Range. From the lunch-place the Keane Wonder Mine looked on a level
with us and quite near, but we traveled two hours and made a stiff
climb to reach it. This was the hardest bit of marching that we did,
for we were too ignorant of the effects of such a combination of heat
and blinding light to know how to conduct ourselves. We thought we were
sick or overtired, and being much too proud to let the Worrier suspect
such a thing, pressed on without stopping often enough to rest. We had
not yet learned that the wagon was always accompanied by a blessed bit
of shade that we could sit down in any time. Later we appreciated fully
this happy attribute of wagons. More than once we were grateful to the
Worrier for refusing to come with a pack-train.
The mine was a large plant which had paid well. A mess of buildings,
some half-blown-down, pieces of machinery and the big red mill huddled
at the mouth of the canyon where the mountain rises steeply from the
mesa. The mine itself was higher up the canyon down which the ore was
swung in huge buckets that ran on iron cables. Water had been piped
from a spring a mile away, but the pipe was broken. The ground was far
too rough to allow us to take the wagon to the spring, so once more
the Worrier led off Molly and Bill and brought back water in a pail.
Earlier in the day we had lamented the necessity of camping among
wreckage, but when we reached the first building, which once had been a
barn, its oblong, indigo shadow was Heaven. We lay prone on the ground
behind it until the sun went down, not attempting to unload the wagon
or do any useful thing. The Worrier found us thus on his return and
gravely opined that we had better stay a while at Keane Wonder and try
to get acclimated.
[Illustration: THE CAMP BEHIND THE BARN]
During the three days that we camped behind the barn we were living
about a thousand feet above the bottom of that amazing valley, looking
down into it and up at the still, white peaks of the Panamints above
it. Opposite Keane Wonder what looked like a low, sandy ridge
separates the main sink of Death Valley from a similar though smaller
and less striking basin called the Mesquite Valley. The high Panamints
end in a stern red mass near the sand-ridge, beyond which a long slope
like the one we had come down leads to more distant mountains which,
however, are a continuation of the range. Emigrant Pass through the
mountains over to Ballarat starts from the slope and winds around
behind the stern, red mass. That may well have been the way out which
the party of emigrants who perished sought and did not find. Most of
the time the steadily pressing wind of the desert blew through the
great, bright space. Often we saw it pick up the sand far down at the
edge of the valley and whirl it along in tall wraiths that looked like
ghosts walking over the white floor.
On the second evening a bell sounded in the dusk. When you travel with
burros on the desert it is the custom to put a bell on one of them
at night so you can find them in the morning, and often the bell is
left on during the day's journey. That sound meant that someone was
coming to our camp-fire. Soon a frail old man with two loaded burros
and a little dog appeared. It was "Old Johnnie," an habitué of Death
Valley, coming home. He had an unworked gold-mine near Keane Wonder and
he spent his life looking after his property. Apparently he was also
the official caretaker of Keane Wonder itself. He performed his duties
by looking over our camp and guarding every bit of wire and every old
rusty nail as though they were gold itself. He hovered around us,
especially at departure, so we only succeeded in stealing one iron bar
for our fireplace, and we needed two. We cast longing eyes at a certain
chipped, granite kettle, but finally had to borrow that, promising
solemnly to return it at Beatty on our way back. Perhaps he was unduly
suspicious because the Worrier had taken a bit of some very ancient and
hopeless-looking hay, which we found in the barn, to cheer up Molly and
Bill.
"How could I know he lived here?" he apologized to us. "Anyways, there
wasn't but two mouthfuls."
But "Old Johnnie" was hospitable, as all old-timers are. He urged
Charlotte and me to move into the superintendent's house. It had been
a good house once, but in its present condition we preferred the open
sand, nor could we bear even for a night to have a roof between us and
the blue deeps of that star-filled sky. He was a garrulous talker and
very friendly. He claimed that his mine was richer than Keane Wonder
ever dreamed of being. Once some one had offered him $300,000, but his
partner would not look at it. His tone implied that it was a paltry
sum anyway. He was an inventor, too, and had sold a patent for an
automobile-part which he described in great detail. We asked him if he
still hoped to sell the mine. He seemed not to know what he intended
to do. Plainly he was another victim of the "terrible fascination." He
related how he had lately been to Tonopah and got sick and almost died
from lack of air in the clutter of things. The Worrier said that he had
money put away somewhere, but money or no money, whether he ever sold
the mine or not, he would hang around Death Valley the rest of his
life.
"Old Johnnie" rose to fine heights as a story-teller when we invited
him to dinner next day. We had brought some fresh meat which had to
be used up early on the trip, and the Worrier achieved a magnificent
meal. Usually I was the cook, but that dinner was far beyond me. He
invaded the ruined boarding-house, wrestled successfully with the rusty
stove, and produced a roast surrounded by potatoes and onions to be
long remembered. We ate it at the board table in the dining-room. "Old
Johnnie" changed his coat for the festivity; he beamed upon us and
talked. He had the good story-teller's gift of suggestion and in the
midst of that blazing emptiness steeped in a silence broken only by
the wind clanging rusted cables and rattling the loosened iron roof,
he peopled the dining-room again. We saw the faces of the men crowding
in for their supper and heard their voices. Once more the camp-cook in
white apron and cap, for "Old Johnnie" described it as a fine camp "run
right," leaned over the table to pour soup into granite bowls. Keane
Wonder came to life while the obliterating desolation crept in at the
door.
He told stories of other mining camps and of the struggle of individual
prospectors with the valley. You outwit its wickedness or you are
outwitted by it. It was alive, a sort of fascinating enemy. His words
took us with him and his burros down its white length. The enemy had
uncanny powers. She played strange tricks on you. If she could not get
you one way she tried another.
"You find fellers dead down there," he said. "And they don't die of
thirst, either. Sometimes there's water in the canteens. They just go
crazy. She gets 'em."
He leaned closer across the table and his voice became lower.
"And you hear 'em in the night," he whispered.
"Hear who?"
"Them. I call it the Lonesome Bell."
"What is the Lonesome Bell?" We found ourselves whispering too.
"You hear it. It's a bell. It rings regular, far off. Sometimes you
hear it all night. It sounds like the bell on a burro. But it ain't
nothing. Once I had a young feller for a partner, and when he heard it
he got up and made coffee for the outfit that was coming. He wouldn't
believe me when I told him it wasn't nothing but the Lonesome Bell. He
waited and waited and nobody came. And the next morning he packed up
and beat it."
Old Johnnie's eyes glittered with unnatural brightness. He was telling
his own secret. Very vividly he made us see a man alone in the blue
night, dim sand spreading away, dark-blue mountains on blueness. Not a
sound, not even the breath of the night stirring the sagebrush. Through
white, empty days and blue, empty nights he is always alone. He listens
to his own heart beating. Then, far off, the faint sound of a bell.
Then again. He listens intently because it is the only sound for such a
long time. It comes again. It grows louder. He strains to hear. A bell
belongs on a burro--he hears the tramp of burros' feet.
With awe we looked at those bright, intent eyes and that thin body bent
tensely forward. Some night the Lonesome Bell will be true, but "Old
Johnnie" will not hear it. A belated traveler with his pack-train will
find a dead camp-fire and an old man asleep forever beside it. "Old
Johnnie" has outwitted the valley so long that he thinks he can always
do it, but she will get him in the end.
After dinner "Old Johnnie" unlocked the mill and showed us the costly
machinery inside, explaining in careful detail the processes of
milling gold. The canyon behind Keane Wonder is narrow and precipitous
as though it had been gouged out by a giant's trowel. High up on
the mountain-side the dumps of iridescent rock around the mine-pits
shimmered. We sat with him on a beam of the ruined mill while he
pointed things out in the valley. He showed us where Furnace Creek
Ranch lies on the sand by the opening of the canyon between the
Funeral Range and the Black Mountains, but we could not see it because
of the heat-shimmer and the misty veil. He said that the stern, red
mass opposite was called Tucki Mountain, an Indian word for sheep,
because the Panamint Indians used to hunt wild mountain-sheep in its
fastnesses. The smooth, bare slope beyond the Mesquite Valley, he said,
was really very rough, cut by deep water-channels and covered with
brush; and rose in that gradual way nearly 3,000 feet before it reached
the mountains. The curious streak in the bottom of the Mesquite Valley
was the swamp of Salt Creek, where the water was so bad you could not
drink it. It joined the morass in the bottom of Death Valley. There
were quicksands there, that you could not get out of if you got in. Men
and burros had been lost that way. He pointed out little, white heaps
down by Salt Creek and said they were sand-dunes a hundred feet high.
While we sat there a storm swept down the big slope and around on
the face of the high Panamints above Death Valley. First the wind
lifted the sand in the tall whirling wraiths that fled before the
pursuing host of the rain. It came on like an army of giants in bright
armor, dust-clouds swirling before their horses' galloping feet, the
sun gleaming on their million spears that reached higher than the
mountain-tops. In the midst of blazing sunshine the shadow of their
passing was dark on the valley; for a few moments they obliterated the
mountains.
"Surely," Charlotte said, "it is pouring rain over there, yet they told
us it never rains in Death Valley."
"That's some rain," he admitted, "but maybe it ain't wetting the sand.
I've been in storms like that when the water all evaporated before it
got down."
"But it must rain sometimes and the water get down," I objected to both
of them, "for Shady Myrick said that he had seen the valley full of
flowers."
"I've seen 'em," he assented, with a sudden eager lighting of his
face--"yes!"
They did not happen to bloom while we were there but we believe in
them. Anything might happen, anything could be true in that terrible,
bright place.
VI
_The Strangest Farm in the World_
On the fourth day we bade "Old Johnnie" farewell, and descended into
the quivering white basin. The next camp was to be at Furnace Creek
Ranch, the irrigated farm in the bottom of the valley established long
ago in connection with the original borax-works of the Twenty-Mule-Team
brand. The water for irrigation is brought down in a ditch from Furnace
Creek in the canyon between the Funeral Mountains and the Black
Mountains and the ranch is a large, green patch on the sand. In any
ordinary place, or in any ordinary light it would be a conspicuous
feature of the landscape; but, though "Old Johnnie" had pointed it
out so carefully, we could never distinguish it nor could we see it
during our approach that day until we were within half a mile of it.
Throughout the journey the valley-floor presented the same unbroken,
white expanse.
For several miles our way continued down the mesa. Here was no road,
only a lurching and grinding down a rocky wash, crawling over the
edge in the hope of something better and returning again to the ills
we knew. It seemed as though the slender-spoked wheels must collapse
under the strain. Our tower of baggage swayed dangerously. The Official
Worrier was a skillful driver and he needed to be, not only on this
day but on several subsequent ones which surpassed it. About noon we
reached the road that leads from Salt Creek at the southern end of
Mesquite Valley across the northern end of Death Valley and along
its eastern side to the ranch. This road was an improvement on the
uncharted wash. There were no rocks in it; but it soon became sandy,
two deep ruts meandering off toward the white floor.
Presently we came to its edge and skirted the swamp of the Armagosa
River, the morass of mud and quicksands which fills the whole bottom of
the valley, an immense expanse covered with large white crystals and
a powdery substance that looks like coarse salt. The valley probably
was once the bed of a salt-lake whose slow evaporation left the thick
alkali crust. The ruts were very deep and the ground soft to walk on,
spongy and hummocky. The Worrier said that if the wagon were to get
out of the ruts it easily might be mired. "Old Johnnie" told us that
in some places in the middle of the bog a team or a man walking could
be sucked down out of sight and one of his tales was of finding a dead
man's face looking up at him out of the ground.
"He was a Swede with yellow hair," he said, "and he stared at the sun.
He sank standing up."
The road which crosses the valley below the ranch near the Old Eagle
Borax Works is said to be almost the only way to get over the swamp.
The Panamint Indians are supposed to have known this route and to have
crossed the valley to escape from their enemies, who dared not follow
them.
A Government bench-mark by the roadside indicated 258 feet below
sea level. The heat was oppressive, and the white ground reflected a
blinding light. At one place, rounding the base of a hill which shut
off the view of the nearby mountains, we found ourselves in the midst
of miles of the shining whiteness. It spread in every direction,
reaching to the distant Panamints across the valley and to the hazy
outline of the low range at the southern end. The hill which we were
passing rose into the sky, white as the plain except for a few streaks
of ugly, greenish-yellow-like sulphur. No living green thing appeared.
The white expanse was unbroken by a bush or even by an outjutting rock.
The desolation was complete. An intense silence lay over it. If we
dropped far enough behind the wagon not to hear the creaking of its
wheels, we felt utterly alone, the only survivors in a dead universe.
That day the sky was a hot purplish-blue; no cloud shadows drifting
over the valley relieved its blinding monotony. The rose and silver
which we had seen from above were gone, not even the illusion of water
far off remained. The sun stared steadily down. It was the far-spread,
motionless silence of the last days when the whole earth will be dying.
Winding around the hill we came to the ruins of a borax-works. This had
been the first plant in the valley, then the Eagle Borax Works south of
the ranch was operated, but now the borax comes from the mines in the
mountains at Ryan. Nothing was left of the old borax-works except a few
roofless stone buildings and the ruins of the works which looked like a
row of immense vats embedded in the side of a low ridge. The vats and
the ridge had the same sulphurous color, and melted together. Around
the buildings the ground was covered with tin cans and broken bottles,
but the square of dark-blue shade beside each house was a blessed
relief from the burning sun.
Beyond the old borax-works the road wound through sand covered with
large mesquites and greasewoods. Though the mesquite is called a tree
it looks more like an overgrown, thorny shrub. It grows near swamps and
dry lakes and is supposed to be a sure indication of water, but its
roots go down very deep and it appears in desolations of sand where
it would be unwise for the wayfarer to dig. Those mesquites in Death
Valley looked very hopeless indeed, sprangling, thorny, leafless things
with a hillock of sand blown around the roots of each.
As we descended into the valley and came along the edge of the morass
a feeling of deep lassitude and inertia gradually crept over Charlotte
and me. It had been very hard to leave the dark squares of shade at the
borax-works, and now as we crawled along among the mesquites we felt
that the white monotony would go on forever. It pressed upon us like a
weight that never, never could be lifted. We stared down at the sand
with unseeing eyes and went on because we were in the habit of going
on. The ranch was only an imagining, born of vain hope.
And then the strange-looking, tufted tops of some tall palms appeared
against the sky. They were very striking and we thought they must still
be far off or we would have seen them all day, but not a quarter of an
hour later we reached the fence which separated the desert from the
emerald-green fields. The sudden springing up of the ranch was as
unreal as any imagining. The fence was a sharp line of demarcation. On
one side the sand drifted up to it, on the other were meadows and big
willow trees. It was evening when we arrived, so we camped at once by
the irrigation-ditch which made a narrow green ribbon across the sand
with grass and trees growing along its banks. We built our fire between
an encampment of Indians and the white adobe ranch-buildings beyond the
fence. The water rushed down the ditch, clear and cool. How marvelous
this running water seemed! How marvelous to dip out all we wanted to
wash ourselves and our clothes and our dishes!
Our felicity, however, was short-lived. The Panamint Indians, in
common probably with all Indians, do not count cleanliness among their
virtues. The rising of the fierce, hot sun brought millions of flies
which converted our dishes and camp equipment into black masses that
crawled. Between the Indians and the large herd of cattle at the ranch,
camping by the irrigation-ditch was impossible. We spent most of the
forenoon moving a mile or two away among the mesquites. We were on
the gradually sloping ground which leads up from the valley-floor to
the rock-walls of the Funeral Mountains. Here in the valley we found
that our impression from the Keane Wonder Mine of mountains rising
precipitously from the flat white floor had been an illusion. The
characteristic mesa of the Mojave curves up on both sides, sandy,
covered with stones, but often entirely bare of vegetation. Death
Valley is always full of such illusions. Even afterwards, when we knew
better, we could never look down into the valley from a height without
feeling that the mountains rose precipitously out of it. That camp
among the mesquites blazed. The yellow sand seemed to smite our eyes.
Across the valley under the edge of the Panamints the mesa looked a
beautiful dark-blue, but around us was an even greater ecstasy of light
than we had known at Keane Wonder. Everything blazed, the sand, the
slow waves of the heat shimmer, the little rounded stony hills between
us and the Funeral Mountains, and the steel-blue battlements of the
mountains themselves.
The Indians at the ranch are employed as laborers, when they will
work. The superintendent, a vigorous, silent Scotchman, was extremely
pessimistic about them. While we were there they had "the flu" and all
we ever saw them do was sit around the corral waiting for supplies
to be handed out. The women and girls, with heavy melancholy faces,
gathered and stared at us. They stared with the stolid curiosity of
cattle, not like burros who twitch their ears saucily, though they
have the burro's reputation for thievishness. The superintendent kept
everything under lock and key. The only Indian who showed a sign of
life was an old fellow who prowled around with a gun after the birds
and wild ducks that make the ranch a resting-place in their flights
across the desert. We were told that there was only one gun in the
whole encampment and that the younger men hunted with bows and arrows.
Most of them looked stunted and their faces were wrinkled like the
skins of shrunken, dried-up apples, as though the valley were taking
toll of the generations of their race.
The valley takes its toll. Most white men cannot live there long. The
vigorous Scotchman had been at the ranch eight years and thought he
could remain, but no one else had ever stayed such a length of time,
and he had difficulty in finding anybody to keep him company for more
than a few months. He told us that no white woman can stand it at all
in summer. As Charlotte and I were almost prostrated even in early
March, we are willing to accept the statement. Nothing that anyone
can tell us of the evil effects of living in the valley is beyond our
imaginations. At times the thermometer goes up to 130 degrees, but
there is something worse than the heat. The Worrier claimed that 130
degrees was not uncommon in Silver Lake, and that he spent his summers
there without suffering as people do in the valley. The mercury never
rose above 98 degrees while we were at the ranch, a temperature by
no means unknown in eastern summers, yet our feeling of lassitude
increased daily, combined with a faintness and giddiness that we could
hardly combat. The blazing light had much to do with it, and we were
below sea-level. A learned, scientific man has since told us that so
small a drop in elevation could not be noticeable. Those old-timers
who went insane on the hot sands knew that it was noticeable. You feel
that if you were to go out into that blazing silence you could easily
go insane, or succumb to the deadly inertia which paralyzed Charlotte
and me. Too easily you could lie down in the thin, delusive shade of
some little bush and forget. Even beneath the willow trees beside the
flowing water we could scarcely move, our minds were dazed so we could
neither read nor think. We understood "Old Johnnie's" feeling about the
valley. Something hostile lives there.
The ghastly, shining swamp and the pools of poisonous water are
horrible to the imagination because of their unnaturalness in the midst
of such choking thirst. Only the perverted brain of a demon could have
invented such a monstrosity. Water is in your thoughts all the time.
From morning until night you are thirsty in the dry heat, and you look
out over the shimmering miles and know that, though there is water here
and there, if you leave the irrigation-ditch you cannot quench your
thirst. You cling to the narrow green line where the mountain-water
flows down. The feeling grows on you that you are visiting some
sinister world which can be no part of your beloved earth.
And then night comes. A miracle happens and you know this is the same
outdoors you love, only its trappings are put off, it is stripped
of obscuring verdure, naked, and you find it more terrible than you
thought it could be and more beautiful than you thought it could be.
The rising and the setting of that cruel sun are great splendors, that
dark night sky is bigger and deeper than in kinder countries. The stars
are very near, floating in a sea so deep it reaches to infinity; they
are twice as big as ordinary stars, they look like silver balls. The
sky is a deep, dark blue. The whole valley is blue in the night and
luminous like a sapphire. The going-down of the sun is a pageant; its
uprising is a triumph. You feel as though you ought to clash cymbals,
you feel as though you ought to dance and sing when the sun looks over
the mountains. You have been remiss in worship all your life because
you have not learned to dance and sing in honor of the rising sun. The
sun-god was worshiped on the desert for there the sun is a cruel, great
god. His glory consumes the earth, but he is so absorbed in rejoicing
in his glory that he does not know it.
One night we camped a little way up the canyon behind the ranch in the
vain hope of finding a cooler spot. The canyon entered the mountain
beside a precipitous, jagged cliff made of crumbling yellow rock, so
steep that we could scarcely climb its sides. We attempted it late in
the afternoon in the hope of getting a view of the whole valley at
sunset, but its knife-edge ridges were so sharp and crumbling and our
endurance so slight after the burning day that we could not reach a
satisfactory summit. Being shut up in a canyon was no part of our plan
and we made the Worrier help us lug our beds quite a way from camp to
the top of a little hill overlooking at least part of the valley.