THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE
All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice, and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments, and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the efforts of modern science to read them.
Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them, wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often in very early light there are strange suggestions of——dunes and boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided. Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
SHASTA—SNOW CLOUDS
Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink. For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the abrupt landward fall of waves.
Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, Pinus flexilis, all the way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With it, but at lower levels to which the flexilis will never come, is found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the food-crop of the wild tribes. But the piñon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the slightest invitation.