Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/313

 in time, its shores, rising by degrees, reduced its superficial area and increased its depth.

The Salt Lake, about seventy miles long, and thirty-five wide, is situated three thousand eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. It holds considerable salt in solution, and one-fourth the weight of the water is solid matter. Its specific gravity is 1,170, that of distilled water being 1,000. Fishes cannot live in it. Those that the Jordan, Weber, and other creeks, carry into it soon perish; but it is not true that the density of its waters is such that a man cannot dive into it.

Around the lake the country was admirably tilled; for the Mormons understand agricultural pursuits; ranches and corrals for domestic animals; fields of wheat, corn, sorghum, luxuriant prairies, and everywhere hedges of wild roses, clumps of acacias and euphorbias, such would have been the appearance of this country six months later; but at this moment the ground was covered with a thin sheet of snow, descending lightly upon it.

At two o'clock the travelers got out at Ogden. The train stopping for six hours, Mr. Fogg, Aouda, and their two companions had time to repair to the City of the Saints by the short branch from Ogden. Two hours were sufficient to visit this absolutely American town, and as such, built after the pattern of all the cities of the Union, vast checker-boards with long cold lines, "with the somber sadness of right angles," according to Victor Hugo's expression. The founder of the City of the Saints could not escape from the need of symmetry which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxons. In this singular country, where the men are certainly not up to the level of their institutions, everything is done "squarely," cities, houses, and follies.

At three o'clock, the travelers were promenading through the streets of the town, built between the banks of the Jordon and the first rise of the Wahsatch Mountains. They noticed there few or no churches, but as monuments, the prophet's house, the court-house, and the arsenal; then houses of bluish bricks with verandas and porches, surrounded by gardens bordered with acacias, palms and locusts. A wall of clay and pebbles, built in 1853, surrounded the town. In the principal street, where the mar-