THE PALM OASES AND CANONS 29 



forms sixty yards away that certainly were bighorn, 

 the first I had met in their own haunts. My nerves 

 tingled : suppose the cougar were stalking the band ! 

 But the moon sank behind the cliff, and when I 

 could no longer see my gun-sights I concluded that 

 the coyote-skins would do very well alone, and 

 turned in. The next two nights I again sat on watch, 

 and not unprofitably, though with no result of 

 cougars. It is in the purity and stillness of such hours, 

 in tranquil fall of moonbeam on rock and shrub, 

 and in such sense of awful but calming solitude, that 

 one learns, by the sacredness of Nature, the beauty 

 of God. 



The face of the cliff near the spring showed a 

 number of likely crannies, which I searched for 

 Indian relics. Most of them were packed with bits 

 of stick or cactus, the caches of those punctilious 

 thieves the trade-rats. In a side cafion, however, I 

 found a handsome olla (or ka'-wo-mal, to give it the 

 Indian name). It had been hidden In a breakneck 

 place, fifty feet up a precipitous cliff, where I 

 glimpsed it by chance. It stood upright on a bed of 

 earth that must have been carried up from below, 

 and was protected by slabs of rock with padding of 

 palm-fibre. Probably it had held water, perhaps 

 stored in case of siege, but that had long vanished, 

 and It contained nothing but a deposit of dust al- 

 most Intangibly fine, like dust of mummies or of 

 Time Itself, which had somehow gathered In spite 

 of the neck being closed with a flat fragment of rock. 

 I suppose this mysterious dust would distil, in course 

 of ages, from the upper ether itself, some product of 



