IV 



TREE HUNTING ON A CALIFORNIA DESERT 



IT was on my first trip to California as the train 

 slowly climbed the monotonous stretch of the 

 Mojave Desert towards the Cajon Pass, which cuts 

 the snowy crest of the San Bernardino sierra to let 

 the traveler into the land of the orange and the 

 palm, that looking up from my book I caught sight 

 through the car window of one of the most remark- 

 able forests in the world. It was not a forest of the 

 kind the Easterner knows, with twilight aisles and 

 a floor deep in leafage and underbrush ; but open to 

 the sun, the individual trees set well apart from one 

 another in gravelly ground where little else was 

 growing. The trees themselves were as grotesque 

 as the creations of a bad dream; the shaggy trunks 

 and limbs were twisted and seemed writhing as 

 though in pain, and the dagger-pointed leaves were 

 clenched in bristling fists of inhospitality. As far 

 as the eye could reach, the strange forest extended 

 some of the trees all trunk, barring a bud-like club 

 or two of branch, some a little better grown resem- 



