Part 2

Along its upper limit the forest zone grows thin and irregular; black shafts of alpine pines and firs clustering on sheltered slopes, or climbing in disordered processions up broken and rocky faces. Higher, the last gnarled forms are passed, and beyond stretches the rank of silent, white peaks, a region of rock and ice lifted above the limit of life.

In the north, domes and cones of volcanic formation are the summit, but for about three hundred miles in the south it is a succession of sharp granite aiguilles and crags. Prevalent among the granitic forms are singularly perfect conoidal domes, whose symmetrical figures, were it not for their immense size, would impress one as having an artificial finish.

The alpine gorges are usually wide and open, leading into amphitheatres, whose walls are either rock or drifts of never-melting snow. The sculpture of the summit is very evidently glacial. Beside the ordinary phenomena of polished rocks and moraines, the larger general forms are clearly the work of frost and ice; and, although this ice-period is only feebly represented to-day, yet the frequent avalanches of winter and freshly scored mountain flanks are constant suggestions of the past.

Strikingly contrasted are the two countries bordering the Sierra on either side. Along the western base is the plain of California, an elliptical basin four hundred and fifty miles long by sixty-five broad; level, fertile, well watered, half tropically warmed; checkered with farms of grain, ranches of cattle, orchard and vineyard, and homes of commonplace opulence, towns of bustling thrift. Rivers flow over it, bordered by lines of oaks which seem characterless or gone to sleep, when compared with the vitality, the spring, and attitude of the same species higher up on the foot-hills. It is a region of great industrial future within a narrow range, but quite without charms for the student of science. It has a certain impressive breadth when seen from some overlooking eminence, or when in early spring its brilliant carpet of flowers lies as a foreground over which the dark pine-land and white crest of the Sierra loom indistinctly.

From the Mexican frontier up into Oregon, a strip of actual desert lies under the east slope of the great chain, and stretches eastward sometimes as far as five hundred miles, varied by successions of bare, white ground, effervescing under the hot sun with alkaline salts, plains covered by the low, ashy-hued sage-plant, high, barren, rocky ranges, which are folds of metamorphic rocks, and piled-up lavas of bright red or yellow colors; all over-arched by a sky which is at one time of a hot, metallic brilliancy, and again the tenderest of evanescent purple or pearl.

Utterly opposed are the two aspects of the Sierras from these east and west approaches. I remember how stern and strong the chain looked to me when I first saw it from the Colorado desert.

It was in early May, 1866. My companion, Mr. James Terry Gardiner, and I got into the saddle on the bank of the Colorado River, and headed westward over the road from La Paz to San Bernardino. My mount was a tough, magnanimous sort of mule, who at all times did his very best; that of my friend, an animal still hardier, but altogether wanting in moral attributes. He developed a singular antipathy for my mule, and utterly refused to march within a quarter of a mile of me; so that over a wearying route of three hundred miles we were obliged to travel just beyond the reach of a shout. Hour after hour, plodding along at a dog-trot, we pursued our solitary way without the spice of companionship, and altogether deprived of the melodramatic satisfaction of loneliness.

Far ahead of us a white line traced across the barren plain marked our road. It seemed to lead to nowhere, except onward over more and more arid reaches of desert. Rolling hills of crude color and low, gloomy contour rose above the general level. Here and there the eye was arrested by a towering crag, or an elevated, rocky mountain group, whose naked sides sank down into the desert, unrelieved by the shade of a solitary tree. The whole aspect of nature was dull in color, and gloomy with an all-pervading silence of death. Although the summer had not fairly opened, a torrid sun beat down with cruel severity, blinding the eye with its brilliance, and inducing a painful slow fever. The very plants, scorched to a crisp, were ready, at the first blast of a sirocco, to be whirled away and ground to dust. Certain bare zones lay swept clean of the last dry stems across our path, marking the track of whirlwinds. Water was only found at intervals of sixty or seventy miles, and, when reached, was more of an aggravation than a pleasure,--bitter, turbid, and scarce; we rode for it all day, and berated it all night, only to leave it at sunrise with a secret fear that we might fare worse next time.

About noon on the third day of our march, having reached the borders of the Chabazon Valley, we emerged from a rough, rocky gateway in the mountains, and I paused while my companion made up his quarter of a mile, that we might hold council and determine our course, for the water question was becoming serious; springs which looked cool and seductive on our maps proving to be dried up and obsolete upon the ground.

A fresh mule and a lively man get along, to be sure, well enough; but after all it is at best with perfunctory tolerance on both sides, a sort of diplomatic interchange of argument, the man suggesting with bridle, or mildly admonishing with spurs; but when the high contracting parties get tired, the _entente cordiale_ goes to pieces, and actual hostilities open, in which I never knew a man to come out the better.

I had noticed a shambling uncertainty during the last half-hour’s trot, and those invariable indicators, “John’s” long, furry ears, either lopped diagonally down on one side, or lay back with ill omen upon his neck.

Gardiner reached me in a few minutes, and we dismounted to rest the tired mules, and to scan the landscape before us. We were on the margin of a great basin whose gently shelving rim sank from our feet to a perfectly level plain, which stretched southward as far as the eye could reach, bounded by a dim, level horizon, like the sea, but walled in to the west, at a distance of about forty miles, by the high, frowning wall of the Sierras. This plain was a level floor, as white as marble, and into it the rocky spurs from our own mountain range descended like promontories into the sea. Wide, deeply indented white bays wound in and out among the foot-hills, and, traced upon the barren slopes of this rocky coast, was marked, at a considerable elevation above the plain, the shore-line of an ancient sea,--a white stain defining its former margin as clearly as if the water had but just receded. On the dim, distant base of the Sierras the same primeval beach could be seen. This water-mark, the level, white valley, and the utter absence upon its surface of any vegetation, gave a strange and weird aspect to the country, as if a vast tide had but just ebbed, and the brilliant, scorching sun had hurriedly dried up its last traces of moisture.

In the indistinct glare of the southern horizon, it needed but slight aid from the imagination to see a lifting and tumbling of billows, as if the old tide were coming; but they were only shudderings of heat. As we sat there surveying this unusual scene, the white expanse became suddenly transformed into a placid blue sea, along whose rippling shores were the white blocks of roofs, groups of spire-crowned villages, and cool stretches of green grove. A soft, vapory atmosphere hung over this sea; shadows, purple and blue, floated slowly across it, producing the most enchanting effect of light and color. The dreamy richness of the tropics, the serene sapphire sky of the desert, and the cool, purple distance of mountains, were grouped as by miracle. It was as if Nature were about to repay us an hundred-fold for the lie she had given the topographers and their maps.

In a moment the illusion vanished. It was gone, leaving the white desert unrelieved by a shadow; a blaze of white light falling full on the plain; the sun-struck air reeling in whirlwind columns, white with the dust of the desert, up, up, and vanishing into the sky. Waves of heat rolled like billows across the valley, the old shores became indistinct, the whole lowland unreal. Shades of misty blue crossed over it and disappeared. Lakes with ragged shores gleamed out, reflecting the sky, and in a moment disappeared.

The bewildering effect of this natural magic, and perhaps the feverish thirst, produced the impression of a dream, which might have taken fatal possession of us but for the importunate braying of Gardiner’s mule, whose piteous discords (for he made three noises at once) banished all hallucination, and brought us gently back from the mysterious spectacle to the practical question of water. We had but one canteen of that precious elixir left; the elixir in this case being composed of one part pure water, one part sand, one part alum, one part saleratus, with liberal traces of Colorado mud, representing a very disgusting taste, and very great range of geological formations.

To search for the mountain springs laid down upon our maps was probably to find them dry, and afforded us little more inducement than to chase the mirages. The only well-known water was at an oasis somewhere on the margin of the Chabazon, and should, if the information was correct, have been in sight from our resting-place.

We eagerly scanned the distance, but were unable, among the phantom lakes and the ever-changing illusions of the desert, to fix upon any probable point. Indian trails led out in all directions, and our only clew to the right path was far in the northwest, where, looming against the sky, stood two conspicuous mountain piles lifted above the general wall of the Sierra, their bases rooted in the desert, and their precipitous fronts rising boldly on each side of an open gateway. The two summits, high above the magical stratum of desert air, were sharply defined and singularly distinct in all the details of rock-form and snow-field. From their position we knew them to be walls of the San Gorgonio Pass, and through this gateway lay our road.

After brief deliberation we chose what seemed to be the most beaten road leading in that direction, and I mounted my mule and started, leaving my friend patiently seated in his saddle waiting for the _afflatus_ of his mule to take effect. Thus we rode down into the desert, and hour after hour travelled silently on, straining our eyes forward to a spot of green which we hoped might mark our oasis.

So incredulous had I become that I prided myself upon having penetrated the flimsy disguise of an unusually deceptive mirage, and philosophized, to a considerable extent, upon the superiority of my reason over the instinct of the mule, whose quickened pace and nervous manner showed him to be, as I thought, a dupe.

Whenever there comes to be a clearly defined mental issue between man and mule, the stubbornness of the latter is the expression of an adamantine moral resolve, founded in eternal right. The man is invariably wrong. Thus on this occasion, as at a thousand other times, I was obliged to own up worsted, and I drummed for a while with Spanish spurs upon the ribs of my conqueror, that being my habitual mode of covering my retreat.

It _was_ the oasis, and not the mirage. John lifted up his voice, now many days hushed, and gave out spasmodic gusts of barytone, which were as dry and harsh as if he had drunk mirages only.

The heart of Gardiner’s mule relented. Of his own accord he galloped up to my side, and, for the first time together, we rode forward to the margin of the oasis. Under the palms we hastily threw off our saddles and allowed the parched brutes to drink their fill. We lay down in the grass, drank, bathed our faces, and played in the water like children. We picketed our mules knee-deep in the freshest of grass, and, unpacking our saddle-bags, sent up a smoke to heaven, and achieved that most precious solace of the desert traveller, a pot of tea.

By and by we plunged into the pool, which was perhaps thirty feet long, and deep enough to give us a pleasant swim. The water being almost blood-warm, we absorbed it in every pore, dilated like sponges, and came out refreshed.

It is well worth having one’s juices broiled out by a desert sun just to experience the renewal of life from a mild parboil. That About’s “Man with the Broken Ear,” under this same aqueous renovation, was ready to fall in love with his granddaughter, no longer appears to me odd. Our oasis spread out its disc of delicate green, sharply defined upon the enamel-like desert which stretched away for leagues, simple, unbroken, pathetic. Near the eastern edge of this garden, whose whole surface covered hardly more than an acre, rose two palms, interlocking their cool, dark foliage over the pool of pure water. A low, deserted cabin with wide, overhanging, flat roof, which had long ago been thatched with palm-leaves, stood close by the trees.

With its isolation, its strange, warm fountain, its charming vegetation varied with grasses, trailing water-plants, bright parterres in which were minute flowers of turquoise blue, pale gold, mauve, and rose, and its two graceful palms, this oasis evoked a strange sentiment. I have never felt such a sense of absolute and remote seclusion; the hot, trackless plain and distant groups of mountain shut it away from all the world. Its humid and fragrant air hung over us in delicious contrast with the oven-breath through which we had ridden. Weary little birds alighted, panting, and drank and drank again, without showing the least fear of us. Wild doves fluttering down bathed in the pool and fed about among our mules.

After straining over one hundred and fifty miles of silent desert, hearing no sound but the shoes of our mules grating upon hot sand, after the white glare, and that fever-thirst which comes from drinking alkali-water, it was a deep pleasure to lie under the palms and look up at their slow-moving green fans, and hear in those shaded recesses the mild, sweet twittering of our traveller-friends, the birds, who stayed, like ourselves, overcome with the languor of perfect repose.

Declining rapidly toward the west, the sun warned us to renew our journey. Several hours’ rest and frequent deep draughts of water, added to the feast of succulent grass, filled out and rejuvenated our saddle-animals. John was far less an anatomical specimen than when I unsaddled him, and Gardiner’s mule came up to be bridled with so mollified a demeanor that it occurred to us as just possible he might forget his trick of lagging behind; but with the old tenacity of purpose he planted his forefeet, and waited till I was well out on the desert.

As I rode I watched the western prospect. Completely bounding the basin in that direction rose the gigantic wall of the Sierra, its serrated line sharply profiled against the evening sky. This dark barrier became more and more shadowed, so that the old shore line and the lowland, where mountain and plain joined, were lost. The desert melted in the distance into the shadowed masses of the Sierra, which, looming higher and higher, seemed to rise as the sun went down. Scattered snow-fields shone along its crest; each peak and notch, every column of rock and detail of outline, were black and sharp.

On either side of the San Gorgonio stood its two guardian peaks, San Bernardino and San Jacinto, capped with rosy snow, and the pass itself, warm with western light, opened hopefully before us. For a moment the sun rested upon the Sierra crest, and then, slowly sinking, suffered eclipse by its ragged, black profile. Through the slow hours of darkening twilight a strange, ashy gloom overspread the desert. The forms of the distant mountain chains behind us, and the old shore line upon the Sierra base, stared at us with a strange, weird distinctness. At last all was gray and vague, except the black silhouette of the Sierras cut upon a band of golden heaven.

We at length reached their foot and, turning northward, rode parallel with the base toward the San Gorgonio. In the moonless night huge, rocky buttresses of the range loomed before us, their feet plunging into the pale desert floor. High upon their fronts, perhaps five hundred feet above us, was dimly traceable the white line of ancient shore. Over drifted hills of sand and hard alkaline clay we rode along the bottom of that primitive sea. Between the spurs deep mountain alcoves, stretching back into the heart of the range, opened grand and shadowy; far at their head, over crests of ridge and peak, loomed the planet Jupiter.

A long, wearisome ride of forty hours brought us to the open San Gorgonio Pass. Already scattered beds of flowers tinted the austere face of the desert; tufts of pale grass grew about the stones, and tall stems of yucca bore up their magnificent bunches of bluish flowers. Upon all the heights overhanging the road gnarled, struggling cedars grasp the rock, and stretch themselves with frantic effort to catch a breath of the fresh Pacific vapor. It is instructive to observe the difference between those which lean out into the vitalizing wind of the pass, and the fated few whose position exposes them to the dry air of the desert. Vigor, soundness, nerve to stand on the edge of sheer walls, flexibility, sap, fulness of green foliage, are in the one; a shroud of dull olive-leaves scantily cover the thin, straggling, bayonet-like boughs of the others; they are rigid, shrunken, split to the heart, pitiful. We were glad to forget them as we turned a last buttress and ascended the gentle acclivity of the pass.

Before us opened a broad gateway six or seven miles from wall to wall, in which a mere swell of green land rises to divide the desert and Pacific slopes. Flanking the pass along its northern side stands Mount San Bernardino, its granite framework crowded up above the beds of more recent rock about its base, bearing aloft tattered fragments of pine forest, the summit piercing through a marbling of perpetual snow, up to the height of ten thousand feet. Fronting it on the opposite wall rises its compeer, San Jacinto, a dark crag of lava, whose flanks are cracked, riven, and waterworn into innumerable ravines, each catching a share of the drainage from the snow-cap, and glistening with a hundred small waterfalls.

Numerous brooks unite to form two rivers, one running down the green slope among ranches and gardens into the blooming valley of San Bernardino, the other pouring eastward, shrinking as it flows out upon the hot sands, till, in a few miles, the unslakable desert has drunk it dry.

There are but few points in America where such extremes of physical condition meet. What contrasts, what opposed sentiments, the two views awakened! Spread out below us lay the desert, stark and glaring, its rigid hill-chains lying in disordered grouping, in attitudes of the dead. The bare hills are cut out with sharp gorges, and over their stone skeletons scanty earth clings in folds, like shrunken flesh; they are emaciated corses of once noble ranges now lifeless, outstretched as in a long sleep. Ghastly colors define them from the ashen plain in which their feet are buried. Far in the south were a procession of whirlwind columns slowly moving across the desert in spectral dimness. A white light beat down, dispelling the last trace of shadow, and above hung the burnished shield of hard, pitiless sky.

Sinking to the _west_ from our feet the gentle golden-green _glacis_ sloped away, flanked by rolling hills covered with a fresh, vernal carpet of grass, and relieved by scattered groves of dark oak-trees. Upon the distant valley were checkered fields of grass and grain just tinged with the first ripening yellow. The bounding Coast Ranges lay in the cool shadow of a bank of mist which drifted in from the Pacific, covering their heights. Flocks of bright clouds floated across the sky, whose blue was palpitating with light, and seemed to rise with infinite perspective. Tranquillity, abundance, the slow, beautiful unfolding of plant life, dark, shadowed spots to rest our tired eyes upon, the shade of giant oaks to lie down under, while listening to brooks, contralto larks, and the soft, distant lowing of cattle.

I have given the outlines of aspect along our ride across the Chabazon, omitting many amusing incidents and some _genre_ pictures of rare interest among the Kaweah Indians, as I wished simply to illustrate the relations of the Sierra with the country bordering its east base,--the barrier looming above a desert.

In Nevada and California, farther north, this wall rises more grandly, but its face rests upon a modified form of desert plains of less extent than the Colorado, and usually covered with sage-plants and other brushy _compositæ_ of equally pitiful appearance. Large lakes of complicated saline waters are dotted under the Sierra shadow, the ancient terraces built upon foot-hill and outlying volcanic ranges indicating their former expansion into inland seas; and farther north still, where plains extend east of Mount Shasta, level sheets of lava form the country, and open, black, rocky channels, for the numerous branches of the Sacramento and Klamath.

Approaching the Sierras anywhere from the west, one will perceive a totally different topographical and climatic condition. From the Coast Range peaks especially one obtains an extended and impressive prospect. I had fallen behind the party one May evening of our march across Pacheco’s Pass, partly because some wind-bent oaks trailing almost horizontally over the wild-oat surface of the hills, and marking, as a living record, the prevalent west wind, had arrested me and called out compass and note-book; and because there had fallen to my lot an incorrigibly deliberate mustang to whom I had abandoned myself to be carried along at his own pace, comforted withal that I should get in too late to have any hand in the cooking of supper. We reached the crest, the mustang coming to a conspicuous and unwarrantable halt; I yielded, however, and sat still in the saddle, looking out to the east.

Brown foot-hills, purple over their lower slopes with “fil-a-ree” blossoms, descended steeply to the plain of California, a great, inland, prairie sea, extending for five hundred miles, mountain-locked, between the Sierras and coast hills, and now a broad, arabesque surface of colors. Miles of orange-colored flowers, cloudings of green and white, reaches of violet which looked like the shadow of a passing cloud, wandering in natural patterns over and through each other, sunny and intense along near our range, fading in the distance into pale, bluish-pearl tones, and divided by long, dimly seen rivers, whose margins were edged by belts of bright emerald green. Beyond rose three hundred miles of Sierra half lost in light and cloud and mist, the summit in places sharply seen against a pale, beryl sky, and again buried in warm, rolling clouds. It was a mass of strong light, soft, fathomless shadows, and dark regions of forest. However, the three belts upon its front were tolerably clear. Dusky foot-hills rose over the plain with a coppery gold tone, suggesting the line of mining towns planted in its rusty ravines,--a suggestion I was glad to repel, and look higher into that cool, solemn realm where the pines stand, green-roofed, in infinite colonnade. Lifted above the bustling industry of the plains and the melodramatic mining theatre of the foot-hills, it has a grand, silent life of its own, refreshing to contemplate even from a hundred miles away.