Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/522

514 of spiders. One cannot climb over them without being covered with the webs and distributing hundreds of the little insects. But few bushes grow upon the tufa, for the rainfall here is very slight, and they are clearly revealed in all their nakedness.

Exceedingly barren are the shores of this great lake, except at two points where springs furnish water for irrigation. The Truckee River has rich bottoms along its lower course, occupied by Indians who seem to be fairly well civilized.

Although the lake is so isolated, its scenery is remarkable in the extreme, and it deserves to be better known. More plainly than is usually the case, the history of the ancient lake which occupied these valleys is recorded on the slopes of the surrounding mountains and in the strange tufa deposits which rise out of the waters of its modern representative, Pyramid Lake. Rising and falling with the different seasons, the lake seems to have slight hold upon life. If the Truckee River should be entirely diverted to Winnemucca Lake, the waters of Pyramid Lake would undoubtedly shrink to insignificant proportions. The same effect would be brought about if the aridity of the Great Basin region should increase, and the precipitation upon the Sierra Nevada become less than at present.

Let us hope that, in the swinging of the pendulum from arid to more moist conditions and back again, the lakes of the Great Basin are not doomed to extinction, but that they may again increase in size, repeating the conditions of the past.