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 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 drink; but your true idler, with days and
nights to spend beside the water trails, will not subscribe to it.
The trails begin, as I said, very far back in the Ceriso, faintly,
and converge in one span broad, white, hard-trodden way in the
gully of the spring. And why trails if there are no travelers in
that direction?
I have yet to find the land not scarred by the thin, far
roadways of rabbits and what not of furry folks that run in them.
