534 MOUNTAIN CHAINS. Book III. 
drying up of the water. This had happened about two 
months before, at which time travellers had found some 
alive, but the whole neighbourhood was infected with the 
smell of the dead fish. The water was then undrinkable ; 
but it had now no longer any bad organic taste, and was 
only somewhat brackish : I drank of it without incon- 
venience. 
It appears to me that the alternate filling and drying 
up of these lagoons is only to be explained by supposing 
an alternate rising and falling of the ground ; the acci- 
dental overflowing of the river appears to be an insufficient 
explanation. 
We had now approached near to the Californian moun- 
tains : they rose in the west like a high wall, over which, 
when we raised our camp in the evening, hung black 
clouds. There is another steep, though not very lofty, 
mountain-chain in the north-east of the road. This is the 
north-western continuation of the rocky range of moun- 
tains which begins below Camp Yuma on the Colorado, 
and to which corresponds a similar chain running in a 
south-easterly direction on the other side of the river. 
The Colorado Desert is simply a bay running in between 
the eastern and western mountains, and forming the 
extreme north-west corner of the lowlands, which formerly 
belonged to the bed of the Californian Gulf. 
The Little Lagoon lies in the State of California, the 
frontier of which we now crossed. Towards evening we 
proceeded further, and pursued our way across an entirely 
barren, hard, and level plain of sandy clay, which was 
covered with little snail-houses like grains of rice. On this 
journey we had an opportunity of learning, by experience, 
that the Colorado Desert — of which it had been asserted 
to me that it never rained in it — is sometimes entirely 
