eet wide. If this edifice be ever
finished, it will rank among the most capacious religious structures of
the continent.

The lake from which the city takes its name is about twenty miles
distant from the latter, by a good road across the level valley-bottom.
Artistically viewed, it is one of the loveliest sheets of water I ever
saw,--bluer than the intensest blue of the ocean, and practically as
impressive, since, looking from the southern shore, you see only a
water-horizon. This view, however, is broken by a magnificent
mountainous island, rising, I should think, seven or eight hundred feet
from the water, half a dozen miles from shore, and apparently as many
miles in circuit. The density of the lake-brine has been under- instead
of over-stated. I swam out into it for a considerable distance, then lay
upon my back _on_, rather than in, the water, and suffered the breeze to
waft me landward again. I was blown to a spot where the lake was only
four inches deep, without grazing my back, and did not know I had got
within my depth again until I depressed my hand a trifle and touched
bottom! It is a mistake to call this lake azoic. It has no fish, but
breeds myriads of strange little maggots, which presently turn into
troublesome gnats. The rocks near the lake are grandly castellated and
cavernous crags of limestone, some of it finely crystalline, but most of
it like our coarser Trenton and Black-River groups. There is a large
cave in this formation, ten minutes' climb from the shore.

I must abruptly leap to the overland stage again.

From Salt Lake City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road
lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man.
For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of
alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time
in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last
obstinate _vidette_ of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are
far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of a
salt, potash, and sulphur hell-broth, which no man would drink, save _in
extremis_. A few days of this beverage within, and of wind-drifted
alkali invading every pore of the body without, often serve to cover the
miserable passenger with an erysipelatous eruption which presently
becomes confluent and irritates him to madness. Meanwhile he jolts
through alkali-ruts, unable to sleep for six days and night