V Entering Death Valley
The way to Death Valley from Beatty is across a shallower valley and through Daylight Pass at an elevation of 4,317 feet. First the road winds down around small, rough hills, at whose base the deserted town of Ryolite is situated. Ryolite is what remains of a mining boom. It is pushed into a cove of a rose-colored mountain—but desert mountains change their hues so often that it may not always be rose. Ryolite is a typical American ruin. Its boom was very brief. The town sprang up over-night. Money was poured in. Water was brought for miles in a pipe-line, a railroad from Beatty begun, and permanent buildings erected—it had the pride of a "thirty thousand dollar hotel," and a bank to match. Immense energy and enthusiasm of youth, middle-aged greed, too, with its eye on the immediate main chance, went into its making. No doubt some people profited by the building of Ryolite. It was a tumult of "American initiative"—then it did not pay. It is easy to picture the promoters, their important hurry, their "up-to-date methods," their big talk. It is easy to picture the investors too. Nearly everybody who has money to invest buys stock in a gold mine once. Great hopes converged on the desert here from many a board-sidewalked town and prairie-farm; futures were built on it. There is a throb in the throat for Ryolite, fading into the mountain, its corrugated-iron roofs rusting red like the hills. The desert is licking the wound with her sandy tongue until not even a scar will remain. Sooner or later she heals all the little scratches men make on her surface.
The dead town faced a wide valley stretching like a green meadow to the opposite mountains. The thick sagebrush melted together into a smooth sward over which cloud-shadows floated. The sun evoked lovely, changing color-tones from it, like a musician playing upon his instrument, making harmonics of violet and brown and sage-green flow beneath a melody of pure blue. A perfectly straight road cut a white line through the meadow. The distance was ten miles, but no one unaccustomed to the clear air of the desert would guess it to be more than three. The road appeared level with a slight rise under the western mountains which had strong, dark outlines on the sky. They looked purple and their lower masses kept emerging from the main range and fading again as the shadows circled.
It took Molly and Bill a long time to travel the straight, white line. By turn we drove and walked, as the three of us could not ride in the wagon at once. Already the superiority of this mode of travel over Fords was being demonstrated. We felt the simple bigness of the desert, and were intimate with the indigo shadow under each little bush, and the bright-colored stones; we had time to make digressions to some new cactus or strange-looking rock while Molly and Bill plodded on. For hours we crossed the valley, hardly seeming to progress. The same landscape was always before us, yet we were in the midst of a changing pageant. Soon Ryolite was lost in a mass of pale rose and blue that seemed like a gate to another world. The knowledge that the mountains were made of dull-red, crumbling rock, and that only Beatty lay behind them could not destroy the illusion. It grew fairer as we left it. The dark mountains in front became formidable silhouettes as the afternoon sun inclined toward them. We could never quite see the canyon by which we were to reach the pass; several times we thought we saw it, only to lose it again in the subtleties of shifting shadows.
THE OUTFIT
Soon after crossing the middle of the valley the road began a long, brutal ascent. Mile after mile it steadily climbed until the sweat made furrows in the shaggy coats of Molly and Bill; but to us, walking ahead of the wagon, the valley looked level as before, and only our greater exertion convinced us of the rise. Here was one of the characteristic mesas of the Mojave; nothing is quite flat there except the narrow bottoms of the valleys. Suddenly the road reached the outposts of the mountain and became much steeper through the sandy wash of a canyon. The walls on either side gradually grew higher and the sand deeper. The ungainly load proved almost too much for the desert-proof steeds. At times we all three had to push, and we often had to stop to rest. Night came while we were still toiling upward. It was cold, and a bitter wind blew between the walls. During one of the halts the Worrier gathered up some bits of wood by the roadside, the remains of a ruined shack, and thrust them under the cinch-ropes.
"We'll need them," he said, buttoning his inadequate coat to the chin. "We're in luck."