Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/674

654 dessert, he need not envy the heroes of Oriental story, who were carried across dreadful solitudes in a single night on the backs of flying genii. Ours brought us over three thousand miles to the Mohave Desert. It was growing hotter and hotter when the train stopped in the midst of vast sand wastes a little after midnight. Roused from our sleep, we stepped on to the brown sand, and saw our luxurious car roll away in the distance, experiencing a transition from the conditions of civilization to those almost of barbarism, as sharp as could well be imagined. We commenced our slow toil northward with a thermometer at 110° in the shade, if any shade there be in the shadeless desert, which seemed to be chiefly inhabited by rattlesnakes of an ashen-gray color, and a peculiarly venomous bite. There is no water save at the rarest intervals, and the soil at a distance seems as though strewed with sheets of salt, which aids the delusive show of the mirage. These are, in fact, the ancient beds of dried-up salt lakes or dead seas, some of them being below the level of the ocean; and such a one on our right, though only about twenty miles wide, has earned the name of "Death Valley," from the number of human beings who have perished in it. Formerly an emigrant train, when emigrants crossed the continent in caravans, had passed through the great Arizona deserts in safety until, after their half-year's journey, their eyes were gladdened by the snowy peaks of the Sierras looking delusively near. The goal of their long toil seemed before them; only this one more valley lay between, and into this they descended, thinking to cross it in a day—but they never crossed it. Afterward the long line of wagons was found with the skeletons of the animals in the harness, and by them those of men, women, and little children dead of thirst, and some relics of the tragedy remained at the time of our journey. I cite this as an indirect evidence of the phenomenal dryness of the region—a dryness which, so far, served our object, which was, in part, to get rid as much as possible of that water vapor which is so well known to be a powerful absorber of the solar heat.

Everything has an end, and so had that journey, which finally brought us to the goal of our long travel, at the foot of the highest peak of the Sierras, Mount Whitney, which rose above us in tremendous precipices, that looked hopelessly insurmountable and wonderfully near. The whole savage mountain-region, in its slow rises from the west and its descent to the desert plains in the east, is more like the chain called the Apennines, in the moon, than anything I know on the earth. The summits are jagged peaks like Alpine "needles," looking in the thin air so delusively near that, coming on such a scene unprepared, one would almost say they were large gray stones a few fields off, with an occasional little white patch on the top, that might be a handkerchief or a sheet of paper dropped there. But the telescope showed that the seeming stones were of the height of many Snowdons piled on one another, and the white patches occasional snow-fields, looking how