The Land of

Little Rain
by

MARY AUSTIN
TO EVE

"The Comfortress of Unsuccess"
CONTENTS

Preface
The Land of Little Rain

Water Trails of the Ceriso
The Scavengers

The Pocket Hunter
Shoshone Land

Jimville--A Bret Harte Town
My Neighbor's Field

The Mesa Trail
The Basket Maker

The Streets of the Mountains
Water Borders

Other Water Borders
Nurslings of the Sky

The Little Town of the Grape Vines
PREFACE

I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving:
every man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso

names him. Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear,
according as he is called by friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to

those who knew him by the eye's grasp only. No other fashion, I
think, sets so well with the various natures that inhabit in us,

and if you agree with me you will understand why so few names are
written here as they appear in the geography. For if I love a lake

known by the name of the man who discovered it, which endears
itself by reason of the close-locked pines it nourishes about its

borders, you may look in my account to find it so described. But
if the Indians have been there before me, you shall have their

name, which is always beautifully fit and does not originate in the
poor human desire for perpetuity.

Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow
spaces which are above all compassing of words, and have a

certain fame as of the nobly great to whom we give no familiar
names. Guided by these you may reach my country and find or not

find, according as it lieth in you, much that is set down here.
And more. The earth is no wanton to give up all her best to every

comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy for each. But if you
do not find it all as I write, think me not less dependable nor

yourself less clever. There is a sort of pretense allowed in
matters of the heart, as one should say by way of illustration,

"I know a man who . . . " and so give up his dearest experience
without betrayal. And I am in no mind to direct you to delectable

places toward which you will hold yourself less tenderly than I.
So by this fashion of naming I keep faith with the land and annex

to my own estate a very great territory to which none has a surer
title.

The country where you may have sight and touch of that which
is written lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite--east

and south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond
Death Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert. You may

come into the borders of it from the south by a stage journey that
has the effect of involving a great lapse of time, or from the

north by rail, dropping out of the overland route at Reno. The
best of all ways is over the Sierra passes by pack and trail,

seeing and believing. But the real heart and core of the country
are not to be come at in a month's vacation. One must

summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine woods
that take two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots

that lie by in the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs
that grow fifty years before flowering,--these do not scrape

acquaintance. But if ever you come beyond the borders as far as
the town that lies in a hill dimple at the foot of Kearsarge, never

leave it until you have knocked at the door of the brown house
under the willow-tree at the end of the village street, and there

you shall have such news of the land, of its trails and what is
astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east

and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and

as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the
land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps,

but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to
indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted

and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never
is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.

This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded,
blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion

painted, aspiring to the snowline. Between the hills lie high
level-looking plains full of intolerable sun glare, or narrow

valleys drowned in a blue haze. The hill surface is streaked with
ash drift and black, unweathered lava flows. After rains water

accumulates in the hollows of small closed valleys, and,
evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness that get the

local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep and the
rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter,

rimmed about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin
crust of it lies along the marsh over the vegetating area, which

has neither beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes open to the
wind the sand drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and

between them the soil shows saline traces. The sculpture of the
hills here is more wind than water work, though the quick storms do

sometimes scar them past many a year's redeeming. In all the
Western desert edges there are essays in miniature at the famed,

terrible Grand Canon, to which, if you keep on long enough in this
country, you will come at last.

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