glorified woods on the one hand, nor the lake on the other, could
at first hold the eye. That dark mysterious lava plain between them
compelled attention. Here you trace yawning fissures, there clusters
of somber pits; now you mark where the lava is bent and corrugated in
swelling ridges and domes, again where it breaks into a rough mass of
loose blocks. Tufts of grass grow far apart here and there and small
bushes of hardy sage, but they have a singed appearance and can do
little to hide the blackness. Deserts are charming to those who know how
to see them--all kinds of bogs, barrens, and heathy moors; but the Modoc
Lava Beds have for me an uncanny look. As I gazed the purple deepened
over all the landscape. Then fell the gloaming, making everything still
more forbidding and mysterious. Then, darkness like death.

Next morning the crisp, sunshiny air made even the Modoc landscape less
hopeless, and we ventured down the bluff to the edge of the Lava Beds.
Just at the foot of the bluff we came to a square enclosed by a stone
wall. This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers, most of whom
met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the boards marking
the graves--a gloomy place to die in, and deadly-looking even without
Modocs. The poor fellows that lie here deserve far more pity than they
have ever received. Picking our way over the strange ridges and hollows
of the beds, we soon came to a circular flat about twenty yards in
diameter, on the shore of the lake, where the comparative smoothness of
the lava and a few handfuls of soil have caused the grass tufts to grow
taller. This is where General Canby was slain while seeking to make
peace with the treacherous Modocs.

Two or three miles farther on is the main stronghold of the Modocs, held
by them so long and defiantly against all the soldiers that could be
brought to the attack. Indians usually choose to hide in tall grass and
bush and behind trees, where they can crouch and glide like panthers,
without casting up defenses that would betray their positions; but the
Modoc castle is in the rock. When the Yosemite Indians made raids on
the settlers of the lower Merced, they withdrew with their spoils into
Yosemite Valley; and the Modocs boasted that in case of war they had a
stone house into which no white man could come as long as they cared to
defend it. Yosemite was not held for a single day against the pursuing
troops; but the Modocs held their fort f