654 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dessert, he need not envy the heroes of Oriental story, who were car- 

 ried across dreadful solitudes in a single night on the backs of flying 

 genii. Ours brought us over three thousand miles to the Mohave Des- 

 ert. It was growing hotter and hotter when the train stopped in the 

 midst of vast sand wastes a little after midnight. Roused from our 

 sleep, we stepped on to the brown sand, and saw our luxurious car roll 

 away in the distance, experiencing a transition from the conditions of 

 civilization to those almost of barbarism, as sharp as could well be im- 

 agined. We commenced our slow toil northward with a thermometer 

 at 110 in the shade, if any shade there be in the shadeless desert, 

 which seemed to be chiefly inhabited by rattlesnakes of an ashen-gray 

 color, and a peculiarly venomous bite. There is no water save at the 

 rarest intervals, and the soil at a distance seems as though strewed 

 with sheets of salt, which aids the delusive show of the mirage. These 

 are, in fact, the ancient beds of dried-up salt lakes or dead seas, some 

 of them being below the level of the ocean ; and such a one on our 

 right, though only about twenty miles wide, has earned the name of 

 " Death Valley," from the number of human beings who have perished 

 in it. Formerly an emigrant train, when emigrants crossed the con- 

 tinent in caravans, had passed through the great Arizona deserts in 

 safety until, after their half-year's journey, their eyes were gladdened 

 by the snowy peaks of the Sierras looking delusively near. The goal 

 of their long toil seemed before them ; only this one more valley lay 

 between, and into this they descended, thinking to cross it in a day 

 but they never crossed it. Afterward the long line of wagons was 

 found with the skeletons of the animals in the harness, and by them 

 those of men, women, and little children dead of thirst, and some relics 

 of the tragedy remained at the time of our journey. I cite this as an 

 indirect evidence of the phenomenal dryness of the region a dryness 

 which, so far, served our object, which was, in part, to get rid as much 

 as possible of that water vapor which is so well known to be a power- 

 ful absorber of the solar heat. 



Everything has an end, and so had that journey, which finally 

 brought us to the goal of our long travel, at the foot of the highest peak 

 of the Sierras, Mount Whitney, which rose above us in tremendous 

 precipices, that looked hopelessly insurmountable and wonderfully near. 

 The whole savage mountain-region, in its slow rises from the west and 

 its descent to the desert plains in the east, is more like the chain called 

 the Apennines, in the moon, than anything I know on the earth. The 

 summits are jagged peaks like Alpine "needles," looking in the thin 

 air so delusively near that, coming on such a scene unprepared, one 

 would almost say they were large gray stones a few fields off, with an 

 occasional little white patch on the top, that might be a handkerchief 

 or a sheet of paper dropped there. But the telescope showed that the 

 seeming stones were of the height of many Snowdons piled on one 

 another, and the white patches occasional snow-fields, looking how 



