288 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



seen in wrecked or distorted houses, cracked walls, 

 shattered windows, and piles of rubbish. The big 

 new hotel, bearing, rather absurdly, the name of a 

 recent "best seller" in local fiction, had hastily re- 

 paired its damages, but looked conscious of the con- 

 cealment. The stores had a prosperous look, but 

 many of the dwellings gave the same unpleasant 

 impression that I had found in the farms. Some were 

 quite sordid in their ugliness, even beyond the usual 

 measure of these products of haste and incompetence. 

 These ramshackle affairs, with their purlieus of 

 bottles and boxes, cans and baling-wire, came as a 

 rebuff. Almost before I had found a lodging I sighed 

 for the desert again, where, if beauty be scant, at 

 least squalor is absent. It is a truth of the widest 

 bearing that "only man is vile.'* 



In the bathroom of my lodging I learned that 

 cold and hot are sometimes interchangeable terms, 

 or, at least, taps. The cistern being set on the roof, 

 by midday the "cold" water had reached a tempera- 

 ture higher than that from the boiler. It was only at 

 early morning that one could get a tolerably re- 

 freshing tub. Another discovery was that El Centre 

 in summer is practically a womanless community, 

 the feminine half having betaken themselves "in- 

 side," as the phrase goes, for the hot term: and an- 

 other, that Centrolians in summer are a coatless and 

 waistcoatless race. A loose, blouse-like garment is 

 the thing on street, in office, at restaurant, and I 

 suppose at church and such social functions as may 

 be attempted in the absence of womankind. 



It was odd, too, to see beds set out on vacant lots 



