PALM SPRINGS TO SEVEN PALMS 89 



there above the level, enough of them merely to 

 accent the general hue by momentary relief of glossy 

 olive. Encelia and burro-weed made up the bulk of 

 the plants, but by now the yellow stars of the former 

 had burned to ashes; the latter makes little show of 

 bloom and wears a perennial garb of gray. These 

 dense-growing, round-topped shrubs afford the 

 minimum relief of shade to the eye. The light is 

 thrown back unbroken from their hemispherical sur- 

 faces, and all there is of shadow is kept for their own 

 needs as if under a close-held umbrella. Of animal 

 life little was to be seen but scurrying lizards, them- 

 selves mostly gray, but some of ivory white. These 

 are bony little goblins with sharp tails and a leer in 

 the eye that comes near being devilish. 



A few late flowers were out, principally the ethe- 

 real sky-blue navarretia, with which one slowly but 

 surely falls in love. Large white evening primroses 

 were still blooming under the creosotes, and here 

 and there the daisy-like desert-star (Eremiastrum) 

 showed like floral Pleiades. A desert willow in a dry 

 water-course kept a few of its frail, orchid-like blos- 

 soms, and the indigo sparks of the dye-weed were 

 plentiful, but almost lost in the wide sea of gray. 

 A month earlier a page would hardly have held the 

 list of the flowery multitude: now, by late May, 

 floral autumn had come on the desert, and this in 

 spite of its being a season of unusually late rains. 



But desert color does not lie in vegetation alone. 

 A few miles north of Palm Springs there rises a great 

 dome of sand that for color effects I can only com- 

 pare to a vast opal. I have seen it pass in a few hours 



