The eastern wall of the valley is not so high, but is hardly less impressive. The Funeral Mountains are steel-blue with layers of white rock near their summits. Both the mountains and the valley were named because of tragedies down on that white floor during pioneering and prospecting days. It is impossible to get the details of the stories from the old-timers, each has a different version and no one is very clear even about his own. One story is of a party of emigrants, men, women, and children, on the way to the gold-fields with all their household goods, who entered the valley by mistake and could not find a way out; another is of a party who were attacked by Indians and fought in a circle they made of their wagons until the last man was killed. The remains of the wagons are said to be buried in the sand near a place called Stovepipe Wells. We never could learn the exact location, though on a later trip we met a man who said that he had once actually found them, and that he had seen Indians around there wearing jewelry and using utensils which they could only have obtained from the white man sometime in the fifties. There are also stories of individual prospectors who perished on the burning sands. It does not matter which particular tragedy fastened such names on this region of celestial day, they commemorate all whose last sight of the earth was that lonely splendor.
The Funeral Range is separated by a deep canyon from the Black Mountains which continue the eastern wall of the valley. This wall is from five to six thousand feet high, jutting into the basin in great promontories as mountains jut into a rock-ringed lake. The range across the southern end is not so high and was half hidden by an opalescent haze. All the time we were in the valley that haze persisted. Only rarely and for short periods could we see any detail in the depths of the hot basin, though the foreground sparkled in the stark, clear air. The Imperial Valley and Death Valley are always hung with misty curtains.
A long, long slope leads from the rock promontory from which we first saw the valley down to that shimmering pit. It is very rocky, cut by washes and sparsely covered with sagebrush and greasewood. Occasional little yellow or blue hills rise like islands from blue-green waves. The ground is covered with little stones of every conceivable color, which flash back the sunlight from their polished surfaces. Unfamiliar green and purple stones lie around, and bright red stones, and a stone of a strange orange-color like flame. A mass of this is what we must have seen at Saratoga Springs on the mountain that bled. The impulse to pick up specimens was irresistible. This proved to be the curse of walking over the bright mosaics. Each little stone was of a color or texture more alluring than the last until our pockets became unbearably heavy. Every resting-time was spent in trying to decide which ones to throw away, but as we could not possibly throw one away on the same day that we picked it up, this was a fruitless occupation.
About noon we lunched in the shade of one of the little hill-islands. During the descent the heat had steadily increased and the sun shone with white, blinding intensity. The Official Worrier grew expansive and happy. He described himself as a "desert rat," and said that the hot brilliance suited him entirely. He called it a pleasant, warm day. Charlotte and I were continually looking at the little blue spots of shade behind a bush or projecting rock to rest our eyes. We could no longer look away over the valley, objects merged and vanished there. One of my recurring dreams since childhood is of trying to walk or run in a light so dazzling that I could not keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time. That day my dream strikingly came true. Everywhere bright heat-waves ran over the ground. The surface of stones and the tips of leaves glittered dazzlingly. It was probably no hotter than it had been at Saratoga, but the reflection of light from the immense white bottom of the valley was an almost unbearable brightness.
Our destination was an abandoned gold-mine on the side of the Funeral 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.
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.