Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back. For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could not penetrate. And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly, I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage, their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty, without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the blossomy wonder is upon the world. As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia. Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon. It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you move.