32 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



When the sun came up, the western cliff became the 

 battlements of some castle in the realm of faery. 

 I often halted in wonder as some reach opened be- 

 fore me, filled with mystical light. The conjunction 

 of extreme beauty of color with savagery of giant 

 walls and thundering water gave a strange effect of 

 unreality. 



A few isolated groups of palms were set high up 

 on the walls. They seemed to have a conscious air, 

 as if they had been waiting until now for first recog- 

 nition. Mountain-sheep make these lonely groves 

 their shelter in summer heat and winter storm ; but 

 human foot, unless perhaps some Indian hunter's, 

 may never have been set in them. 



On little benches here and there I came upon de- 

 lightful beds of flowers, usually of one kind. Here I 

 first met the exquisite malvastrum, in delicacy and 

 fragility more like some hothouse product than the 

 child of desert sand and sun. Those who know the 

 globe-tulip of our coast mountains may picture this 

 as a blossom of the same ethereal character, but 

 palest lilac instead of white, and stained at the base 

 of each petal with a spot of carmine. A plant with 

 half a dozen of the lamp-like flowers is as fairy-like a 

 thing as a child could dream. Another new acquaint- 

 ance was the fagonia, a low-growing relative of the 

 creosote, having starry blossoms of pale magenta. 

 Dwarf lupines occupied stretches of pure sand, and 

 eschscholtzias, with pale yellow flowerets comically 

 small, showed the effect of drought upon the magnifi- 

 cent copa de oro of the coast. On the driest places, 

 exposed to the sun's full blast, the lovely little 



