10 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



recognized elements of beauty, yet is perfect, in its 

 way incomparable. 



In places the drab gives way to other tones. 

 There are large extents of unmixed sand, boulders, 

 gravel, or of pavement-like rock-mosaic in yellow, 

 red, lava-black. On these the vegetation is so sparse 

 as to yield no element of color. This is the desert 

 entire and austere, the realm of geology alone among 

 the sciences. Here Time and all things of Time seem 

 to have ended or not to have begun. The sun rises, 

 flames through the sky, and sets ; the moon and stars 

 look coldly down; the traveller seems to himself the 

 last life on the planet. Awe that is close on terror 

 grasps him : he feels himself alone in the universe — 

 he, and God. His footsteps cease: why should he go 

 on? and whither? for there is no whither. Nothing 

 moves, nor can move, but the elemental wind, 

 vacantly roaming the empty earth (and those great 

 airs, what a sense they bring of age, of eternal soli- 

 tude, of cold, sidereal space!). The life of towns, of 

 farms, all that signifies humanity, seems totally un- 

 real: the Great Question confronts, closes one in, 

 and must, but cannot, be answered. At such mo- 

 ments, reader, you may find foothold in thoughts 

 perhaps long unthought or cast aside — "I believe 

 in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and 

 earth " : and so on to the end. They will not now seem 

 contemptible, I assure you. 



There comes in spring, on all but these barrenest 

 spaces, a startling interlude, a sudden wave of color. 

 Even in the desert. Nature, though here least hu- 

 mane, most indifferent, longs for change, and softens 



