a
wonderful head, huge, round, solid, like a cannon-ball. And his bronzed
face, his regular features, square firm jaw, and clear gray eyes,
fearless and direct, were singularly attractive to me. Well educated,
with a strange calm poise, and a cool courtesy, not common in Americans,
he evidently was a man of good family, by his own choice a rolling stone
and adventurer.

Nielsen accompanied me on two trips into the wilderness of Arizona, on
one of which he saved my life, and on the other he rescued all our party
from a most uncomfortable and possibly hazardous situation--but these
are tales I may tell elsewhere. In January 1919 Nielsen and I traveled
around the desert of southern California from Palm Springs to Picacho,
and in March we went to Death Valley.

Nowadays a little railroad, the Tonapah and Tidewater Railroad, runs
northward from the Santa Fe over the barren Mojave, and it passes within
fifty miles of Death Valley.

It was sunset when we arrived at Death Valley Junction--a weird, strange
sunset in drooping curtains of transparent cloud, lighting up dark
mountain ranges, some peaks of which were clear-cut and black against
the sky, and others veiled in trailing storms, and still others white
with snow. That night in the dingy little store I heard prospectors talk
about float, which meant gold on the surface, and about high grade
ores, zinc, copper, silver, lead, manganese, and about how borax was
mined thirty years ago, and hauled out of Death Valley by teams of
twenty mules. Next morning, while Nielsen packed the outfit, I visited
the borax mill. It was the property of an English firm, and the work of
hauling, grinding, roasting borax ore went on day and night. Inside it
was as dusty and full of a powdery atmosphere as an old-fashioned flour
mill. The ore was hauled by train from some twenty miles over toward the
valley, and was dumped from a high trestle into shutes that fed the
grinders. For an hour I watched this constant stream of borax as it slid
down into the hungry crushers, and I listened to the chalk-faced
operator who yelled in my ear. Once he picked a piece of gypsum out of
the borax. He said the mill was getting out twenty-five hundred sacks a
day. The most significant thing he said was that men did not last long
at such labor, and in the mines six months appeared to be the limit of
human endurance. How soon I had enough of that choking air in the room
where the borax was ground! And the place