SALT GEASS. 241 



A long day's march, during which no drinking place for 

 man or beast is passed, brings us to the Mojave river, down 

 to an altitude of only three thousand feet, and by a short 

 sharp descent of the sandy rim of the river's " bottoms," .to 

 our camp ground a flat meadow of "salt grass." This 

 salt grass is short, tough, and wiry ; will cut like a knife the 

 hand that incautiously pulls it ; and is covered with an 

 incrustation of fine salt. In some places so thick is this 

 efflorescence, as to give the ground the appearance of being 

 covered with white frost ; and everywhere the grass is quite 

 salt to the taste. Horses and cattle will eat salt grass, 

 when they can get nothing else ; but it is not good food, 

 being very weakening, and making them thirsty, in a land 

 where the water is always more or less poisonous. A 

 hundred yards in front of our camp is a long, almost still 

 pool of clear but greenish water, around which grow beds 

 of rushes and thickets of willows. At its upper end this 

 pool is fed by a stream, which is the head-water of the 

 Mojave river ; and from the salt-grass meadow whereon 

 our camp has been just pitched, it receives the trickling 

 flow from several springs of alkaline water. At its lower 

 end this lagoon becomes a sharply running narrow stream 

 the river. The water runs merrily along for a few hundred 

 yards, and then sinks in the thirsty soil, not to appear again 

 for many a long mile. A solitary white stork, a few blue 

 cranes, serve to give point and emphasis to the lonely 

 dreariness of the scene. A succession of very similar 

 camps, at places where the river rises to the surface in 

 pools and short reaches of water, and then sinks at an 

 average distance of twenty miles apart arid we find our- 



