Since this is a hill country one expects to find springs, but not to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where the air has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling up into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little told of it.
    This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and seductive. These months are only approximate; later or earlier the rain-laden wind may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the rain.
    The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it -hardly, or with tropical --luxuriance, as the rain -admits. It is recorded in the report of the Death Valley expedition that -after a year of abundant rains, on the Colorado desert was found a specimen of Amaranthus ten feet high. A year later the same species in the same place matured in the drought at four inches. -One hopes the land may breed like -qualities in her human offspring, not --tritely to "try," but to do. Seldom does the desert herb attain the full stature of the type. Extreme aridity and extreme altitude have the same -dwarfing effect, so that we find in the high Sierras and in Death Valley related species in -miniature that reach a comely growth in -mean temperatures. Very fertile are the desert plants in expedients to -prevent --evaporation, turning their -foliage -edge-wise toward the sun, growing silky hairs, ----exuding ---viscid gum. The wind, which has a long sweep, ---harries and helps them. It rolls up dunes about the -stocky -stems, encompassing and protective, and above the dunes, which may be, -as with the mesquite, three times as high as a man, the -blossoming twigs -flourish and bear fruit.