98 
LAND OF SUNSHINE. 
How thickly inhabited the place must have been ! Human skulls are 
everywhere about, and at camp we used the upper parts as baskets often¬ 
times, when we were short of tin cans. 
After a day of blinding storm—not of rain or of snow, but one of fog 
and sand and small pebbles and wind—a storm so fierce (although so 
strange) that one cannot face it, but gladly stays in his tent and “ fixes ” 
his “finds”—after such a day, how good to see sunshine in the early 
morning, even a touch, through the grey fog which is in truth the mantle 
chosen by San Nicolas, and which he rarely allows the wild wind to blow 
from over his shoulder. 
This morning new (old) bones are found exposed and delicate relics 
which the wind has uncovered. Everywhere the sand is piled fresh and 
the wind has given to the banks the exquisite markings which in colder 
lands he gives to the snow-drifts. 
At the west end, only the long, long stretches of endless mounds and 
the black rim of the reefs below, with the great sea rushing in, so sure 
of its victory. Seven breakers, twenty feet high, one after another, with 
the wind bearing away more and more and yet more new particles to the 
spit; the spit which stretches lazily to eastward with its stolen life ; 
out of the fog and into the arms of the spray which the sunlight turns 
into rainbows. In all this somber isle this one spot alone is joyous, this 
spit where the great rainbows play hour after hour, though there are none 
to see them. 
In March, after the rains, here and there about the central summit are 
gay sparkles of little flowers. About one hundred species were collected 
by the writer: several before unknown to botanists. San Nicol&s is in¬ 
deed a dying land. In all his length w T as found but one shrub seven 
feet high, and in three or four localities Reptosynes grow from four to six 
feet high, their gold stars beaming gladly in this solemn land. One tiny 
lake, too, was found begemmed with bullrush. 
In the weird and briny streams you walk with cautious step, in the 
shifting sand-bed of these narrow arroyos, hastening onward, lest your 
feet sink deeper, gazing up at the trembling crags—crags which often 
shut out the blue of the sky. Sad places, enlivened only by the green 
of the iceplants which grow on the drifted sands. No whirr of wing, no 
sound of bird, no trickle from those briny waters which glide but do not 
flow, and gliding sink ! 
Rarely a raven, like those of Santa Catalina, flies past, and two or three 
foxes are seen ; these too, like those on Santa Catalina, a species which 
is said to be found only on the coast islands. One of these foxes (lame) 
afterward identified as one the mate had shot a year previous. 
Nearly all the mounds are, as has been said, to westward. They lessen 
suddenly as you go towards the east. The cause is apparent upon 
thought. At the west end fresh water drips from the rocks just above 
the reefs ; it diminishes suddenly as you go toward the east, until none 
is found. 
The east end, though it has not fresh water, has that for which the 
west end can never hope, for beyond the long sand-spit, beyond the bil¬ 
low-lulled and rainbow-encircled spit, rise the ridges and rest the canons 
in which wind and sand have spent the greater part of their strength 
and time. There you may walk through defiles hung with stone lace- 
work, and climb stairways strangely carved. You may rest in old ruins 
and lean against a Corinthian column which holds within it still the 
heart of a Greek ; and the dragon which starts out here and there—do 
not forget that he too is but stone! 
You may wander from terrace to terrace and hear no sound save the 
far-off murmur of the sea which breaks a thousand feet below; and below, 
just above the sea, in a riven flat, you behold that which is too strange 
to fathom : for leagues away is the city, yet the park seems to be before 
you. There are dashes of scarlet amongst emerald green; there are 
