He understood that and his face grew kind.
"You get used to it," he said gently.
It was refreshing to meet a man who looked into your feminine eyes and said: "You can do it." It made us feel that we had to do it. We spent a whole day on a hilltop near Joburg looking longingly over the sinister, beautiful mountains and trying to get up our courage. Happily we were spared the decision. Two young miners at Atolia sent word that they were going over to Silver Lake in a few days and would be glad to have us follow them. Perhaps it was Shady's doing. We accepted the invitation with gratitude.
We loafed around Joburg during the intervening days. The stern, red mountains were full of mine-holes, but most of the mines were not being worked and the three towns were dead. Everywhere on the Mojave Desert mining activity had fallen off markedly after the beginning of the war. The population of the three towns had dwindled away and the few people who remained did so because they still had faith in the red mountain and hoped that the place might boom again. The big hotel at Joburg, which was attractively built around a court and which could accommodate twenty to thirty guests, was empty save for us. We looked at and admired innumerable specimens of ore. They were everywhere, in the hotel-office, in the general store, in the windows of the houses. Everyone had some shining bit of the earth which he treasured. We bought some of Shady Myrick's cut stones and received presents of gold ore and fine pieces of bloodstone and jasper in the rough.
We enlisted the services of the garage to get our car in the best possible condition for the journey across the uncharted desert. The general opinion held that it was too heavy for such traveling; the next time we should bring a Ford. When the two young men appeared early on the appointed morning with a light Ford truck dismantled of everything except the essential machinery they also looked over our big, red car questioningly. They feared we would get stuck in the sand and jammed on rocks; but generously admitted themselves in the wrong when, later in the day, they stuck and we did not. Of course they had the advantage, for we would probably have remained where we stopped, while the four of us were able to lift and push the little truck out of its troubles. It was the most disreputable-looking car we had ever encountered even among Fords, a moving junk-pile loaded with miscellaneous shabby baggage, tools, and half-worn-out extra tires. Our new friends matched it in appearance. They looked as tough as the Wild West story-tellers would have us believe that most miners are. We have found out that most miners are not, though we hate to shatter that dear myth of the movies. If you were to meet on any civilized road the outfit which we followed that day from seven o'clock in the morning until dark you would instantly take to the ditch and give it the right of way.
The drive was wild and fearful and wonderful. The bandits led us over and around mountains, down washes and across the beds of dry lakes. Often there was no sign of a road, at least no sign that was apparent to us. On the desert you must travel one of two ways, either along the water-courses or across them. It is strange to find a country dying of thirst cut into a rough chaos by water-channels. Rain on the Mojave is a cloud-burst. The water rushes down from the rocky heights across the long, sloping mesas, digging innumerable trenches, until it reaches a main stream-bed leading to the lowest point in the valley. When you go in the same direction as the water you usually follow up or down the dry stream-beds, or washes, but when you cross the watershed you must crawl as best you can over the parallel trenches which are sometimes small and close together like chuck-holes in a bad country road, and sometimes wide and deep. One of the uses of a shovel, which we found out on that day, is to cut down the banks of washes that are too high and steep for a car to cross.
Most of the mountains of the Mojave are separate masses rather than continuous ranges. Between them the mesas curve, sometimes falling into deep valleys. Instead of foothills, long gradual slopes always lead up to the rock battlements, the result of the wearing down of countless ages, the wide foundations that give the ancient mountains an appearance of great repose. They are solid and everlasting. The valleys are like great bowls curving up gently to sudden, perpendicular sides. The mesas always look smooth, beautiful sweeps that completely satisfy the eye. It rests itself upon them.
When the valleys are deep they usually contain a dry lake, baked mud of a white, yellow, or brownish-purple color. Crossing dry lakes is a curious experience. They never look very wide, but are often several miles across. You need a whole new adjustment of ideas of distance on the desert for the air is so clear that distant objects look stark and near. What you judge to be half a mile usually turns out to be five, and four miles is certainly eighteen. We were always deceived about distances until we trained ourselves a little by picking out some point ahead, guessing how far it was, and measuring it with the cyclometer. Dry lakes are not only deceitful about their size, but also about their nature. Along the edges is a strange glistening effect as though water were standing under the shore. Often the rocks and bushes are reflected in it upside down, and if the lake is large enough the illusion of water is perfect. You drive across with a queer effect of standing still, for there is not so much as a stone to mark your progress. It is like being in a boat on an actual lake. The sunlight is very dazzling on the white and yellow expanses and the heat-shimmer makes the ground seem to heave. Sometimes you have the illusion of going steeply up-hill.
Nothing grows in the lake-beds, but the mesas are covered with the usual desert-growths, sagebrush, greasewood and many varieties of cacti. A view from one of the ridges is a look into a magical country. Only enchantment could produce the pale, lovely colors that lie along the mountains and the endless variety of blues and pinks and sage-greens which flow over the wide, sagebrush-covered mesas. The dry lake far down in the bottom of the valley shines. The illusion of water at its further edges is a glistening brightness. It is hard to tell where the baked mud ends and the sand begins. It is hard to tell what are the real colors and shapes of things. If you can linger a while they change. The valley never loses its immense repose, but it changes its colors as though they were garments, and it changes the relations of things to each other. That violet crag looks very big and important while you are toiling up the mesa, but just as you are crossing the ridge and look back for the last time you see that the wine-red hill beside it is really much larger.
For a short distance we followed the old trail over which the borax used to be hauled from Death Valley. The familiar name, "Twenty-Mule-Team Borax," was touched with romance. Out of the bottom of that baffling, inaccessible valley, through a pass by the high Panamint Mountains where it is sixty miles between the water-holes, and over this weird country unlike any country we had dreamed existed in the world, this prosaic commodity was hauled by strings of laboring mules. They tugged through the sand day after day and their drivers made camp-fires under the stars. We can never see that name now on a package of kitchen-borax, humbly standing on the shelf, without going again in imagination over those two old, lonely ruts.