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Show 68 BY PATH AND TKAIL. a land where there are no flowing rivers, where no rain falls in places for years, volcanoes that geologically died but yesterday and whose configurations and weird out lines are impossible of description. Its rugged shores are indented and toothed like a crosscut saw. It is a land of sorrow almost deserted of man and shrouded in an isolation startling in its pitiful silence. Save the un profitable cactus and the sombre sagebrush, friends of the desert reptiles, there is no vegetation in regions of startling sterility. . If there be upon the earth a country lying under the pall of the Isaiahan malediction, it is here; for here is the realization and accomplishment of the dread proph ecy portending the blight of vegetable life. " I will lay it waste, and it shall not be pruned or digged, but there shall come up briars and thorns. I will also com mand the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. ' ' Here in the vast interior loneliness of this forbidding land are horrent deserts where the traveler may ride hundreds of miles and find no water or look upon other vegetation than thorny cacti or scattered bushes of the warning greese- wood, telling him that here is death. The lonely mountains bordering these deserts are striking in their visible sterility. Torrential rains in seasons over whelm the struggling vegetation that in the intervening months of repose invade the few inviting patches, and, rushing madly to the foothills, sweep all vegetable life before them. Then, when the storm retires, and the blazing sun burns the very air, the porphyritic rocks become an ashen white, and, reflecting the sun's rays, throw off rolling-billows of unendurable heat. Most of these repellent ranges are granite, but in many places there are found |