a sweet, separate intimacy
for each. But if you do not find it all as I write, think me not less
dependable nor yourself less clever. There is a sort of pretense allowed
in matters of the heart, as one should say by way of illustration,
"I know a man who..." and so give up his dearest experience without
betrayal. And I am in no mind to direct you to delectable places toward
which you will hold yourself less tenderly than I. So by this fashion
of naming I keep faith with the land and annex to my own estate a very
great territory to which none has a surer title.

The country where you may have sight and touch of that which is written
lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite--east and south over
a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on
illimitably into the Mojave Desert. You may come into the borders of
it from the south by a stage journey that has the effect of involving
a great lapse of time, or from the north by rail, dropping out of the
overland route at Reno. The best of all ways is over the Sierra passes
by pack and trail, seeing and believing. But the real heart and core of
the country are not to be come at in a month's vacation. One must summer
and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine woods that take
two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots that lie by in
the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that grow fifty years
before flowering,--these do not scrape acquaintance. But if ever you
come beyond the borders as far as the town that lies in a hill dimple at
the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have knocked at the
door of the brown house under the willow-tree at the end of the village
street, and there you shall have such news of the land, of its trails
and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and
south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.

Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into
the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the
limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is
the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports
no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not
proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the
soil.

This is the nature o