34 



THE DESERT 



No running 

 streams. 



enormous strength of the grizzly bear has been 

 known to fail him in these desert rivers. They 

 boil and seethe as though they were hot ; and 

 they rush on against banks, ripping out the 

 long roots of mesquite, and swirling away tons 

 of undermined gravel as though it were only so 

 much snow. At last after miles of this mill- 

 racing the force begins to diminish, the streams 

 reach the flat lake-beds and spread into broad, 

 thin sheets ; and soon they have totally van- 

 ished, leaving scarce a rack behind. 



The desert rainfall comes quickly and goes 

 quickly. The sands drink it up, and it sinks 

 to the rock strata, where, following the ledges, it 

 is finally shelved into some gravel-bed. There, 

 perhaps a hundred feet under the sand, it slow- 

 ly oozes away to the river or the Gulf. There 

 is none of it remains upon the surface except 

 perhaps a pool caught in a clay basin, or a 

 catch of water in a rocky bowl of some canyon. 

 Occasionally one meets with a little stream 

 where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from 

 below forces up some of the water ; but these 

 springs are of very rare occurrence. And they 

 always seem a little strange. A brook that ran 

 on the top of the ground would be an anomaly 

 here ; and after one lives many months on the 



