CHAPTER I_The desert

THE DESERT

[Illustration: Silence and Desolation.]

THE DESERT

_FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL

APPEARANCES_

JOHN C. VAN DYKE

AUTHOR OF “NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,”

“ART FOR ART’S SAKE,” ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1901

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

----

Published September, 1901.

TROW DIRECTORY

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY

NEW YORK

PREFACE-DEDICATION

A. M. C.

After the making of Eden came a serpent, and after the gorgeous

furnishing of the world, a human being. Why the existence of the

destroyers? What monstrous folly, think you, ever led Nature to create

her one great enemy--man! Before his coming security may have been;

but how soon she learned the meaning of fear when this new Œdipus of

her brood was brought forth! And how instinctively she taught the

fear of him to the rest of her children! To-day, after centuries of

association, every bird and beast and creeping thing--the wolf in the

forest, the antelope on the plain, the wild fowl in the sedge--fly from

his approach. They know his civilization means their destruction. Even

the grizzly, secure in the chaparral of his mountain home, flinches as

he crosses the white man’s trail. The boot mark in the dust smells of

blood and iron. The great annihilator has come and fear travels with

him.

“Familiar facts,” you will say. Yes; and not unfamiliar the knowledge

that with the coming of civilization the grasses and the wild flowers

perish, the forest falls and its place is taken by brambles, the

mountains are blasted in the search for minerals, the plains are

broken by the plow and the soil is gradually washed into the rivers.

Last of all, when the forests have gone the rains cease falling,

the streams dry up, the ground parches and yields no life, and the

artificial desert--the desert made by the tramp of human feet--begins

to show itself. Yes; everyone must have cast a backward glance and

seen Nature’s beauties beaten to ashes under the successive marches of

civilization. The older portions of the earth show their desolation

plainly enough, and the ascending smoke and dust of the ruin have even

tainted the air and dimmed the sunlight.

Indeed, I am not speaking figuratively or extravagantly. We have often

heard of “Sunny Italy” or the “clear light” of Egypt, but believe me

there is no sunlight there compared with that which falls upon the

upper peaks of the Sierra Madre or the uninhabitable wastes of the

Colorado Desert. Pure sunlight requires for its existence pure air,

and the Old World has little of it left. When you are in Rome again

and stand upon that hill where all good romanticists go at sunset,

look out and notice how dense is the atmosphere between you and St.

Peter’s dome. That same thick air is all over Europe, all around the

Mediterranean, even over in Mesopotamia and by the banks of the Ganges.

It has been breathed and burned and battle-smoked for ten thousand

years. Ride up and over the high table-lands of Montana--one can still

ride there for days without seeing a trace of humanity--and how clear

and scentless, how absolutely intangible that sky-blown sun-shot

atmosphere! You breathe it without feeling it, you see through it a

hundred miles and the picture is not blurred by it.

It is just so with Nature’s color. True enough, there is much rich

color at Venice, at Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not be

denied; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical color, caused by the

disintegration of matter--the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from

the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after a poor fashion--Nature

subordinated to the will of man. Once more ride over the enchanted

mesas of Arizona at sunrise or at sunset, with the ragged mountains of

Mexico to the south of you and the broken spurs of the great sierra

round about you; and all the glory of the old shall be as nothing to

the gold and purple and burning crimson of this new world.

You will not be surprised then if, in speaking of desert, mesa and

mountain I once more take you far beyond the wire fence of civilization

to those places (unhappily few now) where the trail is unbroken and

the mountain peak unblazed. I was never over-fond of park and garden

nature-study. If we would know the great truths we must seek them at

the source. The sandy wastes, the arid lands, the porphyry mountain

peaks may be thought profitless places for pilgrimages; but how often

have you and I, and that one we both loved so much, found beauty in

neglected marshes, in wintry forests, and in barren hill-sides! The

love of Nature is after all an acquired taste. One begins by admiring

the Hudson-River landscape and ends by loving the desolation of Sahara.

Just why or how the change would be difficult to explain. You cannot

always dissect a taste or a passion. Nor can you pin Nature to a

board and chart her beauties with square and compasses. One can give

his impression and but little more. Perhaps I can tell you something

of what I have seen in these two years of wandering; but I shall never

be able to tell you the grandeur of these mountains, nor the glory of

color that wraps the burning sands at their feet. We shoot arrows at

the sun in vain; yet still we shoot.

And so it is that my book is only an excuse for talking about the

beautiful things in this desert world that stretches down the Pacific

Coast, and across Arizona and Sonora. The desert has gone a-begging for

a word of praise these many years. It never had a sacred poet; it has

in me only a lover. But I trust that you, and the nature-loving public

you represent, will accept this record of the Colorado and the Mojave

as at least truthful. Given the facts perhaps the poet with his fancies

will come hereafter.

JOHN C. VAN DYKE.

LA NORIA VERDE

FEBRUARY, 1901.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. _The Approach._--Desert mountain ranges--Early

morning approach--Air illusions--Sand forms--The

winds--Sun-shafts--Sunlight--Desert life--Antelope--The Lost

Mountains--The ascent--Deer trails--Footprints--The stone

path--Defensive walls--The summit--The fortified camp--Nature’s

reclamations--The mountain dwellers--Invading hosts--Water

and food supplies--The aborigines--Historic periods--The open

desert--Perception of beauty--Sense of beauty--Mountain “view” of the

desert--Desert colors--The land of fire--Drouth and heat--Sand and

gypsum--Sand-whirls--Desert storms--Drift of sands--Winter cold in

the basin--Snow on desert--Sea and sand--Grim desolation--Love for

the desert--The descent--The Padres in the desert--The light of the

cross--Aboriginal faith

CHAPTER II. _The Make of the Desert._--The sea of sand--Mountain

ranges on desert--Plains, valleys, and mesas--Effect of drouth--The

rains--Harshness of desert--A gaunt land--Conditions of life--Incessant

strife--Elemental warfare--Desert vegetation--Protruding

edges--Shifting sands--Desert winds--Radiation of heat--Prevailing

winds--Wear of the winds--Erosion of mountains--Rock-cutting--Fantastic

forms--Wash-outs--Sand-lines in caves--Cloud-bursts--Canyon

waters--Desert floods--Power of water--Water-pockets--No

surface-streams--Oases in the waste--Catch-basins--Old

sea-beds--Volcanic action--Lava-flows--Geological ages--Kinds

of rock--Glaciers--Land slips--Movement of stones--The

talus--Stages of the talus--Desert floors--Sandstone

blocks--Salt-beds--Sand-beds--Mountain vegetation--Withered

grasses--Barren rock--Mountain colors--Saw-toothed ridges--Seen from

the peaks--The Sun-fire kingdom

CHAPTER III. _The Bottom of the Bowl._--Early geological days--The

former Gulf--Sea-beaches on desert--Harbors and reefs--Indian

remains--The Cocopas--The Colorado River--The delta dam--The

inland lake--The first fall--Springs and wells in the sea-bed--The

New River--New beaches--The second fall--The third beach--The

failing water--Evaporation--Bottom of the Bowl--Drying out of the

sea-bed--Advance of the desert--Below sea-level--Desolation of

the basin--Beauty of the sand-dunes--Cactus and salt-bush--Desert

animals--Birds--Lizards and snakes--Mirage--The water

illusion--Decorative landscapes--Sensuous qualities in Nature--Changing

the desert--Irrigation in the basin--Changing the climate--Dry

air--Value of the air supply--Value of the desert--Destruction of

natural beauty--Effects of mining, lumbering, agriculture--Ploughing

the prairies--“Practical men”--Fighting wind, sand, and heat--Nature

eternal--Return of desolation

CHAPTER IV. _The Silent River._--Rise of the Colorado--In the

canyon--On the desert--The lower river--Sluggish movement--Stillness of

the river--The river’s name--Its red color--Compared with the Nile--The

blood hue--River changes--Red sands and silt--River-banks--“Bottom”

lands--Green bordering bands--Bushes and flowers--Soundless water--Wild

fowl--Herons and bitterns--Snipe--Sadness of bird-life--The

forsaken shores--Solitude--Beauty of the river--Its majesty--The

delta--Disintegration--The river in flood--The “bore”--Meeting of river

and sea--The blue tomb--Shores of Gulf

CHAPTER V. _Light, Air, and Color._--Popular ideas--Sunlight on

desert--Glare and heat--Pure sunlight--Atmospheric envelope--Vapor

particles in air--Clear air--Dust particles--Hazes--Seeing

the desert air--Sea-breezes on desert--Colored air--Different

hues--Producing color--Refracted rays--Cold colors, how

produced--Warm colors--Sky colors--Color produced by dust--Effect

of heat--Effect of winds--Sand-storms--Reflections upon sky--Blue,

yellow, and pink hazes--The dust-veil--Summer coloring--Local

hues--Greens of desert plants--Color of the sands--Sands in

mirage--Color of mountain walls--Weather staining--Influence of the

air--Peak of Baboquivari--Buttes and spires--Sun-shafts through

canyons--Complementary hues in shadow--Colored shadows--Blue shadows

upon salt-beds--How light makes color--Desert sunsets

CHAPTER VI. _Desert Sky and Clouds._--Commonplace things of

Nature--The blue sky--Changes in the blue--Dawns on the desert--Blue

as a color--Sky from mountain heights--Blackness of space--Bright

sky-colors--Horizon skies--Spectrum colors--Bands of yellow--The orange

sky--Desert-clouds--Rainfall--Effect of the nimbus--Cumuli--Heap-clouds

at sunset--Strati--Cirri--Ice-clouds--Fire-clouds--The celestial

tapestry--The desert moon--Rings and rainbows--Moonlight--Stars--The

midnight sky--Alone in the desert--The mysteries--Space and

immensity--The silences--The cry of the human

CHAPTER VII. _Illusions._--Reality and appearance--Preconceived

impressions--Deception by sunlight--Distorted forms and

colors--Changed appearance of mountains--Changes in line and

light--False perspective--Abnormal foreshortening--Contradictions and

denials--Deceptive distances--Dangers of the desert--Immensity of

valley-plains--Shadow illusions--Color-patches on mountains--Illusions

of lava-beds--Appearance of cloud-shadows--Mirage--Need of

explanation--Refraction of light-rays--Dense air-strata--Illustration

of camera-lens--Bent light-rays--Ships at sea and upside down--Wherein

the illusion--“Looming” of vessels, cities, and islands--Reversed

image of mountains--Horses and cattle in mirage--Illusion of rising

buttes--Other causes of mirage--Water-mirage--The lake appearance--How

produced--Objects in water--Confused mirage--The swimming wolf--Colors

and shadows in mirage--Trembling air--Beauty of mirage

109

CHAPTER VIII. _Cactus and Grease Wood._--Views of Nature--Growth

and decay--Nature’s plan--The law of change--Nature foiling her

own plans--Attack and drouth--Preservation of species--Means of

preservation--Maintaining the _status quo_--The plant-struggle for

life--Fighting heat and drouth--Prevention of evaporation--Absence

of large leaves--Exhaust of moisture--Gums and varnishes of

bushes--The ocatilla--Tap roots--Underground structure--Feeding

the top growth--Storage reservoirs below ground--Reservoirs above

ground--Thickened barks--Gathering moisture--Attacks upon desert

plants--Browsing animals--Weapons of defence--The spine and thorn--The

crucifixion thorn--The sting of flowers--Fierceness of the plant--Odors

and juices--Saps astringent and cathartic--Expenditure of energy--The

desert covering--Use of desert plants--Their beauty--Beauty in

character--Forms of the yucca and maguey--The lluvia d’oro--Grotesque

forms--Abnormal colors--Blossoms and flowers--Many varieties--Wild

flowers--Salt-bush--The grasses and lichens--The continuous struggle

128

CHAPTER IX. _Desert Animals._--Meeting desert requirements--Peculiar

desert character--Desert Indians--Life without water--Endurance

of the jack-rabbit--Prairie dogs and water--Water famine--Coyotes

and wild-cats living without water--Lean, gaunt life--Fierceness

of animals--Attack and escape--The wild-cat--Spring of the

cat--Mountain lion--His habits--The gray wolf--Home of the wolf--The

coyote--His cleverness--His subsistence--His background--The

fox--The prey--Devices for escape--Senses of the rabbit--Speed of

the jack-rabbit--His endurance--The “cotton-tail”--Squirrels and

gophers--Desert antelope--His eyes, nose, and ears--His swiftness--The

mule-deer--Deer in flight--White-tailed deer--The reptiles--Defence of

poison--The fang and sting--The rattlesnake and his poison--Spiders

and tarantulas--Centipedes and scorpions--Lizards and swifts--The

hydrophobia skunk--The cutthroat band--The eternal struggle--Brute

courage and character--Beauty in character--Graceful forms of

animals--Colors of lizards--Mystery of motion

150

CHAPTER X. _Winged Life._--First day’s walk--Tracks in the

sand--Scarcity of birds--Dangers of bird-life--No cover for

protection--Food problem--Heat and drouth again--A bird’s

temperature--Innocent-looking birds--The road-runner--Wrens and

fly-catchers--Development of special characteristics--Birds of the

air--The vulture--His hunting and sailing--The southern buzzard--The

crow--The great condor--Eagles and hawks--Bats and owls--The burrowing

owl--Ground-birds--The road-runner’s swiftness--The vicious beak--The

desert-quail--Wings of the quail--Travelling for water--Habits of the

quail--His strong legs--Bush-birds--Woodpeckers and cactus--Finches

and mocking-birds--Humming-birds--Doves and grosbeaks--The lark and

flickers--Jays and magpies--Water fowl--Beetles and worms--Fighting

destruction by breed--Blue and green beetles--Butterflies--Design and

character--Beauty of birds--Beauty also of reptiles--Nature’s work all

purposeful--Precious jewel of the toad

174

CHAPTER XI. _Mesas and Foot-Hills._--Flat steps of the desert--Across

Southern Arizona--Rising from the desert--The great mesas--“Grease

wood plains”--Upland vegetation--Grass plains--Spring and summer on

the plains--Home of the antelope--Beds of soda and gypsum--Riding

into the unexpected--The Grand Canyon country--Hills covered

with juniper--The Painted Desert--Riding on the mesas--The

reversion to savagery--The thin air again--The light and its

deceptions--Distorted proportions--Changed colors--The little

hills--Painting the desert--Worn-down mountains--Mountain

wash--Flattening down the plain--Mountain making--The foot-hills--Forms

of the foot-hills--Mountain plants--Bare mountains--The southern

exposures--Gray lichens--Still in the desert--Arida Zona--Cloud-bursts

in the mesas--Wash of rains--Gorge cutting--In the canyons--Walls of

rock--Color in canyon shadows--Blue sky--Desert landscape--Knowledge of

Nature--Nature-lovers--Human limitations

194

CHAPTER XII. _Mountain Barriers._--The western mountains--Saddles

and passes--View from mountain top--Looking toward the peaks--Lost

streams--Avalanches and bowlder-beds--Ascent by the arroyo--Growth

of the stream--Rising banks--Waterfalls--Gorges--Ascent by the

ridges--The chaparral--Home of the grizzly--Ridge trails--Among the

live-oaks--Birds and deer--Yawning canyons--Canyon streams--Snow--Water

wear--The pines--Barrancas and escarpments--Under the pines--Bushes,

ferns, and mosses--Mountain quail--Indigo jays--Warblers--The mountain

air--The dwarf pines--The summit--The look upward at the sky--The

dark-blue dome--White light--Distant views--The Pacific--Southern

California--The garden in the desert--Reclaiming the valleys--Nature’s

fight against fertility--The desert from the mountain top--The great

extent of desert--The fateful wilderness--All shall perish--The death

of worlds--The desert the beginning of the end--Development through

adversity--Sublimity of the waste--Desolation and silence--Good-night

to the desert

213

THE DESERT

CHAPTER I

THE APPROACH

[Sidenote: Desert mountains.]

[Sidenote: Unknown ranges.]

It is the last considerable group of mountains between the divide and

the low basin of the Colorado desert. For days I have been watching

them change color at sunset--watching the canyons shift into great

slashes of blue and purple shadow, and the ridges flame with edgings of

glittering fire. They are lonesome looking mountains lying off there

by themselves on the plain, so still, so barren, so blazing hot under

the sun. Forsaken of their kind, one might not inappropriately call

them the “Lost Mountains”--the surviving remnant no doubt of some noble

range that long centuries ago was beaten by wind and rain into desert

sand. And yet before one gets to them they may prove quite formidable

heights, with precipitous sides and unsurmountable tops. Who knows? Not

those with whom I am stopping, for they have not been there. They do

not even know the name of them. The Papagoes leave them alone because

there is no game in them. Evidently they are considered unimportant

hills, nobody’s hills, no man’s range; but nevertheless I am off for

them in the morning at daylight.

[Sidenote: Early morning on the desert.]

[Sidenote: Air illusions.]

I ride away through the thin mesquite and the little adobe ranch

house is soon lost to view. The morning is still and perfectly clear.

The stars have gone out, the moon is looking pale, the deep blue is

warming, the sky is lightening with the coming day. How cool and

crystalline the air! In a few hours the great plain will be almost like

a fiery furnace under the rays of the summer sun, but now it is chilly.

And in a few hours there will be rings and bands and scarves of heat

set wavering across the waste upon the opalescent wings of the mirage;

but now the air is so clear that one can see the breaks in the rocky

face of the mountain range, though it is fully twenty miles away. It

may be further. Who of the desert has not spent his day riding at a

mountain and never even reaching its base? This is a land of illusions

and thin air. The vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself

is deceptive. But I shall ride on for several hours. If, by twelve

o’clock, the foot hills are not reached, I shall turn back.

[Sidenote: Sand forms in the valleys.]

[Sidenote: Winds of the desert.]

The summer heat has withered everything except the mesquite, the palo

verde,[1] the grease wood, and the various cacti. Under foot there is a

little dry grass, but more often patches of bare gravel and sand rolled

in shallow beds that course toward the large valleys. In the draws and

flat places the fine sand lies thicker, is tossed in wave forms by the

wind, and banked high against clumps of cholla or prickly pear. In the

wash-outs and over the cut banks of the arroyos it is sometimes heaped

in mounds and crests like driven snow. It blows here along the boundary

line between Arizona and Sonora almost every day; and the tailing of

the sands behind the bushes shows that the prevailing winds are from

the Gulf region. A cool wind? Yes, but only by comparison with the

north wind. When you feel it on your face you may think it the breath

of some distant volcano.

[Sidenote: Sun shafts.]

How pale-blue the Lost Mountains look under the growing light. I am

watching their edges develop into broken barriers of rock, and even as

I watch the tallest tower of all is struck with a bright fawn color.

It is the high point to catch the first shaft of the sun. Quickly the

light spreads downward until the whole ridge is tinged by it, and the

abrupt sides of porphyry begin to glow under it. It is not long before

great shafts of light alternating with shadow stretch down the plain

ahead of me. The sun is streaming through the tops of the eastern

mountains and the sharp pointed pinnacles are cutting shadows in the

broad beam of light.

[Sidenote: The beauty of sunlight.]

That beam of light! Was there ever anything so beautiful! How it

flashes its color through shadow, how it gilds the tops of the

mountains and gleams white on the dunes of the desert! In any land what

is there more glorious than sunlight! Even here in the desert, where

it falls fierce and hot as a rain of meteors, it is the one supreme

beauty to which all things pay allegiance. The beast and the bird are

not too fond of its heat and as soon as the sun is high in the heavens

they seek cover in the canyons; but for all that the chief glory of the

desert is its broad blaze of omnipresent light.

[Sidenote: Desert life.]

[Sidenote: Antelope.]

Yes, there is animal and bird life here though it is not always

apparent unless you look for it. Wrens and linnets are building nests

in the cholla, and finches are singing from the top of the sahuaro.[2]

There are plenty of reptiles, rabbits and ground squirrels quietly

slipping out of your way; and now that the sun is up you can see a

long sun-burned slant-of-hair trotting up yonder divide and casting an

apprehensive head from side to side as he moves off. It is not often

that the old gray wolf shows himself to the traveller. He is usually up

in the mountains before sunrise. And seldom now does one see the desert

antelope along the mesas, and yet off to the south you can see patches

of white that come and go almost like flashing mirrors in the sun. They

are stragglers from some band that have drifted up from central Sonora.

No; they are not far away. A little mirage is already forming over that

portion of the mesa and makes them look more distant than they are in

reality. You can be deceived on the desert by the nearness of things

quite as often as by their remoteness.

[Sidenote: The Lost Mountains.]

[Sidenote: Mountain walls.]

These desert mountains have a fashion of appearing distant until

you are almost up to them. Then they seem to give up the game of

deception and come out of their hiding-places. It is just so with the

mountains toward which I am riding. After several hours they seem to

rise up suddenly in front of me and I am at their base. They are not

high--perhaps fifteen hundred feet. The side near me is precipitous

rock, weather-stained to a reddish-black. A ride around the bases

discloses an almost complete perpendicular wall, slanting off half way

down the sides into sloping beds of bowlders that have been shaken

loose from the upper strata. A huge cleft in the western side--half

barranca half canyon--seems to suggest a way to the summit.

[Sidenote: The ascent.]

[Sidenote: Deer trails.]

[Sidenote: Footprints.]

The walking up the mountain is not the best in the world. It is

over splintered rock, stepping from stone to stone, creeping along

the backbone of bowlders, and worrying over rows of granite blocks.

Presently the course seems to slip into a diagonal--a winding up

and around the mountain--and ahead of me the stones begin to look

peculiar, almost familiar. There seems to be a trail over the ledges

and through the broken blocks; but what should make a trail up that

deserted mountain? Mule-deer travelling toward the summit to lie

down in the heat of the day? It is possible. The track of a band of

deer soon becomes a beaten path, and animals are just as fond of a

good path as humanity. By a strange coincidence at this very moment

the sharp-toed print of a deer’s hoof appears in the ground before

me. But it looks a little odd. The impression is so clear cut that I

stoop to examine it. It is with no little astonishment that I find it

sunk in stone instead of earth--petrified in rock and overrun with

silica. The bare suggestion gives one pause. How many thousands of

years ago was that impression stamped upon the stone? By what strange

chance has it survived destruction? And while it remains quite perfect

to-day--the vagrant hoof-mark of a desert deer--what has become of the

once carefully guarded footprints of the Sargons, the Pharaohs and the

Cæsars? With what contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival of the

least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his shield!

[Sidenote: The stone path.]

[Sidenote: Following the trail.]

[Sidenote: Defensive walls.]

Further up the mountain the deer-trail theory is abandoned--at least so

far as recent times are concerned. The stones are worn too smooth, the

larger ones have been pushed aside by something more intelligent than a

mule-deer’s hoof; and in one place the trail seems to have been built

up on the descending side. There is not the slightest evidence, either

by rub upon the rocks, or overturned stones, or scrape in the gravel,

that any living thing has passed up this pathway for many years; and

yet the trail is a distinct line of lighter colored stone stretching

ahead of me. It is a path worn in the rocks, and there is no grass or

vine or weed to obliterate it. It leads on and up to the saddle of the

mountain. There is a crevasse or chasm breaking through this saddle

which might have been bridged at one time with mesquite trunks, but

is now to be leaped if one would reach the summit. It is narrow only

in one place and this is just where the trail happens to run. Across

it, on the upper side, there is a horseshoe shaped enclosure of stone.

It is only a few feet in diameter, and the upper layers of stone have

fallen; but the little wall still stands as high as one’s waist. Could

this have been a sentinel box used to guard the passage of the trail at

this place?

[Sidenote: The summit.]

Higher and still higher until at last the mountain broadens into a

flat top. I am so eager to gain the height and am expecting so much

that at first I overlook what is before me. Gradually I make out a

long parapet of loose stone on the trail side of the mountain which

joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. A conclusion is instantly

jumped at, for the imagination will not make haste slowly under such

circumstances. These are the ruins of a once fortified camp.

[Sidenote: The fortified camp.]

I wander about the flat top of the mountain and slowly there grows into

recognizable form a great rectangle enclosed by large stones placed

about two feet apart. There is no doubt about the square and in one

corner of it there seems an elevated mound covered with high-piled

stones that would indicate a place for burials. But not a trace of

pottery or arrow-heads; and about the stones only faint signs of fire

which might have come from volcanic action as readily as from domestic

hearths. Upon the side of one of the large rocks are some characters

in red ochre; and on the ground near a pot-hole in the rock, something

that the imagination might torture into a rude pestle for grinding

maize.

[Sidenote: Nature’s reclamations.]

The traces of human activity are slight. Nature has been wearing them

away and reclaiming her own on the mountain top. Grease wood is growing

where once a floor was beaten hard as iron by human feet; out of the

burial mound rises a giant sahuaro whose branching arms give the look

of the cross; and beside the sahuaro rests a tall yucca with four feet

of clustering bellflowers swinging from its top.

[Sidenote: Mountain dwellers.]

[Sidenote: Invading hosts.]

And who were they who built these stone walls, these primitive

entrenchments? When and where did they come from and what brought them

here? The hands that executed this rough work were certainly untrained.

Indians? Very likely. Perhaps some small band that had taken up a

natural defence in the mountains because too feeble in numbers to fight

in the open. Here from this lookout they could watch the country for

a hundred miles around. Here the scouts could see far away the thin

string of foemen winding snake-like over the ridges of the desert,

could see them grow in size and count their numbers, could look down

upon them at the foot of the mountain and yell back defiance to the

challenge coming up the steep sides. Brave indeed the invaders that

would pluck the eagles from that eerie nest! Climbing a hill against

a shower of arrows, spears, and bowlders is to fight at a terrible

disadvantage.

[Sidenote: Water and food supplies.]

Starve them out? Yes; but the ones at the bottom would starve as

quickly as those at the top. Cut off their water supply? Yes; but

where did either besieged or besieger get water? If there was ever a

spring in the mountain it long ago dried up, for there is no trace of

it to-day. Possibly the mountain-dwellers knew of some arroyo where by

digging in the sand they could get water. And possibly they carried it

in ollas up the stone trail to their mountain home where they stored it

in the rocks against the wrath of a siege to come. No doubt they took

thought for trouble, and being native to the desert they could stand

privation better than their enemies.

[Sidenote: The aborigines.]

[Sidenote: Historic periods.]

How long ago did that aboriginal band come trailing over these

trackless deserts to find and make a home in a barren mountain

standing in a bed of sand? Who can tell? A geologist might make the

remains of their fort an illustration of the Stone Age and talk of

unknown centuries; an iconoclast might claim that it was merely a

Mexican corral built to hide stolen horses; but a plain person of the

southwest would say that it was an old Indian camp. The builders of the

fortification and the rectangle worked with stone because there was no

other material. The man of the Stone Age exists to-day contemporary

with civilized man. Possibly he always did. And it may be that some

day Science will conclude that historic periods do not invariably

happen, that there is not always a sequential evolution, and that the

white race does not necessarily require a flat-headed mass of stupidity

for an ancestor.

[Sidenote: The open desert.]

[Sidenote: Perception of beauty.]

But what brought them to seek a dwelling place in the desert? Were

they driven out from the more fertile tracts? Perhaps. Did they find

this a country where game was plentiful and the conditions of life

comparatively easy? It is possible. Or was it that they loved the open

country, the hot sun, the treeless wastes, the great stretches of mesa,

plain and valley? Ah; that is more than likely. Mankind has always

loved the open plains. He is like an antelope and wishes to see about

him in all directions. Perhaps, too, he was born with a predilection

for “the view,” but that is no easy matter to prove. It is sometimes

assumed that humanity had naturally a sense and a feeling for the

beautiful because the primitives decorated pottery and carved war-clubs

and totem-posts. Again perhaps; but from war-clubs and totem-posts to

sunsets and mountain shadows--the love of the beautiful in nature--is

a very long hark. The peons and Indians in Sonora cannot see the pinks

and purples in the mountain shadows at sunset. They are astonished at

your question for they see nothing but mountains. And you may vainly

exhaust ingenuity trying to make a Pagago see the silvery sheen of the

mesquite when the low sun is streaming across its tops. He sees only

mesquite--the same dull mesquite through which he has chased rabbits

from infancy.

[Sidenote: Sense of beauty.]

No; it is not likely that the tribe ever chose this abiding place for

its scenery. A sensitive feeling for sound, or form, or color, an

impressionable nervous organization, do not belong to the man with the

hoe, much less to the man with the bow. It is to be feared that they

are indicative of some physical degeneration, some decline in bone and

muscle, some abnormal development of the emotional nature. They travel

side by side with high civilization and are the premonitory symptoms of

racial decay. But are we correct in assuming that because the red man

does not see a colored shadow therefore he is blind to every charm and

sublimity of nature?

[Sidenote: Mountain “view.”]

[Sidenote: The desert colors.]

These mountain-dwellers, always looking out from their height, must

have seen and remarked the large features of the desert--the great

masses of form, the broad blocks of color. They knew the long

undulations of the valley-plain were covered with sharp, broken rock,

but from this height surely they must have noticed how soft as velvet

they looked, how smoothly they rolled from one into another, how

perfectly they curved, how symmetrically they waved. And the long lines

of the divides, lessening to the west--their ridges of grease wood

showing a peculiar green like the crests of sea-waves in storm--did

they not see them? Did they not look down on the low neighboring hills

and know that they were pink, terra-cotta, orange-colored--all the

strange hues that may be compounded of clay and mineral--with here and

there a crowning mass of white quartz or a far-extending outcrop of

shale stained blue and green with copper? Doubtless, a wealth of color

and atmospheric effect was wasted upon the aboriginal retina; but did

it not take note of the deep orange sunsets, the golden fringed heaps

of cumulus, and the tongues of fire that curled from every little

cirrus cloud that lingered in the western sky?

[Sidenote: Looking down to the desert.]

[Sidenote: The land of fire.]

And how often they must have looked out and down to the great basin of

the desert where cloud and sky, mountain and mesa, seemed to dissolve

into a pink mist! It was not an unknown land to them and yet it had

its terrors. Tradition told that the Evil Spirit dwelt there, and it

was his hot breath that came up every morning on the wind, scorching

and burning the brown faces of the mountain-dwellers! Fire!--he dwelt

in fire. Whence came all the fierce glow of sunset down over that

desert if it was not the reflection from his dwelling place? The very

mountain peaks flared red at times, and in the old days there were

rivers of fire. The petrified waves and eddies of those rivers were

still visible in the lava streams. Were there not also great flames

beneath the sands that threw up hot water and boiled great volcanoes of

mud? And along the base of many a cliff were there not jets of steam

and smoke blown out from the heart of the mountains?

[Sidenote: Drought and heat.]

It was a land of fire. No food, no grass, no water. There were places

in the canyons where occasionally a little stream was found forcing

itself up through the rock; but frequently it was salt or, worse yet,

poisoned with copper or arsenic. How often the tribe had lost from

its numbers--slain by the heat and drought in that waste! More than

once the bodies had been found by crossing bands and always the same

tale was told. The victims were half buried in sand, not decayed, but

withered like the grass on the lomas.

[Sidenote: Desert mystery.]

[Sidenote: Sand and gypsum.]

[Sidenote: Sand-whirls.]

Mystery--a mystery as luminous and yet as impenetrable as its own

mirage--seemed always hanging over that low-lying waste. It was a

vast pit dug under the mountain bases. The mountains themselves were

bare crags of fire in the sunlight, and the sands of the pit grew

only cactus and grease wood. There were tracts where nothing at all

grew--miles upon miles of absolute waste with the pony’s feet breaking

through an alkaline crust. And again, there were dry lakes covered with

silt; and vast beds of sand and gypsum, white as snow and fine as dust.

The pony’s feet plunged in and came out leaving no trail. The surface

smoothed over as though it were water. Fifty miles away one could see

the desert sand-whirls moving slowly over the beds in tall columns two

thousand feet high and shining like shafts of marble in the sunlight.

How majestically they moved, their feet upon earth, their heads

towering into the sky!

[Sidenote: Desert storms.]

And then the desert winds that raised at times such furious clouds of

sand! All the air shone like gold dust and the sun turned red as blood.

Ah! what a stifling sulphureous air! Even on the mountain tops that

heavy air could be felt, and down in the desert itself the driving

particles of sand cut the face and hands like blizzard-snow. The ponies

could not be made to face it. They turned their backs to the wind and

hung their heads between their fore feet. And how that wind roared and

whistled through the thin grease wood! The scrubby growths leaned and

bent in the blast, the sand piled high on the trunks; and nothing but

the enormous tap-roots kept them from being wrenched from the earth.

[Sidenote: Drift of sand.]

And danger always followed the high winds. They blew the sands in

clouds that drifted full and destroyed the trails. In a single night

they would cover up a water hole, and in a few days fill in an arroyo

where water could be got by digging. The sands drove like breakers on a

beach, washing and wearing everything up to the bases of the mountains.

And the fine sand reached still higher. It whirled up the canyons and

across the saddles, it eddied around the enormous taluses, it even

flung itself upon the face walls of the mountain and left the smoothing

marks of its fingers upon the sharp pinnacles of the peak.

[Sidenote: Winter cold.]

[Sidenote: Snow on desert.]

It was in winter when the winds were fiercest. With them at times

came a sharp cold, the more biting for the thin dry air of the desert.

All the warmth seemed blown out of the basin with a breath, and its

place filled by a storm-wind from the north that sent the condor

wheeling down the blast and made the coyote shiver on the hill. How

was it possible that such a furnace could grow so cold! And once or

more each winter, when the sky darkened with clouds, there was a fall

of snow that for an hour or so whitened the desert mountains and then

passed away. At those times the springs were frozen, the high sierras

were snow-bound, and down in the desert it seemed as though a great

frost-sheet had been let down from above. The brown skins for all their

deer-hide clothing were red with cold, and the breath blown from the

pony’s nostrils was white as smoke.

[Sidenote: Sea and sand.]

[Sidenote: Grim desolation.]

A waste of intense heat and cold, of drouth and cloud-bursts, of winds

and lightning, of storm and death, what could make any race of hunters

or band of red men care for it? What was the attraction, wherein the

fascination? How often have we wondered why the sailor loves the sea,

why the Bedouin loves the sand! What is there but a strip of sky and

another strip of sand or water? But there is a simplicity about large

masses--simplicity in breadth, space and distance--that is inviting and

ennobling. And there is something very restful about the horizontal

line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful

with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren

deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over to loneliness, have

a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird solitude, the great

silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every

desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange

perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but

to-day people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just

as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.

[Sidenote: Love for the desert.]

But the sun-tanned people who lived on this mountain top never gave

thought to masses, or horizontal lines, or paradoxes. They lived here,

it may be from necessity at first, and then stayed on because they

loved the open wind-blown country, the shining orange-hued sands, the

sweeping mesas, the great swing of the horizontal circle, the flat

desolation, the unbroken solitude. Nor ever knew why they loved it.

They were content and that was enough.

[Sidenote: The descent.]

[Sidenote: The Padres.]

What finally became of them? Who knows? One by one they passed away,

or perhaps were all slaughtered in a night by the fierce band newly

come to numbers called the Apaches. This stone wall stands as their

monument, but it tells no date or tale of death. As I descend the trail

of stone the fancy keeps harping on the countless times the bare feet

must have rubbed those blocks of syenite and porphyry to wear them so

smooth. Have there been no others to clamber up these stairs of stone?

What of the Padres--were they not here? As I ride off across the plain

to the east the thought is of the heroism, the self-abnegation, the

undying faith of those followers of Loyola and Xavier who came into

this waste so many years ago. How idle seem all the specious tales of

Jesuitism and priestcraft. The Padres were men of soul, unshrinking

faith, and a perseverance almost unparalleled in the annals of history.

The accomplishments of Columbus, of Cortez, of Coronado were great;

but what of those who first ventured out upon these sands and erected

missions almost in the heart of the desert, who single-handed coped

with dangers from man and nature, and who lived and died without the

slightest hope of reward here on earth? Has not the sign of the cross

cast more men in heroic mould than ever the glitter of the crown or the

flash of the sword?

[Sidenote: Light of the cross.]

[Sidenote: Aboriginal faith.]

And thinking such thoughts I turn to take a final view of the mountain;

and there on the fortified top something rears itself against the sky

like the cross-hilt of a sword. It is the giant sahuaro with its rising

arms, and beside it the cream-white bloom of the yucca shining in the

sunlight seems like a lamp illuminating it. The good Padres have gone

and their mission churches are crumbling back to the earth from which

they were made; but the light of the cross still shines along the

borders of this desert land. The flame, that through them the Spirit

kindled, still burns; and in every Indian village, in every Mexican

adobe, you will see on the wall the wooden or grass-woven cross. On the

high hills and at the cross-roads it stands, roughly hewn from mesquite

and planted in a cone of stones. It is now always weather-stained and

sun-cracked, but still the sign before which the peon and the Indian

bow the head and whisper words of prayer. The dwellers beside the

desert have cherished what the inhabitants of the fertile plains have

thrown away. They and their forefathers have never known civilization,

and never suffered from the blight of doubt. Of a simple nature, they

have lived in a simple way, close to their mother earth, beside the

desert they loved, and (let us believe it!) nearer to the God they

worshipped.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The use of Spanish names is compulsory. There are no English

equivalents.

[2] Properly Saguaro.