Even the climate of the coast partakes of mystery. The clouds hurrying from the Atlantic have drenched a whole continent of jungle in tropical downpour, and before they reach the desert, their last drop of moisture has been wrested from them as snow--drained dry by the Andes. The tropical sun heats, and the Antarctic current bringing its icy winds, cools. Sometimes one predominates, sometimes the other. For the red-hot desert can also be cold! The low-hanging _garuas_, the ocean mists of half a year, chill the desert and cling to the base of the mountains, fading lighter and lighter up and away from the black rocks where white surf is breaking. Such are the facts of the case, but it has been thought that the original god, Con, was responsible, for once in anger he deprived this desert coast of rain. The desert is majestically empty, a great “vision of nothing without perspective.” Yet its mere emptiness suggests breadth, backward and forward, up and down, both in time and space. An unheard silence lies between the empty horizons, perfect except for the “great, faint sound of breakers,” the tumble of an unused ocean of water, which destroys without moistening the desert shores. It seems lifeless. Harmless and peaceful at least, it presents nothing to be destroyed by sun-blight. It remains, as it apparently always has been, the realm of death--though even death presupposes life before it. But disturb the desert, and a thousand forces spring into action, furiously attacking the intruder. The heat of the sun assumes a ghoulish love of destruction, and at night the stars look down upon a creature shivering with fever, reeking with wet in this desert place. Possessing all fruitful ingredients within and kindly elements without, the desert sleeps. It needs only one thing to burst into life. A mysterious river springs forth full-grown. From what glacier or clear, icy fountain up on the frozen _puna_ may it not have issued? And then, after a mysterious incubation, it returns to sparkle here in the light, and in the leaves and flowers which the dampened earth is ready to produce. There are traditions that sometimes a vagrant shower escapes from the magnetism of the mountain-tops. The flowers waiting just beneath the surface spring up like bloom over the June earth. The water was a shower of bluebells! A fugitive vegetation greedily spreads, quickly as it disappears with the passing of the water. In some places cotton grows to the height of a horse’s head, a luxuriant crop, too unexpected for harvest. This brilliant life lasts a week, perhaps more, and then lapses. Where do the slumbering flowers conceal themselves? Where, indeed, does the pansy get its coloring matter?