f that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt,
burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring
to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full
of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze.
The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava
flows. After rains water accumulates in the hollows of small closed
valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness
that get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep
and the rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter,
rimmed about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin crust
of it lies along the marsh over the vegetating area, which has neither
beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand
drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and between them the soil
shows saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than
water work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a
year's redeeming. In all the Western desert edges there are essays in
miniature at the famed, terrible Grand Canon, to which, if you keep on
long enough in this country, you will come at last.

Since this is a hill country one expects to find springs, but not
to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and
unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you
find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where
the air has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and
breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling
up into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cries
for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of
lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited
must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little
told of it.

This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies
hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then
on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter
snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and
seductive. These months are only approximate; later or earlier the
rain-laden wind may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the
Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the rain.

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the