Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/490

 tions on the map, but these are rarely more than signal-stations where the locomotive, like the passengers, stops to slake its thirst at one of the series of artesian wells.

The plain is not of great extent laterally. Black and purplish mountains are always in sight, and spurs cross the track. Bowlders and pebbles are scattered thickly on the surface at first, among patches of bunch-grass. Then, near Seven Palms, the jaws of the black and purple mountains open and receive us into the genuine desert. It is strewn with bowlders still, but is itself a waste of drifting-white sand, with large dunes and hills of sand. One might be riding on the shores of Coney Island or Long Branch.

A singular depression below the level of the sea for a hundred miles, and at its lowest point nearly three hundred feet, is traversed. At Dos Palmas, in the very bottom of it, a board shanty, covered with signs in amateurish lettering, indicating that it is a saloon, stands entirely alone. Surely the bar-keeper must consume his own drinks, and lead an existence unprecedented among his kind. No; a horseman in Mexican accoutrements dashes across the plain—though where he should dash from, and how he should ride anything, here in the bottom of the sea, but the skeleton, say, of a dolphin or a sea-horse, is a mystery—pulls up, and enters. And it appears, on a better acquaintance with Dos Palmas, that a stage starts every other day for points on the Colorado River, and Prescott, the capital of Arizona Territory, and that this is but a faint survival of bustle which once reigned here before the advent of the railroad. The route of the Southern Overland Mail then came this way, and long trains of immigrant and freight wagons, carrying water in casks for two and three days' supply, were passing continually over these wastes.

Nothing, on general principles, would appear more de-