I told some of my acquaintances in Sonora that I could find the “continuation” of the Halsey lead. They “staked” me with a few dollars, in consideration of which I was to make them shareholders in whatever I might find. Then I went forth into the chapparal to “prospect.” The Halsey claim lay about a mile east of Table Mountain near Montezuma, a mining camp then far in its decline. Table Mountain is one of the geological curiosities, if not wonders of Tuolumne and California. As a well-defined wall it is forty miles long. Through Tuolumne it is a veritable wall, from 250 to 600 feet in height, flat as a floor on the top. That top has an average width of 300 yards. The “table” is composed of what we miners call “lava.” It is a honey-combed, metallic-looking rock, which on being struck with a sledge emits a sulphurous smell. The sides to the ungeological eye seem of a different kind of rock. But parts of the sides are not of rock at all--they are of gravel. On the eastern slope you may see from the old Sonora stage road two parallel lines, perhaps 200 feet apart, running along the mountain side. Mile after mile do these marks run, as level and exact as if laid there by the surveyor. Climb up to them and you find these lines enlarged to a sort of shelf or wave-washed and indented bank of hard cement, like gravel. You may crawl under and sit in the shade of an overhanging roof of gravel, apparently in some former age scooped out by the action of waves. Not only on the Table Mountain sides do you find these lines, but where Table Mountain merges into the plains about Knight’s Ferry will you see these same water marks running around the many low conical hills. A geological supposition. That’s what water seems to have done outside of Table Mountain. Were I a geologist I should say that here had been a lake--maybe a great lake--which at some other time had suddenly from the first mark been drained down to the level of the second, and from that had drained off altogether. Perhaps there was a rise in the Sierra Nevada, and everything rising with it, the lake went up too suddenly on one side and so the waters went down on the other. Inside of Table Mountain there is an old river bed, smoothly washed by the currents of perhaps as many if not more centuries than any river now on earth has seen, and this forms a layer or core of gold-bearing gravel. In some places it has paid richly: in more places it has not paid at all.