seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they
do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. It is
recorded in the report of the Death Valley expedition that after a
year of abundant rains, on the Colorado desert was found a specimen
of Amaranthus ten feet high. A year later the same species in the same
place matured in the drought at four inches. One hopes the land may
breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but
to do. Seldom does the desert herb attain the full stature of the type.
Extreme aridity and extreme altitude have the same dwarfing effect, so
that we find in the high Sierras and in Death Valley related species in
miniature that reach a comely growth in mean temperatures. Very fertile
are the desert plants in expedients to prevent evaporation, turning
their foliage edge-wise toward the sun, growing silky hairs, exuding
viscid gum. The wind, which has a long sweep, harries and helps them. It
rolls up dunes about the stocky stems, encompassing and protective, and
above the dunes, which may be, as with the mesquite, three times as high
as a man, the blossoming twigs flourish and bear fruit.

There are many areas in the desert where drinkable water lies within a
few feet of the surface, indicated by the mesquite and the bunch grass
(Sporobolus airoides). It is this nearness of unimagined help that makes
the tragedy of desert deaths. It is related that the final breakdown of
that hapless party that gave Death Valley its forbidding name occurred
in a locality where shallow wells would have saved them. But how were
they to know that? Properly equipped it is possible to go safely across
that ghastly sink, yet every year it takes its toll of death, and yet
men find there sun-dried mummies, of whom no trace or recollection is
preserved. To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to
the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running
water--there is no help for any of these things.

Along springs and sunken watercourses one is surprised to find such
water-loving plants as grow widely in moist ground, but the true desert
breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat. The angle of the
slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure of the soil determines
the plant. South-looking hills are nearly bare, and the lower tree-line
higher here by a thousand feet. Canons running east and west will have
one wall naked and one clo