Io6 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



stronger than normal, all seems visionary; the very 

 ground underfoot lacks solidity, with its pale lilac 

 shadows. 



Of all those thin, spiritual hues that make the 

 color-charm of the desert and that painters find so 

 bafifling, lilac is the prevailing note. It is the most 

 ethereal of tints, hardly to be termed color, and 

 seeming more of the mind than of the eye. Yet, once 

 realized, one finds it universal. Between you and the 

 gray boulder three feet away you half see, half feel 

 a veil of lilac light, and the distance is suffused with 

 it in varying degrees. Overlying the reds and browns 

 of the mountain walls it makes its delicate presence 

 felt, and covers the crudest facts of geology with a 

 film of fancy, a touch almost of faery. 



Desert shadows fall into the same high tone. There 

 is nothing of darkness in them, no weight, no sense 

 of dimness, but always that aerial tint of lilac infi- 

 nitely thin and refined. Over wastes of sand aching 

 and throbbing with light one catches the same faint 

 hue, lilac, always lilac. 



Caiions opened here and there into the hills on 

 my right, and in some of them I thought I caught a 

 hint of palms. A prospector who includes this route 

 in his wanderings had warned me against being mis- 

 led by these, but as a group of palms was to be my 

 landmark, these appearances tended to doubtful- 

 ness and kept me a trifle uneasy. I had a fair idea, 

 though, of where I was making for, so kept on hour 

 after hour, alternately riding or leading my horse, 

 but always in a little question whether I had not 

 passed my point — awkward, if so, on Kaweah's 



