FAN PALMS IN PETTICOATS. THESE PALMS ARE IN PALM CANYON, IN THE COLORADO DESERT OF CALIFORNIA In their natural state the palm trunks are thus clothed with the reflexed old leaves. Only fire, accidental or intentional, has made many trees bare hummock. He made a neat little fire of a few sticks, not wasting a twig, and from his canteen poured just enough water for two tin cups of tea, and a palmful to wash his hands with, catching the drippings in another tin for rinsing. "The desert is a great teacher of economy," he remarked, waving his hands in the air to dry them, "and in nothing more than in wood and water. People who live where there is plenty of both don't realize how much more they use than is needful." Both among the sunny hills and on the open sands in March and April there are such wild gardens of bloom as will fairly startle you with their brilliancy-blue lupines and larkspurs, creamy evening primroses, poppies orange and white, and golden desert daisies; mentzelias, abronias, daleas, pentstemons, and gilias; cactuses in yellow, pink, and red, white-flowered yuccas, and flaming candlewood-all these and a hundred more in colorful mats and ribbons in the washes and dotted about the plains. But perhaps the most impressive sight of the desert plant life is furnished by the fan palms. They are of a variety found only in California, and there only within a restricted area of this Colorado Desert region, occasionally in open desert, but usually at the mouth of canyons, in soil always kept moist by alkaline streams or springs. At the base of the San Jacinto Mountain, between Palm Springs and Indian Wells, is a sequestered gorge known as Palm Canyon, famous for the abundance and beauty. of its fan palms, forming one of the most enchanting natural forests in the United States. A trail follows the course of a clear mountain stream that pursues its way desertward in the bed of the canyon, and as your horse bears you through the palmy aisles it will be hard, I think, for you to believe that you are not a rider in a dream. Palms in front of you, behind you, and on either hand; seedling palms pushing bristling fans from out the leaf-mold of the trail's side; palms of sober middle age with trunks draped in a shingling of the reflexed dead leaves; patriarchal palms, with fire-blackened boles rising in slender columns fifty, sixty, or eighty feet without a leaf to a crown of glistening verdure. You may follow the main canyon and its various branches for miles in the shadow of these noble trees; but whether you go so far or but a little way, do not hurry off. wood like this is too rare to be frittered away. Strew yourself a springy mattress of A the arrowweed which lines the stream give yourself unreservedly to the enther ment of a night in this unconventional fores primeval where is neither murmuring the nor hemlock, nor beard of mess. Instal the mistletoe hangs in witches' brooms in mesquite clumps and scents the air with is penetrating fragrance; and, lifted into the darkness high above you by the tall truks that your camp-fire reddens, the clustered fans of the palms rustle in musical rest use. as the fingers of the night wind draw cores them. To the lover of the strenuous life, too, the desert makes offerings. Among these mus be counted the high mountains that look down upon it-sun-scorched and dry on the: desert faces as the desert itself, of whie indeed they form the rim. Their dizzy pinnacles and battlements are the home of the mountain sheep, the lynx, and the cougar: and some day of your desert visit you wa yield to the call of the pines that crest these far-away heights. far-away heights. Few trails, and those so faint as to be surely followed only by the Indian or the experienced mountaineer, traverse that highland wilderness. The highest peak is San Jacinto, to the west, and the rise of that colossal mass almost in a perpendic lar from the sea-level of the desert to 10,800 feet above tide, an abrupt wall of two miles, is a unique feature among our mountains. Many are higher, but none furnish so stupen dous an uplift as this does from the desert, for the loftier peaks either start at an elevation already far above the level of the ocean. or rise much more gradually. From San Jacinto's peak the range drops gradually to the southeast, with an occasional up thrust of five, six, or eight thousand feet, until it vanishes across the border into Mexico. In other days there was considerable intercourse between the Indians of the desert and those of the mountains, and many a trail linke. the land of the palm and the land of the pine Into the mountains went the desert folk to hunt deer and to gather piñons when these— the nuts of the one-leaf pine-were ripe, they toasted the hot, sticky cones in the firc until they opened and released the terebinthine tidbits. Down to the desert, at the advent of winter, came the mountaineers. squaw, pappoose, and camp baggage, to pass in the milder climate of the low country the months when their highland homes were snowbound. On the mountain's treeless slopes that give upon the desert are als 1 the mescal fields, the natural plantations of the wild agave, to which desert and mountain Indians alike resorted for textile fiber, and, in the spring, to harvest the tender young flower stalks that shoot upward eight or ten feet, in appearance much like huge asparagus sprouts. Obliterated now are most of those ancient trails; but some dim remnants may still be followed, winding through a chaos of splintered rock and burnished boulder, now skirting dizzy ledges where a misstep may drop you to broken bones and death, again zigzagging through wild rock gardens of golden malacothrix and chænactis, crimson krameria, blue salazaria, and pentstemons. glowing in scarlet. Such gladness is in these solitary places. Often, though, you must dismount and lead your animals down or up devil's staircases, jagged and sharp, and hedged about with bristling cactus, cat'sclaw, and dagger-leaved yucca. The trail is "blazed" in this treeless region by small stones placed at intervals upon boulders along the way; nevertheless, often will you miss it, and bring up standing at the edge of some precipice that drops perpendicularly in fathomless depths, or stray off into some blind canyon with unscalable walls, out of which you must retrace your way and hunt the trail again-all of which but adds zest to the adventure of the explorer. A By such a trail you may go from Palm Canyon or Indian Wells to the level, grassy pass of Vandeventer's Flat, which separates San Jacinto's peak from Santa Rosa's. breezy, sunlit flat is this of Vandeventer's, forty-five hundred feet in the air, offering inspiriting views on one side towards the desert, and on the other towards the coast country. The chill of the spring evening was in the air when we reined up before Vandeventer's cabin to ask permission to camp. A fat old Indian in blue overalls sat in the doorway meditatively smoking a cigarette. He failed to rise to an English salutation, but some words in Spanish rendered him voluble. He and his muchacho, a husky young six-footer who, he told us, filled the office of local Indian policeman, lived there alone. Yes, we might camp, and, moreover, if we had provisions with us, we might cook our supper at the hearth fire inside; and, bringing in an armful of wood, the old man soon had a cheerful blaze crackling in the fireplace. While the rice and raisins boiled and bubbled we chatted in Spanish with the father and in English with the boy, who communicated with the elder in their native Coahuila dialect. There was A "DEVIL'S STAIRCASE This is on the slope of mountains overlooking Colorado Desert, California. There is a trail, but it is distinguishable only by the practiced eye ABANDONED COAHUILA HUT, SANTA ROSA, ON THE BORDER OF THE DESERT surprisingly much to talk about. My companion, a dweller of the desert, could tell of Willy Pablo, who had moved down from Banning and was clearing some ground for his father at the Aguas Calientes Reservation to plant to grapefruit; of young Francisco, who was married lately; of the rumor of a grand fiesta the coming August; and of the prospect of the fig harvest. Each of these momentous topics had to be considered with leisure and gravity from several angles; each necessitated the consumption of much tobacco. Santa Rosa peak, rising to the southeast of Vandeventer's, Calistro informed us, is called by his people the Mount of the Soul. To the south and west in misty loveliness the verdureclad mountains drift off in blue billows fading into Mexico and the fogs of the Pacific. That deep cleft, ten miles away, beyond which the Cuyamacas rise in sharp outline against the sky, is the Canyon of Coyote Creek, up which the Spaniard Anza, one hundred and forty years ago, led his company of colonists journeying from Mexico to lay the foundations of the city of San Francisco; over there to the eastward shimmers the still expanse of the Salton Sea. Northward the pines at our feet drop off to granite bareness revealing, far below and beyond, the vastness of the desert spread like a map from Mecca to Palm Springs. In the northwest stand San Jacinto and San Gorgonio, snow-crowned guardians of the pass through which the tide of modern travel ebbs and flows between Los Angeles and New Orleans. A wild, silent, lifeless mountain this, on which the desert seems to have laid the hand of ownership, drying up its springs. Because of lack of water the Coahuila Indians that once dwelt upon its southern slope migrated years since. We came unexpectedly upon their deserted village, under the yellow pines and black oaks-a dozen scattered cabins in various stages of decay. There was a novel fascination in sauntering about this Coahuila Auburn and entering into its moldering memories. Here was the flat rock with its worn pockets where the women had been wont to come to pound acorns into meal, and scattered about were some of the great storage baskets, each big enough to hold a family of babies, in which the harvest was dumped before grinding. Two such baskets still rested on elevated platforms erected to keep the contents safe from plundering rodents. One cabin, a good specimen of that form of aboriginal architecture called jacal, with walls of brush plastered and reinforced with adobe mud, had also an adobe chimney and fireplace, giving the dwelling an air of distinction, as though the inhabitants had been great folk of the rancheria. |