About noon on the third day of our march, having reached the borders of the Chabazon Valley, we emerged from a rough, rocky gateway in the mountains, and I paused while my companion made up his quarter of a mile, that we might hold council and determine our course, for the water question was becoming serious; springs which looked cool and seductive on our maps proving to be dried up and obsolete upon the ground.
A fresh mule and a lively man get along, to be sure, well enough; but after all it is at best with perfunctory tolerance on both sides, a sort of diplomatic interchange of argument, the man suggesting with bridle, or mildly admonishing with spurs; but when the high contracting parties get tired, the _entente cordiale_ goes to pieces, and actual hostilities open, in which I never knew a man to come out the better.
I had noticed a shambling uncertainty during the last half-hour’s trot, and those invariable indicators, “John’s” long, furry ears, either lopped diagonally down on one side, or lay back with ill omen upon his neck.
Gardiner reached me in a few minutes, and we dismounted to rest the tired mules, and to scan the landscape before us. We were on the margin of a great basin whose gently shelving rim sank from our feet to a perfectly level plain, which stretched southward as far as the eye could reach, bounded by a dim, level horizon, like the sea, but walled in to the west, at a distance of about forty miles, by the high, frowning wall of the Sierras. This plain was a level floor, as white as marble, and into it the rocky spurs from our own mountain range descended like promontories into the sea. Wide, deeply indented white bays wound in and out among the foot-hills, and, traced upon the barren slopes of this rocky coast, was marked, at a considerable elevation above the plain, the shore-line of an ancient sea,--a white stain defining its former margin as clearly as if the water had but just receded. On the dim, distant base of the Sierras the same primeval beach could be seen. This water-mark, the level, white valley, and the utter absence upon its surface of any vegetation, gave a strange and weird aspect to the country, as if a vast tide had but just ebbed, and the brilliant, scorching sun had hurriedly dried up its last traces of moisture.