Afoot on Colorado Desert

TO keep cool is the principal concern of life at Fort Yuma. Just across the river, in the streets of that huddle of forlorn, bleak, flat - topped mud-houses known as Arizona City, you see certain ghostly umbrellas moving about, with a faint suspicion of whey beneath them. The principal articles of apparel worn in that delectable city are umbrellas and very hightopped boots. At sunset, so the story runs, they fold their umbrellas, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away to a series of moulds, shaped as if for taking plaster-casts, in the cool sand along the bank of the Colorado, into which they pour themselves out of their boots, and emerge in the morning solidified into the human form again.

The Yuma Indians have a method peculiar to themselves. They smear their heads with a layer of marl or clay an inch thick, working it well into their long hair, which serves a double usefulness : first, suppressing the parasites there resident ; second, screening their heads against the too ardent rays of the sun. Then they go far up the river, procure sticks or logs of driftwood, by which they buoy themselves up, and float tranquilly down the stream, leaving no part of themselves exposed to the action of the sun, except these smooth, shiny globes of mud.

The exceedingly flat banks of the Colorado, together with the low growth of cottonwoods and willows, — low, because so often beaten and broken by the floods, — remind one of the Lower Mississippi. And it is worth more than a draught of the river’s thick porridge to venture out across them, for they are perfect man-traps. There is something dismal in the very presence of this great desert river ; the treacherous swirl of its current sometimes appalls and drags down the strongest swimmer ; and the very beasts, if they have lived their wretched lives awhile on its banks, dread the sight of it, and snort, when one attempts to drive them near it, with undisguised terror. Across the desert through which it flows there stretches a stout rocky rib, which the river plunges through in a perpendicular cañon. Thus the frail mud-walls of Arizona City are protected by a natural bulwark, and on the other side Fort Yuma lifts its walls pretentiously up on the bulwark itself.

Standing on the walls of the fort, I looked out over the haggard and sullen desert, and my soul exulted in the very greatness and the savageness of the desolation. Ah ! it will be worth a century of babbling in green fields and fiddling among flowers to grapple once more, hand to hand, with Old Hideous ! Words cannot express the utterly wornout, sad, and lustreless light in which I first looked out upon Colorado Desert. It was like a kind of whitish, damplooking haze, a condensed and visible essence of heat, as it were oozing from the very home of the heat. Nowhere else have I ever beheld such a wan, dismal, and haggard sallowness of the sun, as if it were the birthplace of Time, where the very radiance of heaven, grown old with the earth, had worn down to a mere sickly drizzle of light. The air itself seems to be curdled and dimmish, like the eye of a nonagenarian.

Who that has seen can ever forget Cole’s “Voyage of Life”? His symbolic voyager, after he traverses in his flowery shallop the still waters of childhood, amid an extraordinary brilliance of floral shores, stretches out his arms in delirious eagerness after the splendid phantoms of youth ; then rushes down the frightful and storm-blackened rapids of manhood ; is seen at last, an old man, with his boat just entering upon the verge of ocean, over which and all around him lower the heavy mists of death, while his face, though touchingly saddened and furrowed by the long conflict of life, is radiant now with peace, — an unspeakable peace, — as he gazes tranquilly up toward the dim and shadowy Walls of Paradise. The counterpart of those walls seemed to lie before me, as I looked upon the mountains of the Colorado, ninety miles away, heaped up ridge on ridge, with their turrets and domes and minarets. Nature is catholic in her architecture. The mandarin shall find yonder his pagoda ; the Roman, his basilica ; the Norman, his massive cathedral ; the Protestant, his slender spire.

Then I went on down the Colorado flat toward Pilot Knob. By the roadside there was a Texan emigrant-wagon, which had turned aside into the almost impenetrable mesquite brakes, where a very auspicious event had occurred. There were some lank and haggard squaws squatting about, with sundry watermelons hardly as large as their heads. One of them, who appeared to have no children of her own, was exceedingly interested in the occurrence, and seemed, in fact, to have been playing the part of Mrs. Gamp acceptably. There was an older child, with which the father was employiivT his time, and this the squaw now wanted to take into her hands. By every mute and pleading gesture known to tender mothers, by every faithful promise by which she could bind her-self, she seemed to urge him, and at last lie gave it to her for a moment. Her childless soul was overjoyed ; she chucked it and chucked it under the chin ; she coddled it on her knees ; she babbled, and clucked, and chirruped, and tossed it up and down, over and over and over again, as civilized women love to do. Doubtless she would gladly have given all the melons of her tribe, and one over and above, for the privilege of carrying it away to her wigwam.

A mile or two below Pilot Knob I left the flat and ascended a few feet upon the plateau of the desert. I had nearly crossed a continent to see a real desert, and I was a little disappointed. I expected sand, but here was reddish loam. I expected a sea-level, but here were thousands of little mounds. I expected nothing else, but here was mesqnite and cheriondia on the mounds. Dead stems lying everywhere, dead stems leaning everywhere, dead stems standing everywhere, with their wormeaten and loosened sheathing of bark flapping and ticking in every breeze, or dragging half-way down in cobwebs and powder of wood. The whole appearance of the desert was odiously ragged blighted, blasted, gaunt, dusty. I had hoped to see something as sublime as the ocean, for the great and solemn remorselessness of the gloom ; but this was a thing pecked at by Death, shredded, gnawed, shrivelled, hateful.

But I travelled thirty or forty miles beside the edge of a higher plateau of sand, soft and yellow to see, and most exquisitely ripple-marked in little hillocks, which the fierce simooms that at times sweep over them are continually shifting. How that great ocean of sand wimples and flickers beneath the naked, unwinking eye of the sun ! It seems to shiver with a burning impatience to rush upon the luckless traveller, and whelm him fathoms deep in the scorching drifts. The whole vast field quivers with the fiery heat, and all the tops of the hillocks are dancing in the air.

Now the road drags heavily on through deep sand. O, this abhorred winter, with its waste of dead limbs, and its perennial Arctic snows ! Wearily, wearily I tramp in their drifts, thrust into this arid middle and heat of autumn, with its gaunt and hungry air, its pallor, its blinding white-hot shimmer, and its stifling winds ! Sometimes I hear the faint chirrup of the cicala, and think with Antipater that it is sweeter than the swan. Sometimes a gadfly hurries past me in its wide and lonesome flight. Even the crow, which labors heavily along with a strangely sharp, metallic winnowing of the air, holds a moody and solemn stillness, as if it were the last crow of time flapping over the charnel-house of all the centuries.

But the most ghastly of all ghastly things on this hideous wild was the half-eaten and blackened body of a deserter, who, avoiding the stations for fear of detection, had perished miserably on the sand and been slightly covered up, but had been dragged forth by the foul coyotes. Ah ! who can picture a more fearful thing than such a death upon the desert ! Fallen at last, faint with the raging thirst, he beholds the yelling beasts already gathering about him. His wild and haggard eyes strain out into the lurid glare of the desert. The burning wind sweeps in a little rounded hollow past his head, and with its hot breath sucks away his own. The hissing sand eddies thick upon him. creeping insidiously up, inch by inch, till it rests upon his glazing eye.

One forenoon, amid a fiery heat, I heard at a distance singular sounds, and stopped to listen. At first it was a discordant and rasping sound, something like that of the saw-filer ; then it quickly changed to a sharp tinkling jangle, like the chime of little tea-bells, except that there was that strange halfclang which may be made by striking bells under water. I rejoiced much thereat, thinking this was a genuine acoustical delusion ; but a few steps farther brought me to the bed of a dry lagoon, in which there were flowers and buzzing bees, and again I rejoiced,

Is it not just possible that all these " acoustical delusions,” reported from Sahara and other deserts, are delusions indeed, which a little honest examination would have resolved into phenomena as natural as the humming of bees ? Certain it is that for a moment I heard the saw-filing and then the tea-bells as distinctly as ever in my life. But where in all this hideous desert — for it was seventy miles to mountains — do these feeble bees store their juice, unless, like those of Samson, they make a hive of a carcass ? It is said that on the great plains of the central basin of California bees often perish from their long wanderings ; how, then, could these wing their way through this dreadful weather and return ?

In approaching New River one quits the sand and enters upon a vast sealevel plain of reddish soil, which is absolutely denuded of every green thing, and stretches away to infinity, lying bare and blistering in the sun. What is this? Frost? There are patches and acres of white, which look like the early rime, but, upon close inspection, one discovers it is only the minute shells of periwinkles strewn in myriads. Mile upon mile, league after league. I strode across this naked wild, this old and hungry negative of all things, in the centre of a magic circle, frozen in on every hand by a mystic film of ice. Far out as I could see, till it rounded down below the dim horizon, stretched this arctic sheet, glistening deliciously cool and watery-blue in its delusive brilliance. If I brought down my eyes to the level of the desert, then I was frozen in within ten rods; when I rose and walked on, there hovered before me faint and phantom shapes, palaces, domes, gorgeous tropic islands, enchanted mountains, which seemed to roll up and away, far back, to make room for others constantly rising. A fanciful and proud ovation was that lone march on the desert, when weird cities danced in the air about me, and far caravans moved upon the clouds, and all the magnificent pomp of armies was seen in the shadowy panorama !

New River, unlike all well-regulated rivers of which geography brings us any knowledge, has a river for its source, and ends nowhere. Branching from the Colorado near its mouth, it glides easily down across the desert, through a “swale ” a quarter of a mile wide, — a mere creek in its proportions, — till it is swallowed up on a level seventy-five feet below the Pacific.

Whom of all men should I find, away here in this desolate sink of the continent, but genuine Vermont Yankees ? Northern emigration has flowed westward to the Pacific, then down the coast, then far out here on the desert, and even to Arizona City, beating back the Southern. And, what is still more characteristic, here, where the two streams meet and mingle, you find the Yankee keeping the station or owning the little grocery, while the Southerner is the teamster, or the aimless vagabondizing emigrant, coming to California this year, returning to Texas the next. There were three stations on this desert owned by an old gentleman and his sons, and so well had the father at least preserved his characteristics among the large-handed Californians, that his reputation for stinginess met me ninety miles from his station. This structure was of the usual description ; a mud-built quadrangle, of which the house formed one side, while the other three sides were horse-stalls roofed with brushwood. Americans seem to become Mexicanized very soon in regard to mud. In the house part there were whole broadsides of California wine, gorgeous in heraldry of brass and scarlet labels, the fatal sardines, chewing-tobacco, heaps of sacks of barley, and canned fruits blooming in unhealthy colors on their labels. The little old man had a hard, pinched face, which the desert had burned almost black, and he kept all the while insinuating into his nose pinches of snuff, and inflicting upon that organ most unjust and abusive thrusts with a very hard-wadded silk handkerchief, first upon one nostril, then upon the other. He was serving discharged soldiers with great assiduity. From one of them he received a currency note, which he stretched out straight; then he winked very hard at it with both eyes, examined it with his spectacles, and finally made it a part of a roll nearly as large as his hat, and carefully inserted it into his pocket.

Thirty-six miles now without a drop of water! I slung a canteen full over my shoulder, and started at sunset. All through a long September night, by the soft desert light, in the soft desert coolness, I plodded through the brooding solitude, till moonset, then slept an hour till daybreak, then forward again till three o’clock in the afternoon. Crunch, crunch, crunch forever through the gravel. When the moon went down, it disappeared before it reached the level of the desert ; and though I could see nothing, I knew by the ragged outline of that which swept over it in ghostly eclipse that it had found the Sierra Nevada. Could I repress a shudder when I saw my sole companion of the night sink into blackness? Alone, all, all alone, in the darkness of the gaunt and hungry desert ! There came to me something of that feeling which breathes through the noble speech of the dying Ajax, when he bids farewell forever to the beautiful light.

But on the cool, hard gravel I soon fell asleep. O, it was a mighty large bed, so big that you could n’t kick off the clothes at all ! And only one in a bed! I slept well therein, but the rascally coyotes awakened me at last by their yelping. Leaping up suddenly, I came within two or three rods of gripping one by the tail. As they galloped away across the cool gray gravel, in the dim light of the daybreak, it looked precisely as if they were skating away on ice.

Continuing my journey, I presently passed off the gravel, and began to traverse bald yellow or whitish knolls and steep gulches, where everything was absolutely and hideously naked. I walked among peeled hills, and through gullies rasped and washed and rinsed of every green thing. But all was hard now, and stiff in crusts,— the blear stare of the soil, —baked, and skinny, and glistering in the heat with a painful incandescence, — the hopeless reign of hardpan. Sallow old hills, lean old hills, sad old hills, forsaken by all fresh and pleasant things, they grin, and leer, and shiver through an eternal sterility.

Two spurs of the Sierra Nevada straddle far out into the desert, like a pair of tongs, and between them flows feebly down the Carrizo. I had hoped to find some shade or fertility generated by this mountain stream, but the valley is nothing but a broad vacuous sheet of sand. Some distance below the point where the waters of this creek sink, I met some Mexicans with enormous ox-teams, just venturing out into the great desert, going toward Fort Yuma. One of them had with his hands scooped a little pit in the sand, and was waiting for the water to rise. I sat down opposite him, and informed him that it was a good day, whereupon he imparted to me a like piece of intelligence, without once looking in my direction. Then he doubled his hands together, and dipped up water, which he drank. Let a man used to the springs of New England approach one, and he will bow down upon his knees to drink, but a Mexican dips it in his hands. Is it that he fears the insects which live in his warmer climate ?

“ How long will it take you to reach Fort Yuma?” I asked him.

“ Quien sabe, sever ? Mucho tiempo.” He said this with that exquisite mellifluous languor, which makes the veriest trifles of a peon’s talk sweeter than all the eloquence of Everett.

A characteristic answer. “ Much time.” An American, looking only to the result, would have said, “ A long time”; but this Mexican, having all the centuries for his own, and diffusing his consciousness through all the hours as they pass, for whom mere existence is a guaranty of enjoyment, answers, “Much time.”

As one advances up the valley, the mountains draw nearer together, with fringes of foot-hills, frozen-looking and stark in their ghostly pallor. Here, as everywhere in these regions, the mountain ranges gather all the moisture from the clouds, and on their yellow knobs there are a few stunted shrubs, which quiver in the heat, like green-tinged tongues of flame. Occasionally there stands up one among the foot-hills whose heart of fire seems cooled with hidden waters, and on it there are a few shrubs, in singular contrast with this polar nakedness, these grim tropical icebergs.

A little above the Carrizo Station I was rewarded for my early rising with an almost goblin spectacle, worthy of the “golden prime of good Haroun Alraschid.” The tips of the mountains were just reddened by the dawn. Before me lay the immaculately white sand-floor of the valley, sprinkled over with the cheriondia, in its bright seagreen ; dead greenwoods, in a foliage of a crisp, cool, watery gray ; and sagebushes, in a dusty yellowish-green. All the valley and the mountains around stood dim in the violet-white haze of the desert, than which

could be more tenderly tinted. As soon as the blood-red sun was well above the mountains, all the haze forsook the western horizon and gathered thick about it, shrouding its beams into a cold, pallid stare. This sickly light, falling full down into this white graveyard and among its occupants, the weird, spectral, arctic foot-hills, wrought a wonderful transformation. The cheriondia, in this mildew of sunshine, blanched its green brightness, and the whole valley seemed blighted, as if at the approach of the haggard King of Terrors in his pale vestments. Not on the final morning of time shall the sun fling his wan glare so cold through the sickening air upon the last man, freezing his thin blood.

Stephen Powers.