12 Our Araby 



tain's protection and is nourished out of its veins. 

 Two streams of purest water here break from San 

 Jacinto's rocky heart, and make possible this Garden 

 of the Sun, an oasis of pleasant life where Nature 

 had said no life should be except the hard, wild life 

 of her desert children — the plants and animals and 

 Indians of a land of drought. 



The village lies at an elevation of 452 feet above 

 sea-level, well toward the foot of the long gradient 

 which runs, smooth as a waterline for league on 

 league, from the summit of San Gorgonio Pass — 

 the gateway and dividing point between California 

 Green and California Gray — down to the great 

 depression where dreams the Salton, that pale, 

 weird Lake-below-the-Sea which came into being 

 (whether for the tenth or hundredth time, who 

 knows?) some fifteen years or so ago when the 

 Colorado River took a fancy to stretch his watery 

 limbs wider in the sun. Bounding this gradient on 

 the north and east runs the level wall of the east- 

 ward extension of San Jacinto's twin mountain, San 

 Bernardino, beyond which wall there is a twin 

 desert, the Mojave. The low narrow scoop, six to 

 ten miles wide, which lies between mountain and 

 mountain, forming a westerly arm of the Colorado 

 Desert, was marked on old maps as the Cahuilla 

 (Ka-we'-ah) Valley, but is now known as the 

 Coachella — a meaningless substitution — and has of 

 late years become famous as a sort of Little Arabia, 

 the source of the earliest of figs, grapes, melons, 

 and asparagus, and especially of those latest and 



