Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.

 

This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos¹, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring² to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze⁴. The hill surface is streaked⁵ with ash drift and black, unweathered lava⁶ flows. After rains water accumulates in the hollows of small closed valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness that get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep and the rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter, rimmed⁷ about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin crust of it lies along the marsh⁸ over the vegetating⁹ area, which has neither beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand drifts in hummocks¹⁰ about the stubby shrubs¹¹, and between them the soil shows saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than water work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a year's

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