4 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



life and the means of life — food, fire, and shelter. 

 The ocean, impersonal and insincere as it is, has 

 motion and color, play of ripple and breathing 

 grandeur of tide. The mountains give pleasant 

 boundary to our little lives, shutting in friends and 

 kin, shutting out strange humanity and alien climes, 

 and vaguely gratifying the sentiment for home. But 

 the desert yields no point of sympathy, and meets 

 every need of man with a cold, repelling No. 



There are, it is true, about the fringes of the 

 desert, spots of sylvan beauty. Cafions break down 

 from these sterile walls, where, following a cascading 

 brook, cottonwoods and sycamores come trooping 

 in verdant file, and palms hold broad fans aloft 

 against opaque screen of rock and deep transparency 

 of sky. In spring, mating birds find these places out, 

 and live in transient busy colonies while they raise 

 their broods. Flowers, under unbroken days of sun, 

 crowd into sudden bloom, the frail annuals growing 

 quickly and hurrying to mature blossom and seed 

 before the last moisture is drained from air and soil. 

 The hardier plants here keep up a lively show, notice- 

 ably strong in the primary colors, well into summer, 

 though short will have been their shrift on the open 

 desert. Even ferns contrive to live within perhaps a 

 quarter-mile of the boundary of strict aridity. 



But these are only local conditions, quite the re- 

 verse of typical. One feature of loveliness the desert 

 has, however, that is essential : in one field of beauty 

 it is supreme. That is the field of color. Professor 

 John C. Van Dyke, who has made that fine study of 

 the desert which takes the rank of a classic, gives to 



