112 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



had no idea of there being any one in that direction 

 for twenty miles. I learned that they had ranches, or 

 rather claims, in the valley below, and were engaged 

 in "developing" water with a view to irrigation, I 

 was hospitably urged to move down to the camp 

 where one of them was working, a mile or so down 

 the canon, and strong inducement was held out in 

 the promise of better water. 



Accordingly in the morning I moved. My friend's 

 camp was pitched at the edge of one of the palm 

 groves, and consisted of a roomy tent, a forge, a 

 rough stable, and a mountain of debris, the accumu- 

 lation of three years of "baching." For that term 

 he had lived here, most of the time alone, working 

 at his "water right"; tunnelling, sinking shafts, 

 running drifts and ditches, gradually gathering up 

 the underground flow that was betokened here and 

 there by seepages and beds of tules ; a life of cheerless 

 solitude plus hardest labor plus purgatorial heat. 

 His task was nearly done, he told me, for he now 

 had two hundred inches of water almost ready to be 

 piped to his " half -section " of land down in the 

 valley at Edom — significant name ! — where he 

 hoped to grow dates, figs, and early grapes for the 

 tables of millionaires. If spontaneous kindness to a 

 stranger deserves reward, my good Edomite's acres 

 should soon be as fruitful as the land of Goshen. 



I was struck by the Arabian look of this locality. 

 High-walled gullies of red or ochre earth meet and 

 interlace, their bottoms filled with coarse gravel and 

 boulders mixed with blue-gray smoke-bush and 

 stunted mesquit and cat-claw. Among birds, only 



