Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them, wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often in very early light there are strange suggestions of----dunes and boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided. Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals. [Illustration: SHASTA--SNOW CLOUDS] Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water. It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink. For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the abrupt landward fall of waves.