TO THOUSAND PALM CANON 99 



Bernardinos. A spring of good water issues below 

 the smaller group, and here I made camp. A settler 

 has built a small cabin above the spring, and as he 

 was absent I made his house my windbreak. 



On my first visit here, some years before, I found 

 an old scarecrow of a fellow in possession, living in a 

 kind of burrow or dugout. A more Crusoe-like object 

 I never expect to meet, weird as many of these 

 "desert rats" are to the view. He could not be said 

 to be clad, but antique rags were hung about him, 

 and he wore a scrap of debris on his head, under the 

 delusion that it was a hat. His hair was snow-white, 

 long, and plentiful, his skin like that of a well- 

 roasted fowl, and his eyes bright and very blue. The 

 blue eyes gave an infantile touch, and somehow half 

 prepared me for his proud announcement that he 

 was a poet. What more he was or had been I never 

 fully knew, though I learned that he had known 

 such spheres of life as teamster, preacher, prospector, 

 with others perhaps less blameless. Once only I got 

 a taste of his poetic quality, but of that all I recall 

 is a frequent loud roar of "O Isrul!" 



A noticeable thing on the desert whenever one is 

 in the neighborhood of water is the quantity of 

 broken pottery that meets the eye. About Seven 

 Palms the ground is littered with fragments in many 

 places, and a number of fine unbroken specimens 

 have been found by the cowboy settler. Here again 

 broken shards were plentiful, and I have often been 

 surprised at meeting these evidences of bygone pop- 

 ulations in the most unlikely places. The pottery, 

 of the common red sort, but sometimes decorated 



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