ect of special interest in the park is the National Bridge, a
petrified trunk which spans a chasm thirty feet wide and twenty feet
deep. The part of the trunk crossing the gulch lies diagonally and is
forty-four feet long. The length of the trunk exposed by erosion is one
hundred and eleven feet; a fraction still remains embedded in the
sandstone.

The ruins of several ancient Indian pueblos are scattered about the
park, nearly all of them built of logs of this richly colored, agatized
wood. The forest was a storehouse for ages, whence primitive men
obtained material from which to make agate hammers, arrow-heads, and
knives, as is shown by implements found hundreds of miles distant from
these quarries.

CHAPTER V

DEATH VALLEY

Death Valley, or the Arroyo del Muerte, as the Spanish called it, is in
the western part of southern California, near the oblique boundary of
Nevada, a little way north of Nevada's vanishing point. Nowadays one may
ride almost into the valley in a Pullman coach. From Daggett, a forsaken
station of the Santa Fe Railroad, a "jerkwater" road, as it is called,
extends northward to Goldfield and Tonopah, and this road takes one
almost as the crow flies to the edge of the valley of the ominous name.

Even in a Pullman coach the trip is trying to both body and soul. But
forty years ago?--well, that is a different story. Then there was no
Santa Fe Railway, and no Daggett--just a wide stretch of desert dotted
with yucca and Spanish bayonet. Prospectors and pack-trains had left
trails here and there. One of these, now a wagon-road, lay southward to
San Bernardino; northward it lost itself in the desert toward
Candelaria.

The region possesses some names that are a trifle paradoxical. For
instances, there are the Black Mountains, the grayish red color of which
belies their name. Then there is Funeral Range, which, far from being
sombre in aspect, is most brilliantly colored. To the southward is
Paradise Valley, a plain desert strewn with greasewood and chamiso; and
down in the floor of Death Valley is, or rather was, Greenland. But
Greenland is not a waste of icebound coldness; on the contrary, it is
averred by the laborers in the borax fields to be several degrees hotter
than any other place on earth. The surplus water of the spring is
employed to produce verdure there, and it is apparently equal to the
task, for the forty or more acres so irrigated produce wonderful crops;
hence it is "Gre