ldt Mountains, we pass between isolated
uplifts of trap and granite, over a comparatively level desert of sand
and snowy alkali. The terrors of this journey, as performed by
horse-carriage, have been fully depicted in our last April number. We
may laugh at them now. The question which principally interests us,
after we have blunted the first edge of our wonder at the sublime
sterility of the Desert, is what conceivable use this waste can be made
to subserve. Before the railroad, that question had but a single
answer,--the inculcation of contentment, by contrast with the most
disagreeable surroundings in which one might anywhere else be placed.
Perhaps it is over-sanguine to conceive of a further answer even now. If
there be any, it is this: In its crudest state the alkaline earth of the
Desert is sufficiently pure to make violent effervesence with acids. No
elaborate process is required to turn it into commercial soda and
potash. Coal has been already found in Utah. Silex exists abundantly in
all the Desert uplifts. Why should not the greatest glass-works in the
world be reared along the Desert section of the Pacific Road? and why
should not the entire market of the Pacific Coast be supplied with
refined alkalies from the same tract? Given the completed railroad, and
neither of these projects exceeds commercial possibility.

We cross the Humboldt Mountains by a series of grades shorter than that
which conducts us over the Rocky system, but full as difficult in
proportion. We descend into a second instalment of Desert on the other
side; but the general sterility is now occasionally broken by oases,
moist green _canons_, and living springs. A hundred miles west of the
Humboldt Pass we come to the mining-settlements of Reese River, gaining
a new increment to the business of the road in the transportation of
silver to San Francisco, and every conceivable necessary of life to the
mines.--Within the last eighteen months eleven hundred dollars in gold
have been paid for the carriage by wagon of a single set of
amalgamating-apparatus from Virginia City to Reese, a distance of two
hundred miles. The price of the commonest necessaries at the Reese-River
mines has reached the highest point of the old California markets in
'49,--and no attainable means of transport have been adequate to supply
the demand.

From Reese River to Carson we traverse a broken, rocky, and sterile
tract, with occasional fertile patches and a belt along th