looming through the golden dust above his eighteen
mules. The land had called him.

The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly
of lost treasure. Somewhere within its stark borders, if one believes
report, is a hill strewn with nuggets; one seamed with virgin silver; an
old clayey water-bed where Indians scooped up earth to make cooking pots
and shaped them reeking with grains of pure gold. Old miners drifting
about the desert edges, weathered into the semblance of the tawny hills,
will tell you tales like these convincingly. After a little sojourn in
that land you will believe them on their own account. It is a question
whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of
the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the
tradition of a lost mine.

And yet--and yet--is it not perhaps to satisfy expectation that one
falls into the tragic key in writing of desertness? The more you wish of
it the more you get, and in the mean time lose much of pleasantness. In
that country which begins at the foot of the east slope of the Sierras
and spreads out by less and less lofty hill ranges toward the Great
Basin, it is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood and
delicate joys, to pass and repass about one's daily performance an area
that would make an Atlantic seaboard State, and that with no peril, and,
according to our way of thought, no particular difficulty. At any rate,
it was not people who went into the desert merely to write it up who
invented the fabled Hassaympa, of whose waters, if any drink, they
can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color
of romance. I, who must have drunk of it in my twice seven years'
wanderings, am assured that it is worth while.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep
breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one
with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a
desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the
stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured.
They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately
service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky,
they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie
out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub
from you and howls and howls.

WATER TR