Close by is Assembly Hall, also of white granite, and of Gothic architecture. It has seats for 2,500 people, and is most remarkable for the costly fresco work on the ceiling, which illustrates scenes from Mormon history, including the alleged discovery of the golden plates and their delivery to Prophet Smith by the Angel Moroni.
All around this remarkable city are sights of surpassing beauty. Great Salt Lake itself ought to be regarded as one of the wonders of the world. Although an inland sea, with an immense area intervening between it and the nearest ocean, its waters are much more brackish and salty than those of either the Atlantic or the Pacific, and its specific gravity is far greater. Experts tell us that the percentage of salt and soda is six times as great as in the waters of the Atlantic, and one great advantage of living in its vicinity is the abundance of good, pure salt, which is produced by natural evaporation on its banks. It would be interesting, if it were possible, to explain why it is that the water is so salty. Various reasons have been advanced from time to time for this phenomenon, but none of them are sufficiently practical or tangible to be of great interest to the unscientific reader.
It is just possible that this wonderful lake may in course of time disappear entirely. Some years ago its width was over 40 miles on an average, and its length was very much greater. Now it barely measures 100 miles from end to end and the width varies from 10 to 60 miles. In the depth the gradual curtailment has been more apparent. At one time the average depth was many hundred feet, and several soundings of 1,000 feet were taken, with the result reported, in sailors' parlance, of "No bottom." At the present time the depth varies from 40 to 100 feet, and appears to be lessening steadily, presumably because of the extraordinary deposit of solid matter from the very dense waters with which it is filled.
The lake is a bathers' paradise, and the arrangements for bathing from Garfield Beach are like everything else in the land of the Mormons, extraordinary to a degree. In one year there were nearly half a million bathers accommodated at the four principal resorts, and so rapidly are these bathing resorts and establishments multiplied, that the day is not distant when every available site on the eastern shore of the lake will be appropriated for the purpose. As a gentleman who has bathed in this lake again and again says, it seems preposterous to speak of the finest sea-bathing on earth a thousand miles from the ocean, although the bathing in Great Salt Lake infinitely surpasses anything of the kind on either the Atlantic or Pacific coasts.
The water contains many times more salt, and much more soda, sulphur, magnesia, chlorine, bromine and potassium than any ocean water on the globe. It is powerful in medicinal virtues, curing or benefiting many forms of rheumatism, rheumatic gout, dyspepsia, nervous disorders and cutaneous diseases, and it acts like magic on the hair of those unfortunates whose tendencies are to bald-headedness. It is a prompt and potent tonic and invigorant of body and mind, and then there is no end of fun in getting acquainted with its peculiarities. A first bath in it is always as good as a circus, the bather being his or her own trick mule. The specific gravity is but a trifle less than that of the Holy Land Dead Sea.
The human body will not and cannot sink in it. You can walk out in it where it is fifty feet deep, and your body will stick up out of it like a fishing-cork from the shoulders upward. You can sit down in it perfectly secure where it is fathoms deep. Men lie on top of it with their arms under their heads and smoking cigars. Its buoyancy is indescribable and unimaginable. Any one can float upon it at the first trial; there is nothing to do but lie down gently upon it and float.
But swimming is an entirely different matter. The moment you begin to "paddle your own canoe," lively and--to the lookers-on--mirth-provoking exercises ensue. When you stick your hand under to make a stroke your feet decline to stay anywhere but on top; and when, after an exciting tussle with your refractory pedal extremities, you again get them beneath the surface, your hands fly out with the splash and splutter of a half-dozen flutter wheels. If, on account of your brains being heavier than your heels, you chance to turn a somersault, and your head goes under, your heels will pop up like a pair of frisky, dapper ducks.
You cannot keep more than one end of yourself under water at once, but you soon learn how to wrestle with its novelties, and then it becomes a thing of beauty and a joy for any summer day. The water is delightful to the skin, every sensation is exhilarating, and one cannot help feeling in it like a gilded cork adrift in a jewel-rimmed bowl of champagne punch. In the sense of luxurious ease with which it envelops the bather, it is unrivaled on earth. The only approximation to it is in the phosphorescent waters of the Mosquito Indian coast.
The water does not freeze until the thermometric mercury tumbles down to eighteen degrees above zero, or fourteen below the ordinary freezing point. It is clear as crystal, with a bottom of snow-white sand, and small objects can be distinctly seen at a depth of twenty feet. There is not a fish or any other living thing in all the 2,500 to 3,000 square miles of beautiful and mysterious waters, except the yearly increasing swarms of summer bathers. Not a shark, or a stingaree, to scare the timid swimmer or floater; not a minnow, or a frog, a tadpole, or a pollywog--nothing that lives, moves, swims, crawls or wiggles. It is the ideal sea-bathing place of the world.