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Show BY PATH AND TKAIL. 69 outcroppings of gneiss, mica, talc and clay slates. They underlie the quarternary at the base of the granite hills. In some sections the levels are overlaid with the detritus from these rocks. Toward the Gulf of California the slates are accompanied by metamorphic limestones, and often appear forming independent ridges or inclining toward the high granite hills. Near the Pacific coast the land is sown with volcanic cones, broken by benches of land termed mesas, dotted with small groups of hills known as llamas and by long faces of rock called escar-pas. Immense streams of lava at one time entered the deserts and now cover, as with a metallic shroud, many of the sandstone mounds. The petrified waves and eddies of the river of mineral and other organic matter, called magma, zig- zag here and there in the foothills, resem bling streams of ink solidified. Here are rocks, aqueous and igneous, rocks splintered and twisted, and showings of grit stones, conglomerates, shales, salts and syenite basalt. Here, too, are streams poisoned with wearings of cop per, with salts, arsenic and borax, and vast beds of sand and gypsum covered with an alkaline crust, and dry lakes, white as snow, on ' whose lonely breasts the sand lies fine as dust. The weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, the waste places and barren deserts accursed and forsaken of man, abandoned to the horned toad, the tarantula and the snake, terrify the soul and raise a barrier to exploration. The only drinking water to be found over an area of hundreds of miles is in rock depressions and in holes here and there in the mountains where the" rain has collected in natural tanks hidden from solar rays and partially protected from evaporation. But there are seasons when, for years, no rain falls, and |