6 7 



Our camping ground, we were afterward informed, had 

 formerly been the camping ground of thousands of Indians, 

 who, since the advent of the missions, had entirely disappeared 

 from the face of the earth, but for perhaps a few scattered fam- 

 ilies that disease is hurrying to the grave. Nothing of their 

 handiwork now remains — nothing to tell that they once lived 

 and died. 



Sixty miles with a wagon, over a road that is seldom trav- 

 elled except with pack animals, is not always an enjoyable 

 experience at the time. The road was alternately passing through 

 some deep ravine, where pick and shovel were needed, or over 

 the hard, level mesas, where progress — roads or no roads — is 

 always a pleasure. 



Most prominent in the vegetation for the first thirty miles 

 were the endless variety of lichens on earth and pebble. Some 

 were calcareous in character and proved identical with a species 

 previously only recorded from the plains of Nebraska. The few 

 stunted bushes of Euphorbia misera or iEsculus Parryi were 

 often disguised beneath a load of foliaceous species of lichens — 

 particularly with Ramalina crinite and species of Roccella. 



Gradually the road led inland away from the sea cliffs, to a 

 higher elevation. Agave Shawii then became characteristic, 

 thousands of the dead plants, dried in rainless years of existence, 

 concealed myriads of snails of a species that has a happy faculty 

 of aestivation through months and even years of drouth. And 

 well they need this faculty in this little belt, some two hundred 

 miles broad, where the tropics divide from the temperate region. 

 Some years the winter rains of California reach this section, and 

 in summer the Sonoran summer rains deluge the country. But 

 more often both the winter and summer rains neglect all but the 

 elevated mountain ridge, leaving this but an arid, rainless desert. 



Suddenly, without warning; the road leads up to the brink 

 of a high cliff, down which it takes a straight course to the valley 

 below. 'Tis the Rosaria valley, and a little beyond, having 

 safely made the descent, we reach the low, plastered walls of the 

 ex-mission. The quaint Spanish bells still hang as they did 

 more than a century ago. The cheap painted images are occa- 

 sionally honored by the scanty population of mixed races, but 



