About three o'clock we came unexpectedly upon a little spring. It was in a green cleft between a red and a yellow hill where the water trickled over the rock into a charming basin. Eagerly we dipped in our cups. It was true! Here at last was a real mountain spring, very cold, tasteless, a miraculous gift from Heaven. We drank and drank. The Worrier unhitched Molly and Bill and they broke away from him to rush at the water. They did not stop drinking until the last drop was gone.
This bit of Paradise was a complete surprise. The map did not show the little spring, nor did the Worrier know of its existence. It was so tiny that doubtless it is often dry. Emigrant Springs itself, with a much more plentiful flow of water, was about a mile further on. There the canyon narrowed with steep, high sides broken into some beautifully shaped summits. The spring is only a few miles from a big abandoned mining camp called Skidoo and used to be an important one for desert travelers. Someone once built a shack, and nearby was a cave with a fireplace inside, also a corral, part of whose fence had since been used for firewood. Like all desert watering places the surroundings were littered with tin cans, old shoes and rusty iron. We know now what becomes of all the old shoes in the world; they are spirited away to the desert. An ancient government pamphlet that we had found blowing about in one of the shacks at Keane Wonder and carefully preserved describes very scientifically how to locate water, then throws science to the winds and says that the tin can is the best of all methods. When you find a pile of tin cans stop and search. It is surprising how quickly you cease to see the litter, provided it is sufficiently ancient not to be actively dirty. The desert has no foreground; you soon stop looking much for things near at hand and get the horizon-gazing habit. If a flower or a shining stone is at your feet you see it joyfully, but if it is a tin can it does not exist. There are too many far-off, enchanting things to look at. You are never unaware of the sky, nor the beautiful curves of the mountains; no forests nor roofs conceal them from you, and your eyes pass untroubled over small uglinesses.
We made our camp in the shelter of an immense rock that stood alone in the middle of the wash, and settled down for a long resting space. The desert was exhibiting her variety in monotony. Between the burning sands and this mountain coolness what a difference, and yet what an essential sameness! Here is the same glittering sand, the same colorful rocks, the same plants, the same bare, crumbling hills. The sun blazes with the same brightness, turning every projecting edge of rock and little leaf into a spot of light. The all-enveloping silence is the same. The distances shine with the same illusion.
All around Emigrant Springs are mountains from five to seven thousand feet high. One day was devoted to a stiff climb up to the abandoned mines at Skidoo, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. A trail started up from Emigrant Springs, but it looked very steep, so we went a longer way around intending to come down it. Part of the route lay over high ridges from which we saw the splendid mass of the snowy Panamints, now close at hand. We passed little patches of snow in the shadows of the rocks. The sky was a deep blue all day and the air cold with the mountain sting in it.
The town of Skidoo lay in a high valley shut off from a view by the surrounding hills. They were barren and made of crumbly yellow rock. The long narrow basin itself was covered with sagebrush like a blue carpet. The town had consisted of one wide street along which several buildings were still standing. An incredible number of stoves, broken chairs and cooking utensils were strewn about. The most imposing building had been the saloon, behind which a neatly piled wall of bottles, five feet high and several feet wide, testified to past good cheer. The Worrier said that four thousand people once had lived here. They had brought water twenty-eight miles in a pipe-line from a spring near Telescope Peak. During the war the pipe was taken out and sold to the government, but we could see the trench plainly, perfectly straight, leading off toward Mt. Baldy across high ridges. With the taking out of the water Skidoo died.
The place was littered with paper-covered books and old magazines. In one house we found a pile of copies of a work entitled "Mysterious Scotty, or the Monte Cristo of Death Valley." Needless to say we stole one, which became a treasure to be brought out in idle hours by the camp-fire. "Scotty" was a boon to the Worrier who did not hold much with the sort of literature that we carried around. Early in the expedition he had glanced over our library and preferred meditation. We had a few slim volumes of verse, "Leaves of Grass," some wild tales of Lord Dunsany's and a learned treatise on how to paint. This last helped us to keep up the fiction of artistic greatness.
From Skidoo we traversed the top of a long ridge from the precipitous end of which we had a superb view over Death Valley. We owed this to "Old Johnnie" who had told us to go there, for among the tumbled peaks of the Panamint Range around Skidoo you could wander a long time without getting a commanding view of the valley. The point from which we saw it that day was opposite Furnace Creek Ranch, but even with the glass we could not distinguish the green patch of the ranch, nor could we see the Eagle Borax Works lower down. The bottom looked like a white plain with brown streaks around and across it. Death Valley is always different. That afternoon there was no play of color, no magical mirage. From there, looking straight down seven thousand feet, it was ghastly, utterly unlike anything on the earth as most of us know her. It was like the valleys on the dead, bright moon when you look at them through a powerful telescope.
We stayed too long watching the shadow of the Panamints, as sharp and stark as a shadow on the moon, encroach on the white floor. Twilight had begun by the time we reached Skidoo again to hunt the trail down to Emigrant Springs. We tramped around the rough hills searching for it until darkness made it impossible to distinguish it even if we had found it. There below lay our camp. Could we have gone down a ridge or a canyon to it we would have defied the trail, but it was necessary to go crosswise over several of the ridges that buttress the mountain, and up and down their steep dividing canyons. Even the Worrier hesitated to attempt this in the dark. Getting lost is one of the easiest things you can do in desert mountains for they are very broken, flung down seemingly without plan, cut by deep, often precipitous gorges. The same old, tattered pamphlet that gives advice about tin cans also advises about getting lost. It says that persons not blessed with a good sense of locality had better find some other place than the desert for the "exercise of their talents." Standing on top of a mountain you think you know very well where to go, but when you get into those clefts among those hills that look all alike you find you do not know. Any moment you may meet a barrier to be climbed over with great labor or gone around at the risk of getting involved in little canyons leading off in the wrong direction.
There was nothing to do but skirt around the mountain and try to get back onto the path by which we had come. During the quest we had our reward and were glad. Just as night was closing in a shadow rose like a curtain beyond the mountain-tops that shut Death Valley from us. It was a blue shadow and a rose-colored shadow. It was both those colors and yet they were not merged to a purple. It seemed to rise straight up, a live thing, as though the spirit of the valley were greeting the stars. The beautiful apparition remained less than a minute; always after that we looked toward deep valleys at evening hoping to see it again, but we never saw it, though night made wonderful shadows and blue pools of darkness in them. Death Valley is a thing apart. It is a white terror whose soul is a miracle of rose and blue.
About an hour later we came upon the cabin of "Old Tom Adams," another old-timer guarding his own mine and Skidoo. He came out and made a great fuss about finding "ladies." He had heard of us before. He offered to make coffee, but a deep craving for more substantial food forbade any delay. He talked incessantly and would hardly let us go; no doubt we were the most exciting event for a long time. He described a way to get down the mountain by following the tracks of his burros. He swore we could not miss it, you just "fell down" right into Emigrant Springs. He went a little way with us to be sure we started down the right ridge; after that we "fell down" in about two hours and a half. It was the worst, the rockiest, the steepest series of hills and gullies we ever encountered. Presently the deceitful moon turned the bushes into white ghosts and fooled us about the angle of ledges. From time to time we saw burro tracks in the sand, but we suspect that a herd of wild burros pastures around there. The Worrier's opinion of "the old fool" was unmentionable, nor did it soothe him to suggest that the old man had tried to do his best.