out by floods
long before the Aztecs started to move out of Canada,--I saw fossil
bones sticking out of the cliffs, the least of which would make the
fortune of a museum. That was between the Rockies and the Wahsatch."

"People's bones?" asked the hammock, agitating itself again, and showing
a glimpse of a smooth throat and a slender ankle.

"Bless my soul! If there were people in those days they must have had
an anxious time of it!" returned the sage. "No, no, my dear. There
was brontosaurus, and atlantosaurus, and hydrosaurus, and
iguanodon,--lizards, you know, not like these little black fellows that
run about in the pulverized feldspar here, but chaps eighty or a hundred
feet long, and twenty or thirty high; and turtles, as big as a house."

"How did they get there?"

"Got mired while they were feeding, perhaps; or the water drained off
and left them high and dry."

"But where did the water go to?"

The general chuckled at this juncture, and lit another cigar. "She
knows more questions than you do the answers to them," quoth he. "But I
wouldn't mind hearing where the water went to, myself. I should like to
see some of it back again."

"Ask the earthquakes, and the sun. There's a hundred and thirty degrees
of heat in some of these valleys,--abysses, rather, three or four
hundred feet below sea-level. The earth is very thin-skinned in this
region, too, and whatever water wasn't evaporated from above would be
likely to come to grief underneath."

"But, professor," said the musical voice, "I thought there was a law
that water always seeks its own level. So how can there be empty places
below sea-level?"

"It's the fault of the aneroid barometer, my dear. We were very
comfortable and commonplace until that came along and revealed
anomalies. The secret lies, I suppose, in the trend of the strata,
which is generally north and south. You see the ridges cropping out all
through the desert; and there's a good deal of lava oozing over them,
too. They probably act as walls, to prevent the sea getting in from the
west, or the Colorado leaking in from the east."

"In that case," remarked the general, "a little more seismic disturbance
might produce a change."

"It would have to be more than a little, I suspect," returned Meschines.

"Kamaiakan told me that the Indians have a prophecy that a great lake
will come back and make the desert fruitful, and that there are some who
know the very place where the water will