Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/342

324 is a strip of sand, yellow where it can be seen, incrusted with flakes of salt like the icing of a plum-cake, and bearing marks of submergence in the season of the spring freshets. At the water's edge is a broken black line of a peculiar drift, which stands boldly out from the snowy whiteness around. Where my sketch was taken I looked as through a doorway, whose staples were two detached masses of stone. On the right rose an irregular heap of conglomerate and sandstone, attached to the ledge behind, and leaning forward as if about to fall. On the left, the "Black Rock," which can be seen as a dot from the city, a heap of flint conglomerate, imbedded in slaty, burnt, and altered clay, formed the terminating bluff to a neck of light sand and dark stone.

Before proceeding to our picnic, I will briefly resume the history and geography of this Mare Mortuum. The Baron de la Hontan, the French governor of Placentia, in Newfoundland, about 1690, heard from Indians of a Great Salt Water, which he caused to disembogue through a huge river into the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Like the Lake Tanganyika, in Central Africa, it was arrayed in the garb of fable, 800 leagues of length, 30 of breadth, with "100 towns about it," like Mr. Cooley's highly imaginative "Zanganica," and navigated in large boats by the savage Mozeemleks, who much remind one of the old semi-mythical "Mono-moezi." Doubtless many a trapper and obscure trader has since that time visited it; a name or two has been found upon the adjacent rocks, but those were braves who, to speak metaphorically, lived before the age of Agamemnon. In 1845, Colonel Frémont, then engaged with his second expedition, made a partial flying survey, which, in 1849–50, was scientifically completed by Captain Howard Stansbury.

In geologic ages the lake occupied the space between the Sierra Madre on the east, and the ranges of Goose Creek and Humboldt River on the west. The length is roughly computed at 500 miles from north to south, the breadth from 850 to 500, and the area at 175,000 square miles. The waters have declined into the lowest part of the basin by the gradual upheaval of the land, in places showing thirteen successive steps or benches. A freshet of a few yards would submerge many miles of flat shore, and a rise of 650 feet would in these days convert all but the highest peaks of the surrounding eminences into islands and islets, the kanyons into straits, creeks, and sea-arms, and the bluffs into slightly elevated shores. Popular opinion asserts that the process of desiccation is going on at the rate of about half a mile in ten years. But the limits of beach and drift line laid down by Captain Stansbury are still well defined, and the shrinking of the volume may be ranked with its "sinking"—like the sink of the Humboldt and other rivers—an empirical explanation, by which the mountaineer removes the difficulty of believing that evaporation can drain off the supplies of so many rivers.