i8o CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



is a word man should never use for his little victories 

 over physical nature.) At that time the lake was over 

 four hundred square miles in area, with a depth of 

 more than eighty feet — an imposing body of water. 



That is the so-called Salton Sea. Evaporation has 

 somewhat reduced it, and in about twenty years, 

 should there be no new inflow, it will probaoly have 

 disappeared, perhaps forever. To-day it is still a 

 great expanse, which looked at over its farthest 

 extent appears a veritable sea, with no horizon of 

 land to mark its bounds. 



Near the western margin of this geologically 

 romantic lake my road now ran to the southward. 

 The water, faintly blue and ideally calm, looked, in 

 the summer haze, like a water-color drawing, and 

 the mountains beyond, the Cottonwoods and 

 Chuckwallas, might have been an "insubstantial 

 pageant" instead of the uncompromising reality 

 that I had lately experienced. The Chocolate Range, 

 farther to the south, was a mere dream of air tints, 

 quite phantasmic. On the nearer shore a white and 

 grisly rank of dead mesquits stood like skeletons. 

 They had been killed by the flooding of the basin 

 and had but lately emerged as the water receded. 

 Here and there among the branches were many 

 nests of pelicans, which make this inland sea, swarm- 

 ing with fish of one or two coarse species, their home 

 and breeding ground. The effect upon the mind was 

 of a Dead Sea, with horror veiled under a Circean 

 smile. Nor did the sight of the old beach line, with 

 its hint of vanished ages, of countless generations 

 long passed away, at all lessen the impression. 



