VII The Burning Sands
Every day that we stayed in Death Valley seemed more awful than the last. From ten o'clock in the morning until four in the afternoon we existed in a blind torpor. Eyes and brain and pumping heart could not bear it. At noon we always planned to leave immediately, we panted to escape; then the enchantment would begin and we would forget all the plans. Soon, however, it became evident that we must get up into the coolness of the mountains on one side or the other of the burning basin, for there was no such thing as becoming acclimated. In the stupor in which we lived the plans we made were extremely incoherent. We only knew that the mantle of snow on the peaks of the Panamints, so serene above the quivering heat of the valley, was the most desirable thing on earth. To reach it with the wagon we had to circle the northern end of the morass, cross the low ridge into the Mesquite Valley and go up the great mesa leading to Emigrant Pass behind the mountains. There we would bury ourselves in the cold, wet snow, and rub it on our faces and fling it about, strong again and able to laugh at midday. The Worrier pooh-poohed this plan when it finally emerged, for snow has no allurement for a "desert rat." He suggested that we go on up the canyon in which we were camped and thus quickly escape, but we refused to consider that. We had come for the purpose of knowing the feel of the valley and we must travel over the burning sands.
The Worrier was amenable; he always was, but he liked to be persuaded. We went back to Furnace Creek Ranch from the camp in the canyon and stocked ourselves with hay and drinking-water, as we would find no more good water until we reached Emigrant Springs some fifty miles away. The journey over that difficult country would take the better part of four days. Two of the camps would be by so-called "bad water," which, however, animals can drink—the first at Cow Creek not far from the ranch, and the second at Salt Creek in the southern end of Mesquite Valley. The third would be a "dry camp," somewhere on the big mesa we had seen from the Keane Wonder Mine.
Leaving the ranch rather late on the same day we passed the old borax-works again, wound round the white and sulphur-colored hill through the spongy, borax-encrusted ground and along the edge of the sandy mesa where it begins to rise from the level bottom of the valley. Cow Creek is a little green spot at the base of the Funeral Mountains about two miles from the road. Though it is near the ranch we stopped there in order to break the long pull from Furnace Creek to Salt Creek. In Death Valley every blazing mile is to be reckoned with and it is worth while to shorten a day's journey from twenty miles to sixteen. No track led to Cow Creek from the road, and the mesa, which looked quite level, turned out to be as steep as usual. It was broken by little washes and thinly covered with brush. Bumping over it under the hot sun we felt again as though we were in the midst of an interminable monotony. The mountain seemed unattainable. Charlotte and I, suffering from the usual lassitude and complete lack of ambition, wanted to stop and camp on the sand beside a large mesquite, the only thing anywhere that cast a big enough shadow to sit down in, and we had a sharp argument with the Worrier.
THE ALKALI BOTTOM OF DEATH VALLEY
"You can't do that," he said. "It don't matter so much to-day, the water ain't far, but to-morrow you got to go on and you better do it now. When we start you've got to get there, or we don't start."
That was unanswerable and we dragged ourselves on until we reached a large rock near the spring with a square of blue darkness beside it. He was satisfied with our endeavor and let us make camp there while he took the horses to the spring. Cow Creek is chiefly memorable for another argument, a long, warm debate as to whether or not Molly and Bill could haul the outfit up the four-thousand-foot rise to Emigrant Springs. Charlotte maintained that they could not. She based her argument entirely on the appearance of Molly and Bill and she had a good one; but I, inspired by the band of snow on the tops of the Panamints and the mountain-climber's zeal, met it with spirit. I said that Molly and Bill could do it because they were "desert-proof Indian horses." The Worrier lay at full length on the sand, apparently lost to the world. I demanded what he thought about it. He replied sleepily that you "never can tell 'til you try." All the time we were in the valley we argued, and it is to the credit of all three of us that the arguments never degenerated into quarrels. Our nerves were very near the surface. Everything was difficult to do, packing and unpacking, cooking, shaking the sand out of the blankets, hitching-up, getting anywhere, gathering brush for our poor little fires. We all did the minimum of work, and the desert demands very little of the camper-out, but under the weight that seemed to be always pressing down on us that little was hard even for the Worrier.
Next morning we arose with the dawn and hastened to get underway during the cool hours. The road lay over miles and miles of sand, dotted in some places with sad-looking brush and streaked sometimes with the white borax deposit. As always, the morning was radiant. The valley was beautiful, wrapped in its lonely silence, and for the first few hours Charlotte and I forgot our discomforts in the circle of high mountains, blue and red in the sunshine, and the clean sweep of the sand; but by noon we could not see anything and had to ride ignominiously in the wagon with our eyes on the very tiny oblong shadow that traveled beside it. Charlotte had dark glasses, but she seemed to suffer as much as I, who lived again through the nightmare of my childhood's dream. A hot haze lay over all the distances, though the air was clear, and the nearby little stones and bushes blazed. The wagon crawled on, the sand falling in bright showers from the slowly turning wheels, until Molly and Bill stopped. We shook the reins with what energy we had left, and the Worrier came up and shouted and threw stones, but they only looked around at us pathetically.