Edna Brush Perkins

“ It spread in every direction, reaching to the distant Panamints across the valley and to the hazy outline of the low range at the southern end. The hill which we were passing rose into the sky, white as the plain except for a few streaks of ugly, greenish-yellow-like sulphur. No living green thing appeared. The white expanse was unbroken by a bush or even by an outjutting rock. The desolation was complete. An intense silence lay over it. If we dropped far enough behind the wagon not to hear the creaking of its wheels, we felt utterly alone, the only survivors in a dead universe. ”

“ If he loved the mountain, rather than so disfigure it, he would throw ink at his most cherished possession; and only lovers of mountains have the right to invade their loneliness. The Panamints, with their feet in the burning heat of Death Valley and their heads in the snow, almost unknown to any save a few prospectors, guarded on all sides by the solitudes of the desert, seemed utterly desirable to us.
We sat on a rock studying the map, which was no help at all, and eating the big, sweet, California prunes of which we always carried pockets-full as aids to wayfaring. ”

“ From the summit of Baldy the long curving arête that had looked so beautiful from Death Valley on one side and from Pinto Peak on the other led over to Telescope Peak. It was no disappointment. Sloping sharply down from Baldy, level for a ways, then rising again toward the white pyramid, it extended for about three miles, precipitous on both sides, often not more than ten feet wide on top. The exhilaration of walking thus in the clear air high above the spread-out world is always a boundless joy; on this shining wall in the middle of the desert the joy was almost unbearable. ”

“ Before us was the opening in the mountains where the terrible valley itself lay. It was magnificent in the biggest sense of that big, ill-used word. On the east side rose the precipitous Panamints with a thin line of snow on their summits; opposite them the dark buttresses of the Funeral Mountains faded back into dimness. Between the ranges hung a blue haze of the quality of the sky, like the haze that had obscured the hot Imperial Valley. The mountains were majestic, immovable, their summits dwelt in the living silence. The haze had the magicalness of mirage. ”

“ The desert has no foreground; you soon stop looking much for things near at hand and get the horizon-gazing habit. If a flower or a shining stone is at your feet you see it joyfully, but if it is a tin can it does not exist. There are too many far-off, enchanting things to look at. You are never unaware of the sky, nor the beautiful curves of the mountains; no forests nor roofs conceal them from you, and your eyes pass untroubled over small uglinesses.
We made our camp in the shelter of an immense rock that stood alone in the middle of the wash, and settled down for a long resting space. ”

“ The sky is a deep, dark blue. The whole valley is blue in the night and luminous like a sapphire. The going-down of the sun is a pageant; its uprising is a triumph. You feel as though you ought to clash cymbals, you feel as though you ought to dance and sing when the sun looks over the mountains. You have been remiss in worship all your life [Pg 124] because you have not learned to dance and sing in honor of the rising sun. The sun-god was worshiped on the desert for there the sun is a cruel, great god. ”

“ Nearly everybody who has money to invest buys stock in a gold mine once. Great hopes converged on the desert here from many a board-sidewalked town and prairie-farm; futures were built on it. There is a throb in the throat for Ryolite, fading into the mountain, its corrugated-iron roofs rusting red like the hills. The desert is licking the wound with her sandy tongue until not even a scar will remain. Sooner or later she heals all the little scratches men make on her surface.
The dead town faced a wide valley stretching like a green meadow to the opposite mountains. ”

“ The bandits led us over and around mountains, down washes and across the beds of dry lakes. Often there was no sign of a road, at least no sign that was apparent to us. On the desert you must travel one of two ways, either along the water-courses or across them. It is strange to find a country dying of thirst cut into a rough chaos by water-channels. Rain on the Mojave is a cloud-burst. The water rushes down from the rocky heights across the long, sloping mesas, digging innumerable trenches, until it reaches a main stream-bed leading to the lowest point in the valley. ”

“ For a few fearful moments we were alone with Mojave. How could rocks and sand and silence make us afraid and yet be so wonderful? For they were wonderful. The ridge was orange against a luminous-orange sky, the sand in the shadowy basin reached right and left, mysteriously shining, to mountains with rosy tops. The darkness around us was indigo, the two crooked ruts of the Ford were full of blue. ”

“ Ever since leaving Barstow we had been penetrating further and further into the Mojave. With every mile she had become more terrible and more beautiful. The colors which had delighted us at Joburg were pale beside the colors around Silver Lake, the mountains were hills compared to these beautiful, sinister masses. The sun had been brighter there than any eastern sun, here it was a hot, white blaze. All the way Mojave had asserted herself more and more. In the Imperial Valley, at Joburg and Barstow, we had felt men upon the desert, the drama was partly their drama ”

“ Beauty pressing around sorrow—the desert is simply a very forceful statement about that.
For the adventure with the outdoors is the adventure with beauty. And when you have that adventure the jealous walls, however engrossing their contents, and they may be very interesting and amusing and serious and exciting, can never bully you again. They have doors and windows in them and beauty is around them like a garment. ”

“ Old Johnnie's eyes glittered with unnatural brightness. He was telling his own secret. Very vividly he made us see a man alone in the blue night, dim sand spreading away, dark-blue mountains on blueness. Not a sound, not even the breath of the night stirring the sagebrush. Through white, empty days and blue, empty nights he is always alone. He listens to his own heart beating. ”

“ A good road led through the Cajon Pass to Victorville and thence over sand dotted with groves of Joshua palms to Barstow. A Joshua palm is a grotesque tree-yucca which appears wherever the mesas of the Mojave rise to an elevation of a few thousand feet. It becomes twenty feet high in some places and its ungainly arms stick up into the sky. It has long, dark green, pointed leaves ending in sharp thorns like the yucca. It attains to great age and the dead branches, split off from the trunk or lying on the ground, look as though they were covered with matted gray hair. ”

“ You are frightfully glad to have a rôle at all in so vast and splendid a drama and want to defend it as well as you can, but you do not trouble much over the outcome because the desert mixes up your ideas about what you call living and dying. You see the dreadful, dead country living in beauty, and feel that the silence pressing around it is alive. ”

“ All day the white blaze of the sun was around us and the silence, after a week of tumultuous wind, was a mighty dreaming. It was the living silence which we had first known on the night when we wandered away from Silver Lake, the silence in which the earth moves. The mountains dwelt in it majestically. Mojave was again making her fine gesture, unconscious of the discomforts and terrors of small living things. Her pointing at the far-off shining is always a [Pg 218] conquest of grimness, as though sorrow were a stepping-stone to beauty. ”

“ The characteristic mesa of the Mojave curves up on both sides, sandy, covered with stones, but often entirely bare of vegetation. Death Valley is always full of such illusions. Even afterwards, when we knew better, we could never look down into the valley from a height without feeling that the mountains rose precipitously out of it. That camp among the mesquites blazed. The yellow sand seemed to smite our eyes. Across the valley under the edge of the Panamints the mesa looked a beautiful dark-blue, but around us was an even greater ecstasy of light than we had known at Keane Wonder. ”

“ The sun shone with such dazzling brightness that during the middle of the day the shady sides of rocks were the best resting places. A fresh, steady wind blew nearly always up or down the canyon, sometimes piling great white masses of clouds in the sky, always scouring the world incredibly clean. Each night was a blue wonder. The mountains were delicate, luminous shapes in front of a sky infinitely far away. ”

“ Mexicans stopped work on the track to watch us go by, sometimes a house stood alone in the brush, sometimes a lonely automobile crawled along the highway beside the railroad. It was empty and vast, and over it all the sun poured a white flood.
In spite of the dust and glare a fascinated curiosity kept us looking out of the dirty windows all day. Occasionally dim wagon tracks led toward the mountains, some of which were high and set on wide, solid foundations. They were immovable, old, old mountains. Shadows cut sharply into the smooth brightness of their sides. ”

“ We knew that men had died down there in the shimmering heat of that white floor, we knew that the valley was sterile and dead, and yet we saw it covered with a mantle of such strange beauty that we felt it was the noblest thing we had ever imagined. Only a poet could [Pg 95] hope to express the emotion of beauty stronger than fear and death which held us silent moment after moment by the point of rock. ”

“ A lifetime is not long enough to listen to the songs of the desolate places. A whole sunny, timeless day is too short to hear the Mesquite Valley. The days and nights of the desert merge into each other. ”

“ They might vanish like a mirage and never be missed. The magnificent procession of the nights and days passes over the white terror, more magnificent than other nights and days precisely because of the glowing of that terrible sand and those terrible mountains, perfect for its own sake, and utterly indifferent whether or not eyes and hearts can endure it. ”

“ We could see it piling up around the next mesquite, and could imagine it whirling through the valley over the tops of "Old Johnnie's" dunes.
Often the wind goes down at sunset, but that day the sun sank invisibly and the fury increased. We felt a queer excitement not unmixed with fear. Thus, only a hundred times worse, must the sand blow over the vast Sahara Desert while the Arabs cover their heads, calling on Allah. When the solid ground itself arises there is no help but Allah. ”

“ His image would remain always to the inward eye in dull days and difficult days, a reminder of how beauty watches around the world.
When the sun stood just above the wall of the Sierras we began the long descent down the rounded, snowy side of Baldy to the little saddle, and down the long, steep slope and the little, buttress slope where the cedar trees had been so lovely in the snow. Night came while we were still going down, and the basin of Wild Rose Canyon was a violet lake. ”

“ The top of Emigrant Pass is a big mesa surrounded by all kinds of mountains from the broken, battered buttresses and steep snow-peaks of the Panamints to smooth, bare, rounded hills folded over each other and dimpled like upholstered sofas. ”

“ A miracle happens and you know this is the same outdoors you love, only its trappings are put off, it is stripped of obscuring verdure, naked, and you find it more terrible than you thought it could be and more beautiful than you thought it could be. The rising and the setting of that cruel sun are great splendors, that dark night sky is bigger and deeper than in kinder countries. The stars are very near, floating in a sea so deep it reaches to infinity ”

“ Here is the same glittering sand, the same colorful rocks, the same plants, [Pg 159] the same bare, crumbling hills. The sun blazes with the same brightness, turning every projecting edge of rock and little leaf into a spot of light. The all-enveloping silence is the same. The distances shine with the same illusion.
All around Emigrant Springs are mountains from five to seven thousand feet high. One day was devoted to a stiff climb up to the abandoned mines at Skidoo, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. ”

“ On the brightest days in the east flowers and shrubs look as though they were floating in a pure, colorless liquid, and the vistas are softly veiled. The air seems to have substance. Among the mountains of the desert it is a flawless plate glass through which you look directly at the face of the world. ”

“ The bottom of the gorge was a wide, sandy wash much cut up by rains, full of boulders and grown over with brush. The vegetation became ever greener and more luxuriant. The wash looked like a wind-tossed green river between crumbly, precipitous mountains of many colors. Some were a dull red, some sage-green, [Pg 156] some buff, some dark yellow, while an occasional purple crag gave the canyon a savage appearance. These mountains had the velvet texture which we had seen at Saratoga Springs, especially the sage-green ones. ”

“ He listens intently because it is the only sound for such a long time. It comes again. It grows louder. He strains to hear. A bell belongs on a burro—he hears the tramp of burros' feet.
[Pg 109]
With awe we looked at those bright, intent eyes and that thin body bent tensely forward. Some night the Lonesome Bell will be true, but "Old Johnnie" will not hear it. A belated traveler with his pack-train will find a dead camp-fire and an old man asleep forever beside it. "Old Johnnie" has outwitted the valley so long that he thinks he can always do it, but she will get him in the end. ”