n of this whole region, beyond the boundaries of the Mexican
settlements. They who once had the opportunity of recording its
geographical features have left the task undone. They were too busy in
the search for gold; and their weak descendants, as you see, are too
busy in robbing one another to care for aught else. They know nothing
of the country beyond their own borders; and these are every day
contracting upon them. All they know of it is the fact that thence come
their enemies, whom they dread, as children do ghosts or wolves."

"We are now," continued Seguin, "near the centre of the continent, in
the very heart of the American Sahara."

"But," said I, interrupting him, "we cannot be more than a day's ride
south of New Mexico. That is not a desert; it is a cultivated country."

"New Mexico is an oasis, nothing more. The desert is around it for
hundreds of miles; nay, in some directions you may travel a thousand
miles from the Del Norte without seeing one fertile spot. New Mexico is
an oasis which owes its existence to the irrigating waters of the Del
Norte. It is the only settlement of white men from the frontiers of the
Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific in California. You approached
it by a desert, did you not?"

"Yes; as we ascended from the Mississippi towards the Rocky Mountains
the country became gradually more sterile. For the last three hundred
miles or so we could scarcely find grass or water for the sustenance of
our animals. But is it thus north and south of the route we travelled?"

"North and south for more than a thousand miles, from the plains of
Texas to the lakes of Canada, along the whole base of the Rocky
Mountains, and half-way to the settlements on the Mississippi, it is a
treeless, herbless land."

"To the west of the mountains?"

"Fifteen hundred miles of desert; that is its length, by at least half
as many miles of breadth. The country to the west is of a different
character. It is more broken in its outlines, more mountainous, and if
possible more sterile in its aspect. The volcanic fires have been more
active there; and though that may have been thousands of years ago, the
igneous rocks in many places look as if freshly upheaved. No
vegetation, no climatic action has sensibly changed the hues of the lava
and scoriae that in some places cover the plains for miles. I say no
climatic action, for there is but little of that in this central
region."

"I do not unde