BEILLIAIMT COLORING OF AEID REGIONS. 13 



and solitude. In traveling through the Great Basin one sometimes rides a 

 hundred miles without sight of a tree, and many times that distance without 

 finding shade enough to protect him from the intense summer sun. 



The bare mountains reveal their structure almost at a glance, and show 

 distinctly the many varying tints of their naked rocks. Their richness of 

 color is sometimes marvelous, especially when they are composed of the 

 purple trachytes, the deep-colored rhyolites, and the many-hued volcanic 

 tuflFs' so common in western Nevada. Not unfrequently a range of volcanic 

 mountains will exhibit as many brilliant tints as are assumed by the New 

 England hills in autumn. On the desert valleys the scenery is monotonous 

 in the extreme, yet has a desolate grandeur of its own, and at times, especially 

 at sunrise and at sunset, great richness of color. At mid-day in summer 

 the heat becomes intense, and the mirage gives strange delusive shapes to 

 the landscape, and offers false promises of water and shade where the expe- 

 rienced traveler knows there is nothing but the glaring plain. When the 

 sun is high in the cloudless heavens and one is far out on the desert at a 

 distance from rocks and trees, there is a lack of shadow and an absence of 

 relief in the landscape that make the distance deceptive — the mountains 

 appearing near at hand instead of leagues away — and cause one to fancy 

 that there is no single source of light, but that the distant ranges and the 

 desert surfaces are self-luminous. The glare of the noonday sun conceals 

 rather than reveals the grandeur of this rugged land, but in the early morn- 

 ing and the near sunset the slanting light brings out mountain range after 

 mountain range in bold relief, and reveals a world of sublimity. As the 

 sun sinks behind the western peaks and the shades of evening grow deeper 

 and deeper on the mountains, every ravine and canon becomes a fathondess 

 abyss of purple haze, shrouding the bases of gorgeous towers and battle- 

 ments that seem incrusted with a mosaic more brilliant and intricate than 

 the work of the Venetian artists. As the light fades and the twilight 

 deepens, the mountains lose their detail and become sharply outlined sil- 

 houettes, drawn in the deepest and richest purple against a brilliant sky. 



' The word tufa is used throughout this volume to designate deposits of calcium carbouate. 

 Wheu the volcauic jiroduct is meant, for which the same name is sometimes used, we shall designate 

 it by the word tuff. 



