"That's some rain," he admitted, "but maybe it ain't wetting the sand. I've been in storms like that when the water all evaporated before it got down."
"But it must rain sometimes and the water get down," I objected to both of them, "for Shady Myrick said that he had seen the valley full of flowers."
"I've seen 'em," he assented, with a sudden eager lighting of his face—"yes!"
They did not happen to bloom while we were there but we believe in them. Anything might happen, anything could be true in that terrible, bright place.
VI The Strangest Farm in the World
On the fourth day we bade "Old Johnnie" farewell, and descended into the quivering white basin. The next camp was to be at Furnace Creek Ranch, the irrigated farm in the bottom of the valley established long ago in connection with the original borax-works of the Twenty-Mule-Team brand. The water for irrigation is brought down in a ditch from Furnace Creek in the canyon between the Funeral Mountains and the Black Mountains and the ranch is a large, green patch on the sand. In any ordinary place, or in any ordinary light it would be a conspicuous feature of the landscape; but, though "Old Johnnie" had pointed it out so carefully, we could never distinguish it nor could we see it during our approach that day until we were within half a mile of it. Throughout the journey the valley-floor presented the same unbroken, white expanse.
For several miles our way continued down the mesa. Here was no road, only a lurching and grinding down a rocky wash, crawling over the edge in the hope of something better and returning again to the ills we knew. It seemed as though the slender-spoked wheels must collapse under the strain. Our tower of baggage swayed dangerously. The Official Worrier was a skillful driver and he needed to be, not only on this day but on several subsequent ones which surpassed it. About noon we reached the road that leads from Salt Creek at the southern end of Mesquite Valley across the northern end of Death Valley and along its eastern side to the ranch. This road was an improvement on the uncharted wash. There were no rocks in it; but it soon became sandy, two deep ruts meandering off toward the white floor.
Presently we came to its edge and skirted the swamp of the Armagosa River, the morass of mud and quicksands which fills the whole bottom of the valley, an immense expanse covered with large white crystals and a powdery substance that looks like coarse salt. The valley probably was once the bed of a salt-lake whose slow evaporation left the thick alkali crust. The ruts were very deep and the ground soft to walk on, spongy and hummocky. The Worrier said that if the wagon were to get out of the ruts it easily might be mired. "Old Johnnie" told us that in some places in the middle of the bog a team or a man walking could be sucked down out of sight and one of his tales was of finding a dead man's face looking up at him out of the ground.