yucca guarded tall spikes which bore aloft white, shining blossoms,
and the grotesque branches of the Joshua palms were tipped with
brightness like lighted candles. Everywhere high clumps of yellow
coreopsis rivaled the sun. Beyond the dry lake at the base of the
sand-ridge which had been so terrifying on our first drive through the
desert stood stately Easter lilies hung with great white bells. Easter
morning we went over there and gathered armfuls for our kind German
hosts. Their house and ours were abloom during our stay, for we could
no more resist gathering these amazing flowers than we could resist
picking up the many-colored stones. Every dish and bowl was full and
tin cans rescued from the dump were promoted to be vases.
The gallant little flowers in such a stern environment! They were
touchingly lovely, blooming wherever they had the smallest chance and
looking trustingly at the sun. It was as though we had never seen
flowers before, never really seen them.
Indeed, until we went on pilgrimage to the White Heart, we had never
seen the outdoors, never really seen it. How could we not see it when
the outdoors is always on the doorstep? We had thought we saw it, we
had talked about it, a place for pleasant dalliance when work inside
the walls was done, or a sort of glorified gymnasium to make the
blood race and the heart beat faster. The outdoors is the awe-full,
magnificent universe moving along, inexpressibly fearful and beautiful!
And we might have seen it anywhere! The drama is always going on with
its terror and beauty. The gentlest countryside is a part of it.
Everywhere the grim touches hands with the fair, storm alternates with
calm, flowers grow out of death, and the fairness, the calm and the
flowers are the stronger. Poets and artists know this when they step
across their thresholds in the morning--whence their unreasonable joy
at being alive--but most of us have to be shaken awake before we can
see what is in front of our eyes.
The desert shook us awake. We had come looking for mysteries and
"terrible fascinations" and found only the mystery of the old outdoors
and the terrible fascination of the old outdoors. Beauty pressing
around sorrow--the desert is simply a very forceful statement about
that.
For the adventure with the outdoors is the adventure with beauty. And
when you have that adventure the jealous walls, however engrossing
their contents, and they may be very interesting and amusing and
serious and exciting, can never bully you again. They have doors and
windows in them and beauty is around them like a garment. You and I,
unaccountably split off from the vast drama and blessedly able to be
aware of it for a little while, shall we let the din and bother inside
the walls, the frantic lunging at the still face of time, raise such a
dust in our eyes that we cannot see?
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know."
Every day while we rested at Silver Lake we looked the length of the
barren lake bed to the bright mirage at the base of the black mountain
that was no mountain at all, and northward over sandy emptiness to the
enchanted pathway leading behind the Avawatz. Fourteen of the still,
bright days of the desert were strung on the endless string before we
had to say good-by to our hosts and to the Worrier.
Never can we forget any of the people whom we met during our adventure
with the outdoors, neither the few whom we have mentioned in this
inadequate telling of it, nor the many whom we have not. They were all
unfailingly kind. It was very hard to part from our guide, and nothing
reconciled us to it except his cheerful promise to act as Official
Worrier again. Our hostess invited us to come any time and stay as long
as we liked, an invitation of which we have gladly availed ourselves.
We piled our baggage into the automobile, abandoned so long at Silver
Lake, and through a whole sunny day drove away from the White Heart.
The dim road led past sinister little craters that long ago spilled
ugly, black lava over the hills, through acres and acres of blue lupins
blown to waves like a sea, across two ranges of enchanted mountains and
down into and over the white Ivanpah Valley where the heavy sand made
the engine boil. Several times we left the car to walk on the savage,
torn-up hills made gentle by flowers. When the noise of the engine was
hushed the silence was full of the singing of birds.
In the rose and orange of evening we reached Needles on the bank of the
red Colorado River, and came out of the wild and lonely place onto the
great highway that joins the Atlantic and the Pacific. The sand and
rock trail follows the steel road of the Santa Fé. Transcontinental
trains roar past and pennants flutter on automobiles from Maine and
Florida, Michigan and Texas, Oregon and California. Dust clouds roll
over the edge of Mojave as America goes by. Some travelers look at
her curiously, some look longingly, some shudder, some pass with the
window shades pulled down. All the time she is singing on her rosy
mountain-tops and in her deep, hot valleys where the blaze of the sun
is white.
APPENDIX
" ... That part of California which lies to the south and east of the
southern inosculation of the Coast Range and the Sierra comprises an
area of fully 50,000 sq.m. For the most part it is excessively dry
and barren. The Mohave Desert--embracing Kern, Los Angeles and San
Bernardino, as also a large part of San Diego, Imperial and Riverside
counties--belong to the 'Great Basin.' ... The Mohave Desert is about
2,000 ft. above the sea in general altitude. The southern part of
the Great Basin region is vaguely designated the Colorado desert.
In San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties a number of creeks or
so called rivers, with beds that are normally dry, flow centrally
toward the desert of Salton Sink or 'Sea'; this is the lowest part of
a large area that is depressed below the level of the sea, at Salton
263 ft., and 287 ft. at the lowest point. In 1900 the Colorado River
(q.v.) was tapped south of the Mexican boundary for water wherewith
to irrigate land in the Imperial Valley along the Southern Pacific
Railway, adjoining Salton Sea. The river enlarged the Canal, and
finding a steeper gradient than that to its mouth, was diverted into
the Colorado Desert, flooding Salton Sea, and when the break in this
river was closed for the second time in February, 1907, though much of
its water still escaped through minor channels and by seepage, a lake
more than 400 sq.m. in area was left. A permanent 60 ft. masonry dam
was completed in July, 1907.
" ... Death Valley surpasses for combined heat and aridity any
meteorological stations on earth where regular observations are taken,
although for extremes of heat it is exceeded by places in the Colorado
desert. The minimum daily temperature in summer is rarely below 70°
F. and often above 96° F. (in the shade), while the maximum may for
days in succession be as high as 120° F. A record of six months (1891)
showed an average daily relative humidity sometimes falls to 5. Yet
the surrounding country is not devoid of vegetation. The hills are
very fertile when irrigated, and the wet season develops a variety of
perennial herbs, shrubs and annuals."
The Encyclopædia Britannica: "California."
"It is often said that America has no real deserts. This is true in
the sense that there are no regions such as are found in Asia and
Africa where one can travel a hundred miles at a stretch and scarcely
see a sign of vegetation--nothing but barren gravel, graceful, wavy
sand dunes, hard, wind-swept clay, or still harder rock salt broken
into rough blocks with upturned edges. In the broader sense of the
term, however, America has an abundance of deserts--regions which
bear a thin cover of bushy vegetation but are too dry for agriculture
without irrigation.... In the United States the deserts lie almost
wholly between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, which
keep out any moisture that might come from either the west or the
east. Beginning on the north with the sagebrush plateau of southern
Washington, the desert expands to a width of seven hundred miles
in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah. In southern
California and Arizona the sagebrush gives place to smaller forms like
the salt-bush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect. Next comes
the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south into Mexico. One
of the notable features of the desert is the extreme heat of certain
portions. Close to the Nevada border in southern California, Death
Valley, 250 feet below sea-level, is the hottest place in America.
There alone among the American regions familiar to the writer does
one have the feeling of intense, overpowering aridity which prevails
so often in the deserts of Arabia and Central Asia. Some years ago a
Weather Bureau thermometer was installed in Death Valley at Furnace
Creek, where the only flowing water in more than a hundred miles
supports a depressing little ranch. There one or two white men,
helped by a few Indians, raise alfalfa, which they sell at exorbitant
prices to deluded prospectors searching for riches which they never
find. Though the terrible heat ruins the health of the white men in a
year or two, so that they have to move away, they have succeeded in
keeping a thermometer record for some years. No other properly exposed
out-of-door thermometer in the United States, or perhaps in the world,
is so familiar with a temperature of 100° F. or more. During the period
of not quite fifteen hundred days from the spring of 1911 to May, 1915,
a maximum temperature of 100° F. or more was reached in five hundred
and forty-eight days, or more than one-third of the time. On July 10,
1913, the mercury rose to 134° F. and touched the top of the tube. How
much higher it might have gone no one can tell. That day marks the
limit of temperature yet reached in this country according to official
records. In the summer of 1914 there was one night when the thermometer
dropped only to 114° F., having been 128° F. at noon. The branches of
a pepper-tree whose roots had been freshly watered wilted as a flower
wilts when broken from the stalk."
--The Chronicles of America.--Volume I. "The Red Man's Continent,"
by Ellsworth Huntington.
End of Project Gutenberg's The White Heart of Mojave, by Edna Brush Perkins