eakness, grating
their teeth as they moved their jaws with a pathetic instinct of
rumination. Five days passed and on the night of the fifth, when these
young fellows knew they could not live another twenty-four hours
without water, a light cloud came between them and the stars. They
felt the cool touch of snowflakes on their faces and they spread their
blankets to gather what they could while the oxen licked the moisture
from the earth. The next morning the sun shone hot again upon the
plain against whose vast expanse the wagons showed, a little line of
dots creeping slowly toward the white-topped mountain in the west.

At Ash Meadows where the bitter waters of the Amargossa River rise
from their hidden depths to flow for a few hundred yards between gray
hills of shifting sand, the trails of the two parties converged. By
the time they reached this dismal oasis they were killing their oxen
for such shreds of meat as they could strip from the bones; but as
every wagon left the place, climbing the divide beyond, the occupants
forgot their sufferings and talked of the desert as something which
they had left behind. For Furnace Creek canyon lay ahead of them, a
rift in the black range which rose between them and the snow-clad
peak.

The Jayhawkers were now in the lead. They went down the gorge whose
black walls seemed to shut out the sky in places, and on Christmas
morning, 1849, they emerged from its mouth to see the great peak just
ahead of them.

But, as they looked up at the mountain toward which they had been
striving for so many weary days, they discovered that its sides were
verdureless, bare of any earth, so steep no man could climb them. And
there was no pass.

They had descended into the pitfall at its lowest depths. Here where
they first saw the place, more than two hundred feet below the level
of the sea, great beds of rock salt covered its floor worn by the wind
into a myriad of pinnacles, as high as a man's waist, sharp as knives
and coated with brown dust. In the center of this weird forest a level
sheet of white salt lay glistening in the sun. Northward the deposit
stretched away to dunes of shifting sand, and in the south long mud
flats lay, covered with traceries of sun cracks as far as the eye
could reach. The eastern mountains came straight down in cliffs as
black as ink. Eight miles away the western mountains rose in a sheer
wall surmounted by Telescope Peak, whose snow-clad crest towered
eleven t