them running afar off in long, graceful leaps that would put even a pursuing greyhound to his mettle. Once in a while you may also see a spot of yellow-brown and white in the distance, long legs below, and a trim head poised at the scent of danger. For a moment it is motionless, and then the antelope is away like the wind, the signal-spot on its rump blazing white as the animal disappears behind a ridge. As for the poisonous creatures, they are rarely seen. The Gila monster, the tarantula, and the scorpion are so seldom found that they have a money value in the market as curiosities, and one rarely hears of any one being bitten. The rattlesnake is the commonest of the dreaded creatures, but it always rings its alarm before it strikes. Many a traveler has been in the desert for months without seeing any of these poisonous animals.

You will see that the prickly vegetation is friendly enough when once you come

to know it. The wild birds build most beautiful nests of yucca fiber in the cholla, and the cactus protects them from all harm of hawks or snakes. Of a night quail roost safely in the cholla or hide in a bunch of prickly-pear, and a rabbit will here run to cover. The mesquit furnishes a bean-pod that makes a rich food, and the bisnaga, that great, odd, pumpkin-shaped cactus, sometimes called the "niggerhead," with its spines and fish-hooks, has been hailed with joy by more than one desperate wanderer on the desert, whose lips are parched with thirst, and who, until that moment, has expected no mercy from the burning sand. His knife lays open the cactus, and there within is the silvery-white pulp glistening with water: no melon ever looked more luscious. He buries his face in it, pressing the water from the rubbery pulp and moistening his burning tongue. Then there are the pears of the tuna and the fruit of the sahuaro, or giant cactus, for food; the cat's-claw, mesquit, and cholla for fuel; the dry strips of the sahuaro, the bear-grass, and the yuccas for camp-building. But a man must know the desert's secrets before he can take advantage of them.

I have spoken of the aloofness of the desert from men; the life of the desert is aloof in another way. The desert has no love for crowding, for jungles and thickets; it sets each tree and plant by itself. It demands individuality; it hates herding. I have seen great stretches of greasewood-flat in which each bush was set by itself almost in rows and squares like an orchard, all of the same size, and as rounded and symmetrical as if trimmed by human hands. The mesquit, the cactus, the yuccas, grow in the same way, far apart, independent, each in its own space. The explanation of this strange condition is simple enough: there is so little water, and each plant is compelled to send its roots so deep down and spread them so far out in every direction beneath the surface, that there is no chance for any other plant to get a foothold near by. It gives the desert in many places a veritable park-like appearance, and one can hardly believe that men have not had the care of these wild denizens of the dry soil.

Water is the key to the desert. All the life of the desert rests upon its power of resistance to thirst. One marvels at the consummate ingenuity with which nature has improved her scant opportunities, turning every capability to the conservation of such little water as there is. Everything in the

desert has its own story of economy, patience, and stubborn persistency in the face of adversity. Therefore the individuality of desert life is strong; it is different from all other life. Its necessities have wrought peculiar forms both of plants and of animals, and in time the desert also leaves its indelible marks upon the men who dwell in its wastes. The cactus, for instance, is so constructed with thick, succulent stems and branches that when there is water it drinks greedily, gluts itself, and stores its supplies against a dry season. The leaves of all desert trees are small and thick, so that they will expose as little surface as possible for evaporation in the dry air; they also have a smooth, glossy surface, which reflects the sunshine instead of absorbing it, just as many of the reptiles are covered with scale

armor.

Everywhere there are evidences of the terrible struggle for water-a struggle in which men who come to the desert must instantly engage: every wagon that crosses the desert carries its barrel of water; every man who sets out takes with him a canteen; every ranch has its windmill and its waterbarrel. Water is the only thing that is not free. Stop at a desert well, and a sign offers water at ten cents or five cents a head for your horses.

The desert is an opportunist in every tendency. It is patient to wait its chance, but when given its chance it makes good use of it. "Nature," says Emerson, "is immortal and can wait." Nothing can exceed the glory of the desert when the rain finally comes. For months, even years, the plain may lie scorched and dry, not a sprig of green anywhere in the gray dust. Apparently there never has been any life hereno seeds, no hope of blossom, no spring. A rain comes, and in a few days the whole land is gorgeous with color, a very passion of bloom. Never, in any other country, is there such a profusion of flowers or such a glory of coloring. Reds and yellows prevail, the desert seeming to delight in the strong contrast that this momentary flash of bright color presents to its usual sodden grays. Whole hillsides will be gorgeous with poppies; there will be acres on acres of shortstemmed wild sunflowers, daisies, both white and yellow, red-bells, Indian pinks, wild verbenas, blue lupins, and many other gorgeous flowers that have no common names. Then there are pale primroses that come out like moons in the evening, shine for a night, and are gone. The whole air is sweet with the

scent of blossoms; nothing can exceed the fragrance of the mesquit bloom.

As you ride in the early morning, when the coolness of the night is changing to the sudden heat of the day, the warm sand seems to exhale a faint, sweet odor, which clings about you until the desert sun is high and all the hills begin to quiver with heat. "This," you say, "is no desert. This is spring and June." The desert, indeed, always seems on the brink of June, and always yields August. In a day the floral glories have faded, the blossoms fall, the plants themselves shrivel up; the wind comes and whips them from their places, bowls them in tatters across the sand, and heaps them in some distant arroyo. The land is bare again, dry and desolate, but the seeds of its passion are there waiting, and when the time comes, it flames forth.

Color, indeed, is one of the great joys of the desert, and one who has learned to love these silent places finds unending pleasure in the changing lights and shades, many of them marvelously delicate and beautiful. It is a place friendly to color-effects-a negative gray or brown background, often with pale blue hills in the distance, from which the eye is diverted by no detail of tree or stream or building. Upon so vast and simple a background the rising sun paints all the varying shades of gold, tinging each ridge, working color-mysteries in pale blue in each valley, and finally merging all in the hot white heat of high noon. Clouds come to the desert as well as to the rain country; often they seem to promise imminent rain, but rarely fulfil their promises. Usually they are thin, fleecy, and high, and their shadows flit back and forth over the plains, bringing new shades to the prevailing redbrowns and grays. Here rises a sand-storm, floating along the horizon in the distance and leaving behind an impalpable mist, like a fog, which gives the familiar desert other strange new coloring, and paints a sunset of rare beauty. Nor should the endless and mysterious mirages be forgotten, with their glories in blue and pale, cool greens, when blues and greens are the rarest of all the colors in this thirsty land.

Who can convey the feeling of the mysterious night on the desert, suddenly and sweetly cool after the burning heat of the day, the sky a deep, clear blue above,-nowhere so blue as in this dry, pure air,-the stars almost crowding down to earth in their nearness and brilliancy, a deep and profound silence round about, broken occasionally by the far-off echoing scream of

some prowling coyote or the hoot of an owl? The horses loom big and dark where they feed in the near distance; here and there on the top of a dry yucca-stalk an owl or a hawk sits outlined in black against the sky; otherwise there is nothing anywhere to break the long, smooth line of the horizon.

You feel your smallness here, your utter helplessness in the face of the great, impassive, elemental things of nature; but it calms you like music. Crowded cities and the fever of men seem unreal, far-distant, improbable to you; you feel God, and you never forget.

There are times of water even in the desert, but, like the time of the flowers, they are short and intense. Not much rain falls in the desert itself, but the mountains round about are lashed with storms, and the water pours down resistlessly and sweeps out over the plain below. It is bone-dry and dusty today; to-morrow water may swirl over everything knee-deep, waist-deep, chin-deep; the next day it is bone-dry again. The water wears for itself deep arroyos, or washes, in the sand, changing their course with every flood, bringing down boulders, piling up embankments and tearing them down again, heaping the rubbish of the hills against the firmrooted yuccas and mesquits that lie in its path.

And while the flood is on, how greedily the desert drinks! Every living thing takes its fill. Even the sand itself has an inappeasable thirst. Beginning a clear stream in the hills, the water soon becomes loaded with silt and sand; it wears thick like mud, rolling over the ground a red, warm, viscid mass, like molten lava. Finally it stops, and the hot air bakes out all the moisture that remains. In other cases the sand seems to swallow the river at one gulp. Here is a wide river; two miles below you cross the dry, dusty bed of the stream, every drop of water having been absorbed. There are wayward streams; they submit to no restriction; they choose their own way without reference to the desires of men. Several years ago the people of Florence, in central

Arizona, built an iron bridge across the Gila River, where it flowed near the town. Costly approaches led up to it; it was on the maintraveled road. But the river would have none of it. It came in flood one spring and made a new channel for itself, so that the bridge to-day stands unapproachably high, spanning a bit of desert a quarter of a mile from the river it was built to cross.

You hear often from car-window observers of the "dreary" desert, the "hopeless," the "cheerless" desert. But the desert deserves none of these adjectives. It is dreadful, if you wish, in the way in which it punishes the ignorance and presumption of those who know not the signs of thirst; it is sometimes awful in its passions of dust, torrents, heat; it is even monotonous to those who love only the life of crowded cities: but it is never dreary or cheerless. Hopelessness may well apply to the deserts of Mulberry street and Smoky Hollow, with their choked and heated tenements, their foul odors, their swarms of crowded and hideous human life; but the desert of the arid land is eternally hopeful, smiling, strong, rejoicing in itself. The desert is never morbid in its adversity; on the other hand, it is calm and sweet and clean-the cleanest of all land. Not till man comes, bringing his ugly mining-towns and his destructive herds, does it bear even the vestige of the unclean, the dreary, the unpicturesque.

It is good to feel that, in spite of human enterprise, there is plenty of desert left for many years to come, a place where men can go and have it out with themselves, where they can breathe clean air and get down close to the great, quiet, simple life of the earth. "Few in these hot, dim, frictiony times," says John Muir, "are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money, or so little, they are no longer good themselves." But here in the desert there yet remain places of wildness and solitude and quiet; there is room here to turn without rubbing elbows, places where one may yet find refreshment.

VOL. LXIV.-26.