A MEMORY OF THE DESERT.

          QUESTS there have been that promised fulfillment without stint and without fail, only to prove—just as one's outreached hand caught at the garments of Fortune—it was but a vision more tantalizing than any mirage. And one easily sees visions, in that land of visible and invisible mysteries.

          Once, there was one that I knew—one who was counted too sane to see visions and too wise to be deceived—who went a-search for diamonds, there in the Desert. Topaz, and turquoise, and other things of beauty are there, but of diamonds none have been found.

          To one of the wee towns that make scattered dots on the map of Nevada southward from the Black Rock country, there came an old prospector; and he singled out this man, from all whom he knew, to take into his confidence and make half-owner in the wonderful diamond mines he had found. He brought with him a sack of the gems, to prove the truth of his assertions—a canvas bag full of sparkling white things that under the gaslight, as they were spread out, were beautiful enough to be real. Such a sight! Long, long afterward I, too, saw them, and I did not wonder that ignorance of the diamond in its rough state, might very well help a man to believe in these—to think them the gems

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they looked to be. There must have been fifty pounds of the pretty, worthless baubles that were poured into a bright and new tin pan, and filled it well to the brim. It seemed impossible that they had not been cut by a lapidary, so perfect were they on all sides. Not crystals as we know them, pointed on one end only; but polished, and true, with facets cut by Nature on every side. The most beautiful crystals I have ever seen, and of a sort that I had never come across here in the West.

          Out beyond the Quin River Desert, the Old Prospector found them, believing them to be diamonds of worth. They were lying about in quantities, sprinkling the sand wastes off there at the Desert's edge, where the sands gather together in dunes, only to scatter themselves broadcast, as grain is tossed from the hand of the sower. So the winds cover and uncover them; and to them, one day, came these men believing in their worth; and many a dollar that might have gone better ways, went toward the gathering of what came, later, to shame them for their simple credulity.

          Others (and I among them, also) found copper out there—melted copper that I took from its home in the mountain, where it had been melted by the great conflagration. It seemed easy to believe the Desert's treasure-trove might well be there. It is so easy to dream of things that never present themselves to one in lands where strange things do not intrude. But here it would seem that any marvelous thing might very well be; the country is so weird—so unusual—so unlike our everyday world. You find yourself looking for all sorts of impossible things to happen. You find yourself saying : "Why not?"

          But my handfuls of copper were all there were—there was never a sign of a ledge. Just melted bits from a

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"blow-out"—spewed out by the earth's internal fires, with its parent ledge leagues upon leagues away.

          And a sulphur mine that I tried to conquer? Did it not become conqueror itself? It fought me with fire, though hidden, and so drove me away. Yet, I have heard that others have now gone there to do what I, in vain, tried to do. Will they succeed, or will they, too, be vanquished by the earth's better weapon? Or, will the Desert have gone back to its way of old, and become cool once more, as it was away back in the early 'sixties? I often ponder over it. It was a mystery then, it is a mystery still.

 

 

A DESERT MYSTERY.

          YOU may try as you will to comprehend, in its entirety, the awful tragedy of Pelee and La Soufriere—to grasp it as something of modern times and real—yet, as you read, you are aware it seems as remote from our day as the stories of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and more than half fiction. It was too appalling a tragedy—too stupendous a death-roll, for the comprehension of any but those who afterward stood in the silence where once there was sound, and saw the fearful dead that bestrewed the places where once the living walked. Under the shadow of its black phophesy the people worked or played, loved and married, bore children and buried them—living out the measure of their days unheedful of the thing that was, some day, to come. None who live within a volcano's possible reach but know its danger ; yet who will ever believe that he himself is to be in the pathway of its wrath?

          And how thin the old Earth's crust is, over her mighty fires ! And the warnings that she sends before her outbreaks—how little are they heeded ! Man only believes in danger when that danger has come.

          With my thoughts dwelling upon the Earth's vagaries ; of the uncertainty of her temper where her fires burn the fiercest, I am reminded of a certain place

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where, once, I found a subterranean temperature that was tremendous.

          It was a strange thing that I came upon, that time. Let me tell you of it.

          It was in January, 1900, that I formed a partnership with a former associate in gold mining, to prospect for sulphur deposits in Northern Nevada. There are vast beds of pure sulphur (the largest in the United States, unless those of Louisiana that lie under the sea are included) lying west of north of the Central Pacific Railroad, and forty miles away from its threads of steel. They are the great Humboldt sulphur mines, so well known. Following that trend all the way to the Oregon line are scattered indications of sulphur throughout that weird and barren land that the great lava flow of the North has spread itself over.

          For our initial work, we selected a district a short distance westward from the railroad station of Humboldt. As early as the late '60's I had had knowledge of small prospect hole at that especial place; and, as it was within a hundred and fifty yards of the railroad track (thus solving the problem of cheap transportation, which, in that land of long distances is the most serious drawback to the development of mines carrying small "values") we determined to begin our operations there.

          Just prior to the laying of the Central Pacific's rails through the great gray valley of the Humboldt—the one-time-called "River of Death"—these beds were located by James Spence; and from the single prospect hole (an incline of not more than thirty feet in depth) he took some fifteen or twenty tons of sulphur. Two "mountain schooners" (Nevada's desert camel of the early days), driven by himself and Henry Childers, had carried the crude ore into Virginia City, where it

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became the property of Hy Barnes, and—an unprofitable speculation. I name these people to you because they were real people, even as the stories are real. In cabins and by camp-fires I have heard old miners tell these things so often that the names of these men are as familiar to me as my own. Hy Barnes could not dispose of it, and the months that came saw it lying there —a flaming yellow pyramid on the side of Mount Davidson. This was in Virginia City's palmy days. Later—for that must have been in '64 or '65—when the Central Pacific Railroad Company was building its snow-sheds over the Sierra Nevada mountains, and bolt-holes were being drilled into the rock walls, to which the sheds cling like swallows' nests against a cliff, sulphur was needed for securing the bolts in place. Into these holes smoking-hot sulphur was poured as the iron rods were driven home, to hold them firmly; it having that unusual quality of non-shrinkage in cooling, peculiar to itself. The sulphur used in the work—two tons—was taken from the surface of the ground on the old Spence claim. No other work had ever been done there. So much was history. It was generally thought, by those interested in mining, that it had been simply a "blow-out" from some untraceable deposit, and that it was not worth the prospecting.

          Although I knew of it earlier, I was too young to take any special note of it until about the year 1873. At that time it attracted my attention by reason of the very great number of freshly-shed snake-skins that lay about in the crevices of the gypsum and lava, the sulphur and ash. Dozens of them! Hundreds of them! And, paying heed to the fact, I observed thereafter that each spring they were replaced by others, while the old ones were blown away by the whirlwinds. Evidently it was a famous place for reptiles; yet it

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was a puzzle to me, always, that in such a quarry of snake-skins, I should never chance to see the snakes themselves.

          Back in those years when I first knew sagebrush-land as home, I was an omnivorous—if not always a discriminating—reader; and, on summer days when the desert sun shone hot and a particularly fascinating book fell into my hands, I at once sought some spot that offered both cool shade and quiet. What better place than just within the deserted incline of the old sulphur mine? There, surrounded by the white and yellow of gypsum and sulphur walls festooned with the silvery-white skins, I had a retreat all my own, and quite as full of charm to me as any rose-hung bower could have been to another girl—a girl not of the gray wastes and solitudes of the Desert. There, with eyes and heart deep buried in my books, I spent many and many a delightful hour, retreating farther and farther down the incline, as the afternoon sun found and followed me in there. For—burn as it might outside—it was always a delightfully cool place within the incline. There were times when, with an old broken shovel I found there, I dug into the bottom of the deserted prospect-hole for specimens of sulphur crystals —those delicate clusters of glittering yellow jewels that belong to fairyland—yet, dig deep as I would into the soft ash and gypsum, I never observed the slightest indication of heat. I know that in those days there was no indication of subterranean heat whatever.

          Then—by and by—I left the Desert for a home at tide-water; and straightway forgot all about he sulphur beds, until years afterward, when I was reminded of them by hearing of a skeleton that had been found there.

          In 1888 or '89, Samuel H. Kitto and Dan Merrigan,

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two young men out for a jaunt one spring morning, came unexpectedly upon the bleached bones of an unknown man lying at the foot of a hollow cone that is commonly known as "the Crater," half a mile from the old prospect-hole. Nothing was found whereby the dead man might have been identified. There was no paper, no article of clothing—absolutely nothing except an open and rusty razor lying by his side. Of course the Coroner came, as the law provided; and there was the usual farce of an inquest on a fragment of what had once been human. Then the sun-and-storm-whitened bones were carried to the railroad station and buried in the little graveyard where the dead are mostly nameless—tramps killed by some passing train, or (as this one) a fleshless skeleton found far away from wagon road or railroad track. Their stories are unknown and their graves unmarked.

          It was at "the Crater"—after doing some preliminary location work at the point where Spence had once worked the claim—that we decided to sink our first shaft. This cone is one of a number of such vent-holes that can be traced thereabouts—vent-holes for furnaces that were burned out centuries ago. Fires have burned and died; great mountain ranges have been lifted high on either side of the valley, down in which the vents are now all but covered by the valley's soil. Only this one lifts itself distinctive—rising sharply a few feet from the level of the plain, to be seen several miles away. The valley here is quite flat—broad, long, and a dead level. There are great alkali fiats, absolutely bare and miles wide; but where the sulphur beds are, greasewood—short, scrubby and dead-looking—grows sparsely. Now and then the ground is sprinkled with gravel and flakes of quartz washed down from the mountains.

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          All the way from the railroad track (which here runs northeast and southwest) to the river, two or three miles away, one may find indications of sulphur. And when one comes to the river itself, one finds other cones, quite unlike these, are fantastically topped with a lime-crust that has resisted the erosion which has eaten the lower strata away. The same hard crust overlies the whole valley here for miles and miles, barely hidden under a thin veneer of soil. But down by the cones by the river's edge (the river of today, whose course is through the centre of the mile-wide channel of the great river of the dead years), one may easily trace the strata downward far below the crust's line. First, the mushroom-shaped lime topping, whose jagged edges in many places have taken unto themselves the semblance of grotesque, unkenned creatures —dragons and gargoyles, and strange open-jawed monsters that seem born of some nightmare. Next, a broad band of almost pure salt—two to three feet in depth; then gypsum and volcanic ash plentifully streaked with sulphur, down to the level of the ancient river bed. They are queer things, these cones that have been fashioned by creeks cut by short-lived floods born from the cloud-bursts on the high lands; and yearly erosion is eating them more surely away.

          But none of these, in spite of the evidence of sulphur, are kindred with "the Crater." There, where we made our locations (which through their brimstone suggestiveness seemed to name themselves Aetna, Vesuvius, Popocatapetl, Yztaccihuatl, Mauna Loa and Kilauea), is lava and pumice in plenty; and in walking over the ground—especially if it be on a little rise— one hears the echo of his footsteps as though the sound were sent back from a great vault beneath—a hollow echo that tells of vast caverns underground.

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          I know too little of scientific lore to dare say what the conditions we found there may indicate; I can only tell what we discovered during our weeks of prospecting, and will leave to others the task of translating the signs that puzzle us still.

          We began sinking the shaft in "the Crater" on the twenty-ninth of January. The only men working on the claims at that time were my partner and one of his sons. Later, the younger man's, place was taken by an Indian—a young Paiute.

          Though it is no part of this story, yet just here let me tell what we found during the morning of that first day's work. There, in "the Crater," but two or three feet down, we came on the skeleton of a man that had been thrust (not buried in decent wise—but jammed) into the hollow hole which the wind-drifts of each year had covered still deeper with the powdered pumice and gypsum and ash tossed down from the brim of the wee "crater."

          The side of the skull was crushed in, and the body bent nearly double, as though hurriedly crowded into a hole too small for honest burial. The story? Who knows? Did that other—the one found years before but a few yards from this spot—did he--? But who can say? It is but another mystery of that great, gray land of mysteries.

          The skeleton fell apart when unearthed and lay on the crater's edge, where it was cast up by the shovels, a heap of fragile brown bones that seemed more like strips and bits of wet pasteboard than anything else. The water-soaked ash (there had been an unusually warm period for January, and the snow of the valleys was melted, completely saturating the ground) and the moistened sulphur-stained formation we found there had communicated to the bones a peculiar flexi-

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bility; for they bent between our fingers like whalebone. It was an uncanny thing to find at the very outset of our work; so we quickly buried them again, giving them sepulture in the "Popocatapetl's" location monument at the crater's rim. All but the skull and thigh bones—they were set aside to find place with many another strange thing that came out of the Desert in my strangely-lived Desert life.

          We were still under the spell that the grewsome "find" had cast over us, when the shaft developed something even more mysterious—an unsolved mystery to this day, at least to the four persons who, so far as I know, are the only ones who have known of it.

          After the last slabs of lava-rock had been replaced upon the monument, I dropped over the rim into the pit, and clambered down to the shaft. "The Crater" (such a baby crater it is!) was filled well to the top with a fine gray volcanic ash—dry on top, a bit moist from the rains beneath; while scattered through it were quantities of the rough, unfriendly rock that made the crust of the cone. In the centre of this was the hole that was yet too small to be dignified by the name of a shaft.

          From the bottom of the excavation my partner scooped up a handful of the moist earth and asked me to hold out my hands. I did so, and he poured it in. It was warm!—perceptibly so. I was astounded—too puzzled to say anything; and I stood there holding it, looking stupidly at him for an explanation. He laughed; and then, throwing out a shovelful or two from the shaft, took from underneath some that was freshly uncovered.

          "Here, take this!"

          I don't remember what I said, but I cried out in as-

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tonishment as I let it fall. It was hot!—not just warm, but hot!

          That was the beginning of what, for weeks and weeks, was to us a daily wonder. Seven or eight feet beneath the surface of the ground we would find this unexplainable heat. Not alone at that particular place, but over a five-mile area, we found like conditions. On the slope just below the old prospect hole we came on ground that was covered here and there with the so-called "petrified -grass"—salt grass and the three-cornered stems of Paiute grass, over which, at some former time, lime-impregnated waters from hot springs had flowed. I tried to answer all the questions that came crowding in upon me, by saying to myself that, at some time in the remote past, there had been boiling springs here—springs that were now sealed up. But when I remembered that a quarter of a century before, the earth in the bottom of Spence's old incline was cold, I felt that such explanations were inadequate. Nowhere, in all our knowledge of the valley, had there ever been steam, or fire, or heat. I went into the camps of my Paiute friends and questioned the elders. None of them, nor their fathers, nor their fathers' fathers before them, had ever heard of a time when the valley had spit steam or fire; and their legends (told by father to son as they sit by the campfire, and memorized with infinite accuracy) date back to a time earlier than the white man's history.

          Shaft after shaft was sunk, and sulphur in plenty was found. Some of it was crystalized; and much of it was colored like a California poppy. Elsewhere we found a snow-white marvel of sulphur—sulphur that turned yellow only when a lighted match was touched to it, and was ninety-five per cent pure! Now and then we came upon "black" sulphur—that glassy,

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dark-green sort made by nature in those molds where pressure is greatest. Where lime rock was, we found pisolite and oölite in small quantities. That meant there had been, at some time, boiling springs. But such places were few. In the deeper shafts, volcanic ash was found in undisturbed strata. Volcanic rock and lava were everywhere; and the lava was frequently streaked with cinnabar. Sometimes a waxy formation would be encountered that discouraged work at that point. It would not break, as rock ordinarily will, from shots of giant powder; but was of a texture that refused to be shattered when blasted, and was too hard to be worked with picks. And everywhere was that mysterious heat.

          When we were some fifteen feet down the deepest shaft we sunk, I wrote to the California Academy of Sciences describing the conditions there (but not naming the locality) and asked if a similar state of affairs was known to exist anywhere else in the world. They were unable to give me any information on the subject, but referred the letter to Prof. Branner, of Stanford University. In reply to my brief outline of conditions he wrote as follows:

          "I regret to say that I do not know of any such place as you mention in your letter. The temperature of the crust of the earth varies so much, however, in different places that no fixed law has ever been found for the downward increase of .the temperature, except of local application. In the Comstock mining region, the temperature is one degree for every twenty-eight feet, down to 3,000 feet; in the north of England, it is one degree for forty-nine feet; in New South Wales, it is one degree for eighty feet; in Leipsic, it is one degree for fifty-six feet; at Grass Valley, Cal., it is one degree for one hundred and seven feet; in the cop-

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per mines of Michigan, it is one degree for two hundred and twenty-four feet, and so on."

          Up and down, back and forth, we prospected, sinking shafts where we could—tasting it, smelling it, testing it with a match. The whole district, so far as we investigated, is richly underlaid with sulphur; but everywhere that we sunk on the claims we found that strange heat—a heat too great to permit our continuing the work. Where the lava was encountered in greatest quantities, we uncovered the home of the snakes, for it was as full of bubble holes as a honey-comb is of cells. There, long, slim (and entirely harmless) snakes were housed in numbers that were appalling. When the explosions disturbed them from their winter's rest, they had crawled to the walls of the shafts, through the network of cracks that underlie the district, and, tumbling down to the bottom, coiled, and lifted, and writhed there, vainly trying to get out, and quite unpleasing things to see.

          The weather turned cold—eight degrees below zero. But the temperature underground was growing hotter and hotter, the deeper the shaft was sunk. At eighteen feet each man who worked there suffered from frightful headaches, and the younger man had to return to his home in Sacramento. Their clothing—even their buckskin gloves—rotted as they worked, and their skin burned and stung. The drill's point in a few moments would become so hot that it caused discomfort to touch it with the bare hand. After a series of blasts had been put off, and the smoke had escaped from the shaft, a cloud of vapor would arise while the mercury marked zero at the top; and the rock thrown up from the bottom was so hot that it could not be handled at all bare-handed.

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          Each night the giant powder froze. Each morning it was thawed in a few minutes by throwing it over a wheelbarrow load of rock and ash from the bottom of the shaft. Sometimes all the sticks of powder in the box would be frozen together, and the mass frozen to the box itself ; but by the time the drill-hole was ready for it, the powder would be found thawed. Canteens of water, carried by the men coming to work, were frozen solid. Buried in the broken bits of rock a few moments, the ice would immediately melt. By and by—as the work progressed further downward—the drills became so hot that their temper was destroyed (and, incidentally, our own) and the men could make but little headway in their work. Still they kept on —changing shift every few minutes, and being hauled to the top with faces burning red, down which rivulets of sweat ran.

          Some of the time it was, as has been said, zero weather; but on the warmest day the mercury marked fifty degrees. The shaft was, down twenty-three feet. The mercury marked 120° when taken to the bottom of the shaft as soon as a man could descend after the shots had been fired. At twenty-nine feet it registered one hundred and forty degrees. The men—working five-minute shifts—sank a foot deeper; but the experience of the last one down was such that not one of them would again venture into that furnace of frightful heat, and the temperature after that last shot was not taken. They were satisfied with the knowledge already obtained—that the heat had increased something like ninety degrees in twenty-nine feet, at the point where the old Spence shaft was—where, more than five-and-twenty years ago, it was a cool and pleasant place to sit and read in on summer afternoons !

          Are there fires underneath? Or sealed-up boiling

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springs? Or gases that create heat? Or what? We had all sorts of theories, of course; and we talked together of the statements that had been made to us that there were places in the valley where the ground had settled unaccountably during the previous ten years ; and we did a great deal of wondering. But all our speculations left us baffled and bewildered. And because we could not satisfy ourselves as to the causes, we said nothing of the affair to anyone else. The few folk who live within sight of the ground, and the hundreds that pass over it in railway cars every day, have never heard nor known of these things that would seem to me now (living here in rose-land by the sea, and "where things never happen") but a dream, did I not have, as proof of it really having happened, over the door of my den—where I can look up and see it as I write—the skull and crossbones of the man of "Popocatapetl."

          People came there to visit the "prospects," but not till after the deepest shafts had been partially refilled, that stray horses and cattle might not fall in them, to be killed or crippled. Some of the smaller shafts there were, in which (had they but closely noticed) some heat might have been observed. But much of the heat disappeared after the shafts had been exposed to the air for a while. So the visitors went away, discovering nothing unusual, at least up to the time when I abandoned the claims as impracticable for working.

          Sulphur there is a-plenty, but it is guarded by an inferno of subterranean heat that puts it far beyond the reach of the miner's pick and drill. Will the heat that so strangely came, after a while subside? Who can say what may happen? I only know it is a place of serpents and sulphurous smells, of strange heat, of dead men's bones, and mystery. Such places are best let alone. I—for one—want no more of them.

(end of Part 9)

__________ 

  Idah Meacham Strobridge, In Miner's Mirage-Land (1904) - Part 1 (Foreword; Mirages of the Desert); Part 2 (The Myths of the Desert; The Secret Mine of the Brown Men); Part 3 (The Charm of the Desert; The Quest of Old Man Berry); Part 4 (The Lovers of the Desert; Forman's Find); Part 5 (The Lessons of the Desert; The Marvelous Hardin Silver); Part 6 (The Lure of the Desert; The Rise and Fall of Hardin City);  Part 7 (The Men of the Desert; Three Little Lakes of Gold); Part 8 (The Beauty of the Desert; The Lost Blue Bucket Mines); Part 9 (A Memory of the Desert; A Desert Mystery); Part 10 (The Toll of the Desert; The Graves of the Desert)