136 CHANNEL ISLANDS OF CALIFORNL^ 



bubbles of the old lava mass, one side blown out. I 

 found one of them, perhaps one hundred fifty feet 

 long and fifty feet deep, that had been used as a 

 home by the ancient inhabitants of this island. A 

 mass of shell and black earth lay in front of the cave, 

 covered with growing cactus, and scattered about 

 were broken implements telling the story. Surely no 

 human being ever had a stranger home than this; a 

 hole in a bed of conglomerate, with a lava-flow as a 

 roof, from which tons of lava had fallen into the adja- 

 cent canon. 



From here for eight or ten miles the country grew 

 more difiicult, wilder, with more lava, but at last we 

 came out on a mesa, beyond which through the dusk 

 we could see a long line of beating sea, gleaming in 

 silvery phosphorescence, and away inland a light. 

 How the horses found the way is a problem, but we 

 had kept up the regular Mexican fox-trot since eight 

 in the morning, and it was now seven-thirty. A few 

 more climbs, a few more drops, a sand-dune, a beach 

 or two, and the cavalcade ascended a mesa and was 

 at Chinetti's ranch. Chinetti himself came out to 

 greet us and bid us welcome. Here we uncinched the 

 saddles, led the horses down to the corrals, and then 

 watched Chinetti prepare a meal for four men he had 

 not expected. 



San Clemente is a great sheep ranch, eighteen miles 

 long as the raven flies. The Chinetti ranch includes 

 about ten miles of the most God-forsaken country I 

 have ever seen, and I know the Mohave Desert in 

 various parts, — have ridden over it when the ther- 

 mometer indicated 130° in the shade, when it would 

 have taken a sixth son of a sixth son to discover shade, 



