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Show THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 105 large tracts of bunch- grass, but that, brown as broom- sedge, does not to an Eastern eye relieve the landscape. Occasionally the mountain scenery rises to the sublime, but for the most part the view is strangely wearisome. On some people these scenes produce a deep and peculiar melancholy. It is as though all hope had died out of mother earth, leaving the dead embers of a burnt- out land as witnesses to the awful despair of nature. HUMBOI. DT PALISADES. For hundreds of miles after leaving the fertile valley of Bear River there is scarcely place for a garden. There is first the Promon-tory Range and then Indian Creek Desert; then Red Dome and Red Desert; then the Goose Creek Range and the Goose Creek Desert; then the Humboldt Range and the Humbolt Desert, and finally a few detached buttes and sun- scorched sand- hills through which we pass to the Great Nevada Desert, last, longest and worst of all. Into it flow Carson, Truckee, Reese, and Humboldt rivers and a hundred smaller streams; out of it comes nothing. Salt lakes, alkaline " sinks" and mud flats alone relieve the dreary monotony ; the phenomena arc hot winds, blinding dust, the mirage, and the shadow of death. The only view of any grandeur is at Humboldt Canon, now better known as the Palisades, a wild gorge through which the river has forced its way in some far distant geologic age, and where the railroad track lies along the base of a perpendicular rock many hundred feet in height. Far |
