THE DESERT' 



of the water and with their hosts of barnacles 

 and sea-life became a part of the land. 



The waters of the great inland lake fell per- 

 haps a hundred feet and then they made a pause. 

 The exposed shores dried out. They baked hard 

 in the sun, and were slowly ground down to sand 

 and powdered silt by the action of the winds. 

 The waters made a long pause. They were re- 

 ceiving reinforcements from some source. Pos- 

 sibly there was more rainfall in those days than 

 now, and the streams entering the lake from 

 the mountains were much larger. Again there 

 may have been underground springs. There 

 are flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed 

 wells that cast up water salter than the sea it- 

 self. No one knows their fountain-head. Per- 

 haps by underground channels the water creeps 

 through from the Gulf, or comes from mountain 

 reservoirs and turns saline by passing through 

 beds of salt. These are the might-bes ; but it 

 is far more probable that the Colorado River at 

 high water had made a breach of some kind in 

 the dam of its own construction and had poured 

 overflow water into the lake by way of a dry 

 channel called the New River. The bed of this 

 river runs northward from below the boundary- 

 line of Lower California ; and in 1893, during 



