86 LODGES IN THE WILDERNESS 



Jween glowing spheres of stone, and lacking 

 rain, as they did, for periods of years at a 

 stretch. Their strength must have been as 

 much greater than that of the oak as the oak's 

 is greater than that of a willow sapling. Did 

 these shrubs ever flower, I wondered. Per- 

 haps, once in a thousand years, a miracle was 

 wrought on them as it was on Aaron's rod. 

 Only one could I identify even so far as the 

 genus went. It was a kind of Rhus ; the dark- 

 green, reticulated, trifid leaf naked and 

 deeply veined above and covered with down 

 beneath, was quite typical. 



For what unspeakable cosmic sin was that 

 titanic and seemingly eternal punishment in- 

 flicted, that withdrawal of living water from 

 a region built up and, no doubt, filled with 

 abounding organic fecundity by the craft of 

 its strong, creative hand? Did multitudes of 

 those fearsome monsters of the prehistoric sea, 

 which there swayed beneath the moon, gasp 

 out their lives on that sun-blasted tract when 

 the great cataclysm befel? Did a livid net- 

 work of their colossal bones lie there for un- 

 thinkable ages until the slow attrition of wind 

 and changing temperature transmuted them 

 into that dust which vainly tried to scale the im- 

 mutable heavens in the car of the sand-spout? 



