lands now showed plainly.
Then we dropped down behind the divide into a cup valley containing a
little meadow with running water on two sides of it and big pines
above. The meadow was brown, to be sure, as all typical California is
at this time of year. But the brown of California and the brown of the
East are two different things. Here is no snow or rain to mat down the
grass, to suck out of it the vital principles. It grows ripe and sweet
and soft, rich with the life that has not drained away, covering the
hills and valleys with the effect of beaver fur, so that it seems the
great round-backed hills must have in a strange manner the yielding
flesh-elasticity of living creatures. The brown of California is the
brown of ripeness; not of decay.

Our little meadow was beautifully named Madulce,[1] and was just below
the highest point of this section of the Coast Range. The air drank
fresh with the cool of elevation. We went out to shoot supper; and so
found ourselves on a little knoll fronting the brown-hazed east. As we
stood there, enjoying the breeze after our climb, a great wave of hot
air swept by us, filling our lungs with heat, scorching our faces as
the breath of a furnace. Thus was brought to our minds what, in the
excitement of a new country, we had forgotten,--that we were at last on
the eastern slope, and that before us waited the Inferno of the desert.

That evening we lay in the sweet ripe grasses of Madulce, and talked of
it. Wes had been across it once before and did not possess much
optimism with which to comfort us.

"It's hot, just plain hot," said he, "and that's all there is about it.
And there's mighty little water, and what there is is sickish and a
long ways apart. And the sun is strong enough to roast potatoes in."

"Why not travel at night?" we asked.

"No place to sleep under daytimes," explained Wes. "It's better to
keep traveling and then get a chance for a little sleep in the cool of
the night."

We saw the reasonableness of that.

"Of course we'll start early, and take a long nooning, and travel late.
We won't get such a lot of sleep."

"How long is it going to take us?"

Wes calculated.

"About eight days," he said soberly.

The next morning we descended from Madulce abruptly by a dirt trail,
almost perpendicular until we slid into a canon of sage-brush and
quail, of mescale cactus and the fierce dry heat of sun-baked shale.

"Is it any hotter than this on the dese