Mojave

I

MY unfinished researches for the New York Zoölogical Society, my preparations, all my keenest enthusiasms, pointed eastward toward Bermuda, deep-sea fish, and a half-mile dive. But three Acts of God, as the steamship tickets put it, interfered — a sinus and two physicians. Westward the latter pointed toward the desert, which, as any dictionary will tell you, is a place which is very hot and dry.

I chose the good old Pullman route instead of going by airplane, because I waste too much time as it is to have two more days thrown on my hands; and, just as I prefer my underseascape from a diving helmet instead of a glassbottomed boat, I had nothing but sheer joy in seeing the states unroll horizontally before me — mountains, prairies, desert, and mountains again. From my train window I was able to observe the marvelous corresponding shift in plants, from maple to wheat, cactus, and pine, as well as the change from daisies to poppies, crows to ravens, woodchucks to prairie dogs, cuckoos to road-runners, skyscrapers to ’dobe huts. There were also shifting percentages of Americans, from the 25 per cent smoking-room drummers with suspicious accents to 50 per cent Mexicans and 100 per cent Indians. All these and notes filling twenty pages I recorded before I stepped off the train on the first day of June into glorious warmth at the flag station of Victorville, California, which, I was to learn, had been hard hit by the depression, though no one talked about it.

Here the B. H. (pronounced ‘best host’) in the world met me, and we went into a spotless lunchroom where I hung up my anachronistic winter overcoat beside a pair of ‘chaps’ and sat down across from a slender young fellow with high heels — who was neither a gigolo nor a film cowboy. There were placed before us such eggs, cream, strawberries, cantaloupe, hot cakes, bacon, and coffee as I supposed had passed from existence with our grandmothers, and the glimpse I had of the check made it seem to my New York eyes like the tip to the waitress or an amusement tax.

My host had to leave shortly for Hollywood for several days’ motionpicture work, but he insisted on driving with me the fifty miles to his cabin in the heart of the Mojave Desert, to do the honors for five minutes before he retraced his steps.

From the very first I found myself constantly water-conscious in these strange surroundings. I kept seeing the barren buttes on every side as merely the tips of lofty mountains, as indeed they were, and I kept thinking that, if only all this débris could be swept away, there would be exposed the old lake bottom, and I might find shells and fossil fishes resting there. I also had a feeling of familiarity with the whole desert, and only when a hot wind sprang up and brought me the indefinable, unforgettable desert smell did I recall that over a quarter of a century ago I had written my first book on the arroyos and barrancas of western Mexico.

In every respect I found this first day in my new house typical of those that followed — hot and dry, dry and hot. A few hours later I was huddled close to a blazing fire of gnarled roots and welcoming the suggestion of a fourth blanket on my bed. I stepped outside and could scarcely stand before the bitter wind which howled around the cactus. The next morning I sat up and thawed out and remarked that at least the desert was dry. By noon, rain was falling in torrents, and after a cloud-burst the creosote and cactus dripped streams. Again a morning of sun, and the third day there came a downpour of great hailstones heavy enough to break the glass of windshields, and the distant foothills were white with two inches of the icy pellets. This was the last effect put on for my special benefit, and from then on the Mojave was all that my doctors and I had expected.

II

I was supposed to be convalescent and not to tear about, as is my wont. So I invented ‘Low Gearing’ for specimens. Don, my Universal Factotum, and I would start off in the car with open doors, and crawl like a dusty turtle for miles over and through the desert, leaping out with net or snake stick or binoculars when anything demanded it.

With the dashing away of the first lizard from our path, problems arose to plague me, unexpected adaptations to aridity and heat, inexplicable habits and structures. As with fish and birds, differences in psychology were instantly apparent. The jolly little horned toads fled headlong, raised high on all four legs, carrying a conspicuous shadow beneath them. Then they flattened, wriggled for a moment, and vanished. If one had marked them down carefully, it was the simplest thing in the world to walk up and lift them unresistingly from the sand. But with the whip and the gridiron-tailed lizards, flight was like the instantaneous passing of a shadow.

The nights were too chilly and windy to go about much, so I chose an indirect method of studying nocturnal life — a method reminiscent of my ways with deep-sea fish. I noosed what rattlers crossed my path or tapped their fragile cervical vertebræ, and later investigated their penult and antepenultimate meals, finding many interesting and quite recent kangaroo rats and pocket mice. In every rattler I examined there were traces of lizards as well as mammalian food, and all the sidewinding rattlers had been feasting on unfortunate horned toads, lizards whose girth and spines would seem to render them almost unswallowable. In fact, more than one of these rattlesnakes was found dead, with the sharp spines of the lizard projecting through the skin.

The sand-colored sidewinders were extremely difficult to see, and did not rattle readily. When the snakes were teased, the vibrations would begin — a high, fine, incredibly ventriloquial sound, exactly like the distant call of a desert cicada. The warnings of the several species of larger rattlers were lower and direct. I had never before had an opportunity to watch the strange method of progression of the sidewinder. When in soft sand or in a hurry, its motion seemed to be a real slithering or lateral pushing, its track being a series of isolated, S-shaped marks; but when on harder ground it was a distinct sideways stepping, the focal points being the neck and the posterior part of the body — neck, hips, neck, hips, we might say — in succession, all of the intermediate extent of body being held well above the ground.

This is, of course, an adaptation to swifter progress than would otherwise be possible over soft deep sand, and to the eye of the evolutionist it would seem almost a restriving for legs at certain definite points of the body. But evolution never repeats itself, and the limbs of this and all other rattlers are lost forever in the mist of far-distant ancestry.

Failing to find insects under flat stones at midday, I reverted to old habits, and to my companion’s astonishment produced many rare species from beneath the dried carcasses of turtles, jack rabbits, and other creatures which had fallen victims to automobiles at night. The exceptions to this diurnal dearth of insect life were black beetles of large size and belonging to diverse families, which crept slowly and unconcernedly about. The terrific disgust showed by my captive horned toads at the taste of these was unmistakable proof of their inedibility.

Another unexhausting method of studying desert life was to watch quietly at the few springs and wells. Our cabin lay at the very base of the great, rugged, barren mountain of Ord — a name suggesting at one and the same time one of the lesser gods of Pegana and a place where metals abound. A still better meaning was furnished by a well-founded rumor that it was the adopted name of a family descended from some early king of England — the acrostic, Of Royal Descent. At any rate, minerals did abound in its heart, and at the entrance to a gold mine which faced us was a tank constantly filled with water; here, if one was patient, one might see all the water-loving desert folk from humming birds to mountain sheep come to quench their thirst.

III

On my way West I had read four standard books on deserts, — two of them excellent, two very poor, — and each day I realized how little we really know, with the exception of the names and external structure, of this hard-bitten flora and fauna.

The jungle with its birds and climbing creatures, and the sea with its fish, seem to me places of three dimensions, whereas a being of the desert may wander here and there, back and forth, but hardly upward. Amid concealing foliage a creature must sing or call or scream to its mate or flock, but here the view is open on all sides, so the desert folk are silent, compelled to search and look. In the sea the problem is to get enough oxygen from the all-surrounding water, while here life itself depends on a meagre drop of dew, or the moisture within seed or insect.

All about me were hosts of unsolved problems awaiting patient observation. I had time on this trip only to recognize their existence. As an example of one solution of the water problem in a waterless desert, let us recall the ingenuity of the sand grouse of the Sahara. These birds often nest many miles from water, yet the nestlings are absolutely dependent upon an ample supply. The male parent flies daily to water, no matter how distant, and systematically rubs the feathers of his breast back and forth upon the sand until they are all awry and mussed up. He then wades into shallow water and thoroughly saturates the disturbed plumage of the under parts, and when this is accomplished he flies swiftly back, mile after mile, to the nest and at once stands over his offspring. They reach up eager beaks and suck the dripping feathers until they are quite dry. It reminds one of the mammalian feeding of milk to the young, and especially of the duckbilled platypus, whose lacteal fluid flows down a cluster of hairs into the mouth of the offspring.

At the other extreme from the sand grouse are creatures like certain antelopes, ground squirrels, and lizards, which probably never take a drink of water throughout their lives.

A hundred similes between this life and that of the tropical jungle and the undersea came to mind, and I saw how necessary to the intelligent study of each of the others was knowledge of this life amid the dryness and the heat.

I remembered the hoatzin and the peripatus of the jungle, and the amphioxus of the Bermuda shallows, and I wondered what the desert had to offer in the way of so-called missing links or living anachronisms. Then one morning Grant Mitchell called out to come and catch a strange beast in the garbage pile, and I rushed with joy upon a vinegaroon at bay between a tin can and a grapefruit. I had not seen one since, in long-past ages at the university, they were doled out of preservative for dissection to students of Biology III. We knew them as solpugids — sinister-looking, but exceedingly important scientifically as living links of sorts between scorpions and spiders. The creature has four unpleasant horizontal jaws, its head and thorax are united, as in spiders, but a long jointed abdomen recalls the scorpions, and it walks on ten legs, which no spider can possibly do. Most remarkable of all, its breathing apparatus is built on a sheer insect plan. I fed it flies, which it leaped upon and then sucked dry, and it survived to reach New York.

Jabim would love the desert because he would never have to lament the losing of things. Next to the great difficulty of finding something in the desert is the impossibility of losing anything which one wishes to throw away. Unless, at the expense of herculean efforts, tin cans, papers, and garbage are buried, they soon become the most conspicuous part of the landscape. A tiny fluff of cotton I had used to chloroform some insect and thrown out of the window became the cynosure of all eyes, and was commented upon until I buried it beneath a stone; the stone was displaced by a casual step after dark, and next morning there was the cotton gathering all the combined white rays of the sun until I brought it in and burned it.

Remembering that the desert was a place of spines and spikes and thorns, I went to the door on the first evening and hurled a used safety-razor blade as far as I could. The following morning, next to the sun itself, the most compelling thing in the desert was a brilliant spark of light, as from a giant diamond or a mirror. I could not imagine what it might be, so I stalked it, and far off, at the base of a yucca, I found my razor blade, ablaze in sunlight, advertising its whereabouts to an astonishingly wide arc of the horizon.

IV

On the last afternoon of my stay I climbed to the top of the butte behind the cabin, and sat on the topmost boulder. As far as the eye and ear could penetrate in every direction, nothing moved or broke the silence.

Far down beneath me the cabin rested comfortably among the creosote bushes and cactus. Across the long level stretch to the north rose glorious Ord, with a nick halfway up — a gopher hole from here, a deep gold mine from its rim. Distant desert mountains bounded the horizon in other directions, east and west, while from mid-desert rose a series of jagged rocky ridges known as the Hackletooth or Pickaninny Buttes. Behind me the imposing wall of the San Bernardino Range stood high and dark, fading into the horizon at either end. Still higher, like an embryonic Himalaya, rose the cone of Sugarloaf, and San Gorgonio, more than two miles above the sea, reared its snowy crest clear of the pines, and drew and held the eye both from the sky and from the lesser ridges.

Five minutes passed, and at last a minute dark speck, like one of the Mojave ground beetles, appeared in mid-desert, sending up a tiny wake of dust exactly like a bombardier beetle. My glass resolved the object into a less interesting organism — a dusty Ford ploughing along the trail, conveying some desert rat of a miner into the open and to town for food or water, quite like the lizards and turtles in the surrounding desert. The car vanished, and again the Mojave became a death valley.

After a long wait I pushed idly with my foot at part of the boulder which formed my seat. It was smooth and rounded, sandpapered and varnished by the endless millions of seasons since it had first been exposed. Suddenly I realized that frosts had driven wedges into its very heart, and the high explosives of heat and cold had let off charges deep down. The age-old foundations of the strength and cohesion of solid rock had been so weakened that my puny muscles were the deciding feather’s weight, the thistledown unit of energy which was to change for me the whole aspect of the Mojave Desert.

At the pressure of my heel a crack opened across the face of the boulder, a crack into which slipped all ten fingers of my resting hands. I relaxed my muscles, and the great weight of stone slowly swiveled back, pressing gently on my knuckles. Then I pushed with all my force and the quarter ton of rock turned slowly upon its base, like the proverbial stone entrance to an Aladdin’s cave, but gaining impetus like a great tree beginning to fall.

So slow was its first quarter turn that I could distinguish every detail of a patch of sage-green lichen as it came into view, clinging close, with crinkled surface, and, as I knew, almost as hard as the rock itself. The lichen on this revolving rock must be like the forests — if such there be — on the fifteen-mile-diametered moon of Jupiter.

As the last push of my foot spent itself, I saw a change come over the whole aspect of the great desert. It was no longer a sleeping, lifeless, inert thing, but a place of vital, incipient, latent energy. Gravitation took over from what I saw now was a perfect kick-off, seized with joy upon my football, and rushed it down the sloping field, overcoming with crash after crash every upjutting rock of opposition until, suddenly, after a sheer drop of thirty feet, all similes ceased. My boulder struck fairly upon a solid expanse of dark porphyry dike, and exploded into a thousand pieces. A few of these continued on their visible orbits, like asteroid débris following the obliteration of a star. Then silence closed down. But I had set in motion more than I knew, and there had barely been a split second of desert calm when a soft, pasteled aftermath of the echo of the final crash came back from the opposite wall of the arroyo.

V

Only a tenuous mist of dust remained to mark the whole catastrophe, and this was settling into invisibility when suddenly up the farther slope there rushed toward me a whole herd of animals — or so it seemed. The steep perspective massed the scattering desert plants into a solid growth of dusty green, and the stems and leaves were thrown into violent agitation along a swath about ten feet wide. If I had been in low, scrubby, tropical jungle, a small herd of peccaries would have been a perfectly rational explanation, but here my approaching herd swerved toward the cloud of dust, into open territory, and although bush after bush was trampled and violently shaken, no visible cause ran along the path of the disturbance. As far as appearance went, it might have been some gigantic mole ploughing along through roots and rocks, or an irresponsible, diminutive earthquake on the loose. If animals, they must have belonged to the sinister breed of Dunsany’s dogs of the Castle of Oneleigh. I hoped that, unlike those invisible hounds, these were not my past sins come at last to seek me out, and, reassured by the apparent small size of the herd, I waited and watched.

Straight for the scene of the explosion went the line of shaking foliage, and when it was reached the mystery was solved. I might wax ultrapoetic and say that the soul of the shattered boulder became at once visible, and was wafted up and away to some geological bliss in a Heaven of Hematite, or Nirvana of Gneiss! But all that happened was that the atmosphere and its energy were made visible by proxy; the enigma was merely a dustless Dust Devil, a cyclone in miniature, the desert’s substitute for a waterspout; and when it reached my boulder’s cloud of dust it seized upon it as a cloak of visibility — an inversion of the fairy tale — and climbed cheerfully up toward my seat on the top of the butte. Not a grain of dust was left behind — the air was swept clean, and the materialization advanced as a sharply outlined twist of brown, astonishingly opaque and fading out overhead into desert clarity.

I soon learned that, as in the case of many other desert phenomena, Dust Devils are far other than merely ocularly resolvable. When the dust cloud was still well down the slope, a faint breath of air came to my cheek, and this increased considerably, long before the actual cœur de poudre reached me. And now a strange thing happened, or rather the first of several. I had hoped to renew on a diminutive, safe scale my experience with full-sized hurricanes, and looked first for a breeze in one direction (clock-wise, as I was north of the equator), then a period of dead calm, and lastly a breeze from the left. But there was only a jumble of indeterminate winds, which soon died down, and to my amazement the dust settled all about me. Never before, I venture to say, has any human being, after hurling a bit of a boulder down a mountain slope, seen an appreciable part of it returned to its age-old bed by invisible agents. By the time the Wind Devil had expired I was covered with a gritty brown film, which doubtless, to small enough organisms, would seem in turn a collection of boulders to be sat upon or kicked down correspondingly Lilliputian slopes.

VI

But I had no time for futuristic philosophizings, for I had been semiaware for some time of the presence of co-sharers of my pinnacle. Several times I had felt a fly or some insect on my neck, and had unthinkingly brushed it off as I watched the approach of the Dust Devil. But, while the break-up of the little whirlwind had laid the boulder’s dust, it aroused and brought to my consciousness a new miracle.

I looked down and saw a dozen winged ants on my clothing, and then a glance at the bed of the vanished boulder showed the mockery of my fancied isolation. Simeon Stylites in a swarm of bees would be a fitting parallel, for the cracks and crevices were alive with the annual flight of a huge nest of desert ants.

The sudden deluge of sunlight had been the spark which exploded this greatest of all events — the marriage flight. These were large ants, and the sexes very distinct — the males pale golden brown and the females black; and they were pouring out in myriads from dozens of underground cracks and crevices. With them were a host of small workers, apparently giving their winged brothers and sisters a last polish and lick. Usually a swarm like this takes to wing at once, both sexes pouring up into the sky like a column of smoke, and the union taking place wherever a pair meets in mid-air.

Here only a few were climbing up the boulder and taking off from its summit or from my person. The majority were rolling and tumbling about at my feet in a frenzy of mating. Everywhere I looked were little balls of ants composed of half a dozen or more males at the heart of which was one of the black females. Some of these myrmicine masses grew until they were two or three inches in diameter. Roughly scraping up a score into a glass vial caused not a moment’s diminution or hesitation in their frenzy.

I looked out at the desert, calm and apparently as lifeless as it had seemed when I first took my seat. But I now distrusted all superficial appearances; beneath the hot stillness I knew there must be a constant search for food, an equally ceaseless watch for and escape from enemies, both administering to the third vital need of all life, the finding and winning of a mate.

I had to leave before I could learn whether this precocious, terrestrial mating resulted in the immediate loss of wings. If so, the chance of adequate wide distribution in the formation of new nests must be considerably curtailed. But if this is a rule and not an exception with these desert ants, it must somehow be correlated with the corresponding need for swift blossoming, fertilization, and fruition of the tiny, water-loving ground plants. However that may be, this final phase of the early morning’s happening had worked magic for me. As I looked back at the summit of the butte I saw the rocks, not as an abode of death, but as marking the scene of an outburst of frantic, intense energy such as I never remember having seen in the heart of any luxuriant jungle.

VII

On my way down to the cabin I stumbled among the sage and saw the ground littered with small pieces of my vanished boulder. I pocketed one of the newly fractured red-brown bits, and later in the day I imitated an exciting process which my friend Carl, the miner, had demonstrated for me — I panned for gold. Having none of the official implements, I had to use substitutes. I searched about until I found a large steel chisel with a flat, splayed head, and in the distant garbage pile, where I disturbed several lizards and a cluster of lovely orange butterflies, I secured an empty tomato can. With these as pestle and mortar, I proceeded to pound up the specimen of rock, and in a surprisingly short time I had several ounces of olive-black powder, so fine that at each blow a cloud of dust blew out of the can.

Then, with a shallow salad dish, I began washing. I tried all sorts of twists and turns, and at last found that by sending the water in a circular stream the larger bits of rock were sluiced off by themselves and could be scraped out. Finer and finer became the residue, and when, more by luck than skill, I had the whole strewn out across the bottom of the dish, I examined with a high-powered hand lens the rear guard of the mass, and found that I had in view thirty or forty beautiful specks of real gold. They shone forth brilliantly from among the dark particles, and the episode of the fallen boulder ended worthily.

VIII

My ten days passed at last, and I felt that the old ultra-violets had done their work, and that my body was fit and ready again to do my will. I had been impressed by the complexity of life and the interrelations of life around me. Now, on the last evening, it was a great simplicity which seemed most real. After a week of identical evenings I could almost prophesy every change, every alteration of color.

Ever since a week ago, when the last cloud had disappeared over the great range of pines and snow along the southern horizon, the sunsets had been identical with the sunrises — except reversed. As the sun sank lower, the shadow of Ord crept in a mighty blue-black swath across the desert toward us, and the violet and purple deeps of the surrounding canyons and gorges brought out in ringing contrasts the reds and rich yellows and browns of the buttes in every direction. The steady, all-day blue of the sky would turn slightly greenish, after the sun had dipped — then a pale straw, then yellow, and finally a glorious orange, dying out with no afterglow. Very soon a pair of planets took the plunge, following the sun behind Ord, and the crescent moon, kindling its ashes, blazed with symbolic gold, and, before vanishing, rested gently a moment upon a jagged pinnacle on the mountain’s profile.

In the evening old Ord became more and more dusky and mysterious; creatures far other than mountain sheep or coyotes seemed to creep out from the black arroyos, and then suddenly it became a mountain of pasteboard, compressing to a fiat profile — every rock, gully, and boulder cut out sharply against the glowing orange of the sky beyond. It looked like the conventional wave forms of Japanese artists, using up every imaginable angle and jagged crag; and then abruptly, as a final crashing chord of music lapses into silence, the rough profile shifted into the long, perfectly smooth slope of its weathered talus, — a long-drawn-out, exquisitely delicate curve, out and down and across the desert, — a talus made of a myriad myriad parts of itself, weathered and frozen and heated and blown off throughout all the ages of Mother Earth. Surely Ord deserved its own acrostic — legitimate and personal.

The most unexpected and the most wonderful thing about the desert was its silence. After the continual crash of breakers and howling of winds near the sea, and the uproar of beast and bird and insect life in the jungle, the silence of the desert seemed to me its most healing, potent power. This last night I listened with all my might. Far off behind me came a slight, timid echo of a song, the last sleepy phrase of a desert sparrow, and, from the very heart of jet-black Ord, the low, doublenoted coo of a dove. It seemed as if I had imagined them both. The silence of the Mojave had not been broken.