630 TRAVEL IN EUROPE AND AMERICA. [1872, 
reached Salt Lake City, the Mormon town, before 
sunset. Here we passed two nights and a day, and 
enjoyed scenery worth crossing the ocean for, and saw 
something of the strange life of the district. 
Back to Ogden ; two more nights and days, one long 
day crossing the Humboldt desert, rendered passable 
only by the Humboldt River, which, though the 
ragged mountains all run north and south, yet runs 
from east to west and marks its course by a narrow 
line of greenness, and at dusk we saw its end in the 
Humboldt sink, a lagoon without outlet on the west- 
ern verge of the basin, against the Sierra, the arid 
side of which we were ascending all night, to awake 
among pine forests at sunrise; to breakfast upon the 
very summit soon after; to descend through most 
striking scenery into the great valley of California, 
and, traversing that and the Contra Costa range, to 
see the head of the Bay of San Francisco at dusk; to 
cross the bay in a steam-ferry, and reach our hotel in 
San Francisco at ten Pp. M.,—a journey full of interest, 
not a bit monotonous or dull, from first to last. There 
were fatigues and small discomforts, of course, but 
these are all forgotten long ago, and the whole transit 
dwells in memory as one continual and delightful 
piece of pleasant, novel, ever-varied, and instructive 
sight-seeing. Of course the identifying at sight, as 
we flew by, of flowers new to me in the living state, and 
the snatching at halts, and the physical features of 
districts which I had always been interested in, and 
knew much about but had never seen, all gave me 
occupation and continual pleasure. But it was much 
the same with all the party. Even the return jour- 
ney was hardly less interesting. . . 
From Dubuque we took steamer up the Mississippi 
