386 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Dutch housewife had washed and scrubbed them with soap-and-water, 

 until they resemble in their whiteness the boards of her own kitchen- 

 floor. Glass bottles, left for a short time on the ground, lose their 

 original appearance, and are ground inside and out. All this is the 

 effect of the blowing sand. 



Here, at the station of Dos Palmas, we are some two hundred and 

 seventy-five feet below the level of the sea. The heat in summer is 

 simply fearful, and this, added to the sand-storms, makes it anything 

 but a desirable place of residence. Men can only be induced to work 

 on the railroad by offering them increased wages. All the section- 

 houses along the road (and for nearly two hundred miles there are no 

 other habitations) are built in a peculiar manner. None are more than 

 one story high. Each has a large porch at one side and a double roof. 

 The lower one constitutes the ordinary roof, but the upper one is 

 raised up about two feet, and the eaves project some four feet beyond 

 the walls. This arrangement, leaving an open space between the two 

 roofs, admits the circulation of air, and keeps the interior of the house 

 cooler than it would otherwise be. Such precautions will be thought 

 to be by no means extraordinary, when it is known that 95 to 100 is 

 the ordinary temperature in a shady spot, and 115 or 120 is by no 

 means uncommon. 



Rain never falls on this desert in the natural manner. Cloud- 

 bursts and water-spouts, accompanied by fearful thunder and light- 

 ning, are of frequent occurrence. The ground between Frink's Spring 

 and Flowing- Well Stations, a distance of seventeen miles, is cut and 

 gullied in a most remarkable manner. In this distance there are no 

 less than seventy-five bridges and culverts on the railroad-track. The 

 gullies vary from five to twenty-five feet in depth and about the same 

 in width. The banks are so steep and precipitous that, in walking 

 along, one does not see the canon until it yawns at one's feet. These 

 gullies are all caused by the rush of water from cloud-bursts and 

 water-spouts. 



Some six miles from Frink's Spring Station is a section-house 

 known as Volcano. Close to it, and a few yards from the track, is a 

 mud-spring, and from this the house takes its name. The spring is 

 situated in a depression about twenty-five feet deep, and the same in 

 diameter. In the bottom is a small lake, or mass of liquid mud. This 

 rises in great bubbles as large as a hat, breaking and sputtering like 

 boiling lard. All over the surface of the water are little bubbles, 

 caused by carbonic-acid gas. Both mud and water have a strong 

 smell of sulphuretted hydrogen, and the spring is evidently the result 

 of volcanic force, which has, at some former period, been very active. 



At Flowing- Well Station there was, when the railroad was first put 

 through, a well bored to get water to supply the locomotives. The 

 surface-water, all through the desert, is so alkaline that it is impos- 

 sible to use it. It is, therefore, necessary for the railroad to haul water 



