34 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



A few miles out on the plain another group shows 

 a distinctive feature of chance arrangement. Twelve 

 palms stand approximately in line, and the number 

 has given them the name, "The Twelve Apostles." 

 Local fancy takes pleasure in pointing out that one 

 of them is headless and dead, the result of lightning- 

 stroke. This, of course, is Judas, and verily there 

 is something infamous in the mean, misbegotten 

 shape. Nothing in the vegetable world is so hideous 

 as a headless palm. Other trees when killed or de- 

 cayed have at least the touch of the grotesque or 

 pictorial. The palm that loses its head loses all : there 

 remains merely a hateful stick, not even pathetic, 

 only sinister. 



Out on the wind-swept plain to the east of Palm 

 Springs lies the oasis of Seven Palms. The name does 

 not now describe the group, though no doubt it once 

 did so. Placed here and there in picturesque mode, 

 singly or in twos, threes, and one larger cluster, a 

 score or so of Washingtonias inhabit a space of a 

 few acres, surrounding a pool of alkaline water. 

 Years ago a settler made a homestead here, and 

 his flat-roofed, unpainted dwelling, weathered into 

 drab conformity of hue, merges with gray thickets 

 of arrowweed. The charm of the place, apart from 

 its palms, is in the grandeur of its mountain pros- 

 pect, dominated to the south by colossal San Jacinto, 

 whose two-mile height soars close at hand, un- 

 dwarfed by intervening foothills. San Gorgonio rises 

 somewhat more distant, but not less superb, a little 

 to the west. The spot has a special drawback too — 

 the pestilentwind which blows down the pass for days 



