sarcastically, pointing at one of the steel-blue crests of the Funeral
Range. We could not help it if he scoffed, we had to see the drama
of the coming of night. Panting from these exertions added to our
fruitless effort to climb the cliff, we brought up a canteen and the
few things we needed and bade him go back and sleep happily under the
wagon.
We ourselves had very little sleep on the hilltop for the drama was too
stupendous. Slowly the mountains turned blue, and then bluer. Their
beautiful skyline was drawn with a pencil that left a golden, luminous
mark. Pale blue crept into the valley, indigo lay in pools among the
foothills. The whole night was a succession of studies in blue like
the blue nights some artists paint, but every shade of blue that an
artist could mix on his palette was there. Layers of different blues
lay one above another, and changed, and mingled. The enormous stars
came out and hung in the sky like great lamps. The sapphire valley
glistened beneath them. The lamps swung slowly toward the west and then
were gradually extinguished. The sapphire turned into a moonstone,
palely glimmering, and then into an opal full of flashing fires. The
cruel, great god was coming. He came, and we were two tongue-tied fools
longing to celebrate him and only standing mute and bewildered.
We always felt that longing and that bewilderment during the evenings
and nights and mornings in the White Heart. They overwhelmed us and
hurt us. We were like prisoners shut in by the walls of ourselves,
unable to break through and be one with such beauty. We could not rest
in it as we had rested for long minutes by the red promontory where we
first saw the valley; there was too much beauty. We clutched at each
changing, evanescent moment, spectators watching through tiny loopholes
in the walls a pageant which passed too quickly and was too big for our
understanding.
The White Heart exceeds the imagination every way. It is too terrible
and too splendid. It asserts itself tremendously; the green patch of
the ranch lying on the baked sand beside the shining swamp seems more
ephemeral and unimportant than any of man's efforts to tame the desert;
it is an unreality, a dream, and the dwellers on it are shadows in
a dream. The majesty of the valley completely overshadows the row of
tall palms against the background of the snowy Panamints, and the
little oasis of alfalfa-fields, willow-trees, and white ranch-buildings
blessed with shade. They might vanish like a mirage and never be
missed. The magnificent procession of the nights and days passes over
the white terror, more magnificent than other nights and days precisely
because of the glowing of that terrible sand and those terrible
mountains, perfect for its own sake, and utterly indifferent whether or
not eyes and hearts can endure it.
VII
_The Burning Sands_
Every day that we stayed in Death Valley seemed more awful than the
last. From ten o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon we
existed in a blind torpor. Eyes and brain and pumping heart could not
bear it. At noon we always planned to leave immediately, we panted
to escape; then the enchantment would begin and we would forget all
the plans. Soon, however, it became evident that we must get up into
the coolness of the mountains on one side or the other of the burning
basin, for there was no such thing as becoming acclimated. In the
stupor in which we lived the plans we made were extremely incoherent.
We only knew that the mantle of snow on the peaks of the Panamints, so
serene above the quivering heat of the valley, was the most desirable
thing on earth. To reach it with the wagon we had to circle the
northern end of the morass, cross the low ridge into the Mesquite
Valley and go up the great mesa leading to Emigrant Pass behind the
mountains. There we would bury ourselves in the cold, wet snow, and rub
it on our faces and fling it about, strong again and able to laugh at
midday. The Worrier pooh-poohed this plan when it finally emerged, for
snow has no allurement for a "desert rat." He suggested that we go on
up the canyon in which we were camped and thus quickly escape, but we
refused to consider that. We had come for the purpose of knowing the
feel of the valley and we must travel over the burning sands.
The Worrier was amenable; he always was, but he liked to be persuaded.
We went back to Furnace Creek Ranch from the camp in the canyon and
stocked ourselves with hay and drinking-water, as we would find no more
good water until we reached Emigrant Springs some fifty miles away.
The journey over that difficult country would take the better part of
four days. Two of the camps would be by so-called "bad water," which,
however, animals can drink--the first at Cow Creek not far from the
ranch, and the second at Salt Creek in the southern end of Mesquite
Valley. The third would be a "dry camp," somewhere on the big mesa we
had seen from the Keane Wonder Mine.
Leaving the ranch rather late on the same day we passed the old
borax-works again, wound round the white and sulphur-colored hill
through the spongy, borax-encrusted ground and along the edge of the
sandy mesa where it begins to rise from the level bottom of the valley.
Cow Creek is a little green spot at the base of the Funeral Mountains
about two miles from the road. Though it is near the ranch we stopped
there in order to break the long pull from Furnace Creek to Salt Creek.
In Death Valley every blazing mile is to be reckoned with and it is
worth while to shorten a day's journey from twenty miles to sixteen. No
track led to Cow Creek from the road, and the mesa, which looked quite
level, turned out to be as steep as usual. It was broken by little
washes and thinly covered with brush. Bumping over it under the hot
sun we felt again as though we were in the midst of an interminable
monotony. The mountain seemed unattainable. Charlotte and I, suffering
from the usual lassitude and complete lack of ambition, wanted to stop
and camp on the sand beside a large mesquite, the only thing anywhere
that cast a big enough shadow to sit down in, and we had a sharp
argument with the Worrier.
[Illustration: THE ALKALI BOTTOM OF DEATH VALLEY]
"You can't do that," he said. "It don't matter so much to-day, the
water ain't far, but to-morrow you got to go on and you better do it
now. When we start you've got to get there, or we don't start."
That was unanswerable and we dragged ourselves on until we reached a
large rock near the spring with a square of blue darkness beside it.
He was satisfied with our endeavor and let us make camp there while
he took the horses to the spring. Cow Creek is chiefly memorable for
another argument, a long, warm debate as to whether or not Molly and
Bill could haul the outfit up the four-thousand-foot rise to Emigrant
Springs. Charlotte maintained that they could not. She based her
argument entirely on the appearance of Molly and Bill and she had
a good one; but I, inspired by the band of snow on the tops of the
Panamints and the mountain-climber's zeal, met it with spirit. I said
that Molly and Bill could do it because they were "desert-proof Indian
horses." The Worrier lay at full length on the sand, apparently lost
to the world. I demanded what he thought about it. He replied sleepily
that you "never can tell 'til you try." All the time we were in the
valley we argued, and it is to the credit of all three of us that the
arguments never degenerated into quarrels. Our nerves were very near
the surface. Everything was difficult to do, packing and unpacking,
cooking, shaking the sand out of the blankets, hitching-up, getting
anywhere, gathering brush for our poor little fires. We all did the
minimum of work, and the desert demands very little of the camper-out,
but under the weight that seemed to be always pressing down on us that
little was hard even for the Worrier.
Next morning we arose with the dawn and hastened to get underway
during the cool hours. The road lay over miles and miles of sand,
dotted in some places with sad-looking brush and streaked sometimes
with the white borax deposit. As always, the morning was radiant.
The valley was beautiful, wrapped in its lonely silence, and for the
first few hours Charlotte and I forgot our discomforts in the circle
of high mountains, blue and red in the sunshine, and the clean sweep
of the sand; but by noon we could not see anything and had to ride
ignominiously in the wagon with our eyes on the very tiny oblong shadow
that traveled beside it. Charlotte had dark glasses, but she seemed
to suffer as much as I, who lived again through the nightmare of my
childhood's dream. A hot haze lay over all the distances, though the
air was clear, and the nearby little stones and bushes blazed. The
wagon crawled on, the sand falling in bright showers from the slowly
turning wheels, until Molly and Bill stopped. We shook the reins with
what energy we had left, and the Worrier came up and shouted and threw
stones, but they only looked around at us pathetically.
"We might as well eat lunch here and let 'em rest," he said.
There was no shade except the bit beside the wagon. We sat in that and
leaned against the wheels. They would not move for Molly and Bill hung
down their heads and the sweat streamed off them. The sand glittered
with little particles of mica, which added to the glaring brightness.
Toward the south the illusion of water appeared once more, not blue
but a glassy gray with several strange-looking shrubs reflected in it
upside down. There was nothing between us and the ranch to look so
large, unless it were magnified like the stunted little bushes in the
mirage at Silver Lake. The Worrier decided that these appearances could
only be the palm trees, though they did not look in the least like palm
trees nor could we see a sign of the green patch of the ranch. It is
curious that we never saw Furnace Creek Ranch from any of the places
where we had views of the valley, either before we had been there or
afterwards, or while we were approaching or leaving it. It sprang from
the earth by magic for our bewilderment and vanished the instant we
went away.
That lunch-place was in the middle of Death Valley at the northern
edge of the morass. Ever since coming down from the Keane Wonder Mine
we had been below sea-level. Tradition has it that the lowest part
of the valley is south of the Ranch, near the old Eagle Borax Works,
but the bench-marks of the government's survey indicate that the part
opposite the white and sulphur-colored hill by the borax-works which we
had passed is the lowest. Two iron posts driven into the ground along
the road had read respectively 253 and 257 feet below sea-level. The
lowest point, 280 feet, was in the morass at our end of the valley not
very far away. Whether being below sea-level has an effect or not we
all suffered that day. The Worrier guessed the temperature at about 105
degrees, but said that it felt like 120 degrees at Silver Lake. The sun
seemed to stand still in a hard sky. The heat rose solidly from the
endless white sand, the vast glistening swamp and the metallic-looking
mountains. We were in the midst of an immense movelessness, in a
silence never to be broken.
After an hour's halt we started on again, Charlotte and I in the wagon,
though we could hardly bear to be dragged through the heavy sand by
that unhappy horse and mule. Even in the wagon our heads swam, the
ground would not stay still under us, the sun seemed to drink every
bit of moisture from our bodies so we burned in the heat instead of
perspiring. The skin of our faces and hands felt dried up and as though
it might chip off. We were blind and parched with thirst. The water
in the canteens was hot and did not help us much. Molly and Bill kept
trying to stop, and little stones the Worrier threw as he walked behind
whizzed past our heads and thudded on their tired flanks. We had to
fight the hope that they would stop for good and let us creep under the
wagon and shut our eyes; but we never suggested doing it. "When you
start you got to get there."
The Worrier himself suggested stopping two hours after lunch in the
shade of a little grove of mesquites, though they were not much good
as shade-trees. They were about ten feet high, each one with a little
hummock of sand blown around its roots, and branches armed with long
sharp thorns spreading close to the sand. We could not get under them,
but for some reason they were more comforting than sitting beside the
wagon.
"We'll stay until the sun gets above Tucki Mountain," he said. "We're
getting along fine, if Molly and Bill don't lay down."
"Suppose they should lie down?"
"You'd stay by the wagon and I'd go back for help." He spoke cheerfully
as though the idea of walking back over the burning sands was perfectly
commonplace.
"I suppose you could walk out of the valley from anywhere?"
"Sure. Got to. I walked thirty miles once without no water. Blazing hot
as this and not a bush big enough to get more than my head under. I
laid down by a greasewood most all day. But I made it."
Walking through the valley at that season was nothing to an old-timer.
They often cross it in June, July and August. Death is lurking behind
the bushes then, waiting for them. Along the way from Furnace Creek we
had passed two of the sun-bleached boards set upright in the sand which
mark graves on the desert.
As the day cooled we wandered a little way from the road among the
mesquite and suddenly came upon another one. Near it lay the skeletons
of two burros tied to a bush and a little further off a coffee pot
beside the stones that had been a fireplace. Someone had written with a
pencil on the board: "John Lemoign, Died Aug. 1919."
The Worrier had known John Lemoign. He described him as a regular
old-timer who owned a mine somewhere in Tucki Mountain. Our friend
seemed sorry, but his final comment was:
"He ought to have known better. But they never learn. They always think
they will make it this time."
Everywhere that attitude toward accidents on the desert was typical.
"Old Johnnie" told his most gruesome tales as though the victims were
to blame. The valley was an enemy to be out-generaled; if you were
a fool, of course she would get you. It was a pity when she did,
inevitable and not very important. They were not callous, for they
included themselves in the "inevitable and not very important." When
we had first talked to them they seemed to us singularly care-free and
their faith in their own sagacity and prowess pathetically blind, but
we found that we shared somewhat in their attitude as we crossed the
burning sands. We felt able to take care of ourselves--could there
be a more pathetic and blind faith?--and if by some remote mischance
we should not be able, it would be only another painful but trifling
accident. The sun-bleached boards made us sorry, but they did not seem
especially tragic.
The point of view is born of the desert herself. When you are there,
face to face with the earth and the stars and time day after day, you
cannot help feeling that your rôle, however gallant and precious, is
a very small one. This conviction, instead of driving you to despair
as it usually does when you have it inside the walls of houses,
releases you very unexpectedly from all manner of anxieties. You are
frightfully glad to have a rôle at all in so vast and splendid a drama
and want to defend it as well as you can, but you do not trouble much
over the outcome because the desert mixes up your ideas about what
you call living and dying. You see the dreadful, dead country living
in beauty, and feel that the silence pressing around it is alive. The
Worrier said one night:
"My, ain't it awful! Them stars and everything. Makes you feel kind of
small."
"Do you like to look at them?"
"Yes, I do."
"Why do you?"
"I dunno."
VIII
_The Dry Camp_
When the sun stood over Tucki and the mesquites began to have real
shadows beside them we resumed our journey. The little ridge which
separates Death Valley from Salt Creek had looked very insignificant
from the Keane Wonder Mine, but we climbed for more than an hour to
cross it. It was entirely bare and covered with small flat stones of
pale colors, lavender, light-blue, gray and buff, pressed down into a
hard mosaic. Instead of being polished smooth the delicately-colored
little stones were marked with intricate patterns which looked like
the impressions of leaves and sections of plants, as though a vanished
vegetation had left its record upon them. We were not scientific enough
to know whether they were really fossils or whether the markings were
due to the action of water or some other cause. So lovely were they
that in spite of the heat which still beat up from the bright ground
Charlotte and I walked behind the wagon in order to examine them.
There, on that hard ridge, where not even one sickly sagebrush grew, we
saw the fronds of ferns and the stems and cups of flowers finely etched.
From the top of the ridge the dim wagon-track which we had been
following pitched down an almost impossible hill to Salt Creek, a marsh
formed by a stream that keeps itself mostly underground. Coarse grass
grew in it, looking very green in the surrounding waste, alternating
with streaks of white alkali. The marsh winds down from the Mesquite
Valley and cuts through the ridge into Death Valley. The surrounding
country is utterly barren. A little way off up the bog we could see
the beginning of the sand-dunes which "Old Johnnie" had pointed out,
opposite us rose the immense mesa leading up past Tucki Mountain to
Emigrant Pass through the Panamints, at the left just beyond the swamp
stood the harsh, red mass of Tucki, first a smooth-looking bare
slope, then towering buttresses and crags of rock. Our side of Salt
Creek was a jumble of little stony hills. Save for the grass and a few
dead-looking mesquites in the swamp we could not see a growing thing in
the whole waste.
You have to dig a well to get the water from Salt Creek. Several
shallow holes had been dug where the road began to cross the marsh,
and, as one was clean enough for our use, the Worrier was spared the
exertion of making another. Stove Pipe Wells, near which the ring of
wagons is said to be buried, is a little further up Salt Creek where
some prospector once drove down a length of Stove Pipe to preserve
his water-hole. All the water in Salt Creek is bitter and salty,
intolerable to drink. We had thought that we might at least use it for
cooking, but one taste killed that hope. We feared we could not eat
potatoes boiled in it, and knew that tea would be impossible, so once
more we drew upon the fifteen gallons which we had brought from Furnace
Creek Ranch.
Poor Molly and Bill had no choice in the matter. They had to drink the
loathsome stuff which the Worrier drew up for them from the uninviting
hole. However, they seemed much pleased with the coarse, green
grass, the first forage they had had since leaving Daylight Springs.
Henceforth they would have to get their own living with occasional
small feeds of grain, as we could not carry enough hay to last for
more than another two days. By that time we should be well up in the
mountains; still, remembering Beatty and the thin pickings at Daylight
Springs, and looking out now over the discouraging bareness, their
prospects seemed far from cheerful.
When we had located our camp as far as possible from the tin cans and
ancient rubbish of other camps, the Worrier took his shot gun from
under the wagon seat and went off to hunt ducks. Ducks! How could the
desolation of Salt Creek, after that journey over the burning sands,
yield ducks? At every green place like Furnace Creek Ranch and Saratoga
Springs, we saw birds. They flashed in the sun and their twitterings
broke the silence. While we unloaded the wagon that evening we saw
small yellow birds like wild canaries light on the mesquites in the
swamp, and many tiny blue birds; but it was hard to believe in wild
ducks, even harder there than it had been at the ranch where the old
Indian snooped around with his gun.
The Worrier's assurance was so surprising that we put off getting
dinner and dragged ourselves to the top of one of the stony hills
overlooking the winding of Salt Creek toward Death Valley to watch
him. From that viewpoint the swamp coiled between high, perpendicular,
sulphur-colored bluffs like a poisonous snake glistening with green
and white spots. One small blue pool far off was its eye. The Worrier
was working his way toward that from grass-tussock to grass-tussock.
Presently he reached it and vanished in a bunch of rushes at its edge.
While we sat and waited the enchantment of sunset began. The sky
became orange and green, the terrible valley that we loved and hated
began to put on its sapphire robe, the sulphurous walls that prisoned
the snake turned pink, the poisonous blue eye, too blue, too bright,
softened--the enchanter almost had us by the throats again, ready to
choke us until tears came in our eyes, when two shots spilt the spell.
We sprang up, startled; we had forgotten that a man was hunting ducks
in a swamp. A scramble then, back to the fireplace, a hasty match, the
red fire kindled and leaping up, the smoke-blacked pot balanced on the
iron bar stolen from "Old Johnnie," the soft clash of tin dishes, and
soon a proud hunter coming home through the sapphire night.
Early next morning we were underway, floundering across the swamp. The
Worrier fulfilled his function by doing a little worrying there, for
he remarked afterwards that he might have lost Molly and Bill. Salt
Creek marsh is a little sample of the giant bog that makes the bottom
of Death Valley fearful. The road usually traveled to Emigrant Pass
leads along the edge of the marsh and through the sand-dunes before it
begins to ascend the big mesa, but "Old Johnnie" had instructed us to
avoid the heavy sand by keeping to the base of Tucki Mountain. There
was a sort of track in some places, but mostly we ground among rocks
and made detours to avoid gullies too deep to cross. The base of the
mountain had looked smooth, instead it was cut by wide, deep washes
full of rolled-down boulders. For nine miles we skirted Tucki before
we began the ascent of the mesa itself. Not till then did we pass a
bench-mark indicating that at last we were as high as sea-level. Except
that the road around the mountain was rocky instead of sandy there was
very little difference between the morning's journey and the one across
Death Valley. The light and heat were intense and we suffered from the
same feeling of depression. Even when we began to ascend the mesa we
were hardly conscious of any relief. Though we climbed two thousand
feet that day we were still on the burning sands under the pitiless
sun. Everything burned, rocks were hot to the touch, the endless stony
ground was a hot floor. Tucki Mountain showed a dull red as though it
smoldered, and the hot blaze on the mountains beyond the great mesa was
smoke rising out of furnaces.
After passing the bench-mark we were in the midst of an immense space
far away from any mountains, toiling for miles up a stony barrenness
where only scattered sagebrush grew. The road was so washed out that
often no trace of it showed and the Worrier steered by intuition. The
wagon groaned and swayed, and Molly and Bill stumbled and sweated.
In the roughest places we led them. We all walked most of the day to
lighten their load. A long spur of Tucki Mountain reached up the mesa
several miles to the left, ending in a red promontory which we must go
around, and that point became our goal. We toiled and toiled, but it
was never any nearer. A quarter of an hour, a day, a year of putting
one foot heavily in front of the other, and we would look up expecting
some reward for so much labor, and the red promontory would be exactly
where it was before.