TO IMPERIAL VALLEY 291 



terror of the Inhabitants, who in spite of desperate 

 work in the building of levees saw part of their town 

 carried away by the flood that rushed along this 

 perfidious water-way.^ 



Mexicali, across the border, is a mere rank of 

 gambling-hell saloons, as offensive to the sight as 

 they are disreputable in every other regard. A 

 pimply youth with a megaphone was inviting the 

 public to enter the widest of these numerous gates 

 into the broad way to Destruction, and made me, 

 as a stranger, the particular object of his attentions. 

 "Wide open " is a literal as well as figurative descrip- 

 tion of the place, for the flimsy structure was fully 

 open to the street. A dozen or so gambling- tables at 

 which you lose your money at faro, monte, roulette, 

 or what you please: a thriving bar: an incessant 

 racket of "rag- time" from a quartette of tenth-rate 

 musicians at the rear: three painted girls, or rather 

 children, in dirty pink, who now and then ceased 

 their crude blandishments of the men near them to 

 shout the words of a ribald song (this was the vaude- 

 ville entertainment to which I had been bidden by 

 Pimpleface) : and a babel of shouts and cheerless, 

 discordant laughter from a hundred or so loafers, 

 mostly Americans, but with a sprinkling of Mexi- 

 cans, Japanese, and I don't know what — that, six 

 or eight times repeated, is Mexicali. If ground is 

 ever sought for a declaration of war against Mexico, 



1 I have not learned how this stream got its name. Major-General 

 Cooke, in the narrative of his expedition of 1846-47, notes that a few 

 years after his crossing of this region, when the channel was dry, 

 other travellers found a stream running in it. Probably some such 

 party gave it its name. 



