And the weather? I have not mentioned it as we travelled along, for I wished to emphasize it by bringing it in at the end of the chapter. Well, the weather. There was none to speak of, unless you can call a fierce dry over-heat, averaging 96 in the shade, weather. And this is all that we have had for the last twelve hours or so; heat enough to blister even a lizard, or frizzle a salamander. A hot wind, like the "100" of the Indian plains, blew across the desperate sands, getting scorched itself as it went, and spitefully passing on its heat to us. It was as hot as Cawnpore in June; nearly as hot as Aden. And then the change at Yuma! We had suddenly stepped from Egypt in August into Lower Bengal in September--from a villainous dry heat into afar more villainous damp one. The thermometer, though the sun had set, was at and, added to all, was such a plague of mosquitoes as would have subdued even Pharaoh into docility. The instant--literally, the instant--that we stepped from our cars our necks, hands, and faces were attacked, and on the platform everybody, even the half-breed Indians loafing outside the dining-room, were hard at work with both hands defending themselves from the small miscreants. The effect would have been ludicrous enough to any armour-plated onlooker, but it was no laughing matter. We were too busy slapping ourselves in two places at once to think of even smiling at others similarly engaged; and the last I remember of detestable Yuma was the man who sells photographs on the platform, whirling his hands with experienced skill round his head and packing up his wares by snatches in between his whirls. CHAPTER XXVI. THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY. The Santa Cruz Valley--The Cactus--An ancient and honourable Pueblo--A terrible Beverage--Are Cicadas deaf?--A floral Catastrophe--The Secretary and the Peccaries. YUMA marks the frontier between California and Arizona. But it might just as well mark the frontier between India and Beluchistan, for it reproduces with exact fidelity a portion of the town of Rohri, in Sind. A broad, full-streamed river (the Colorado) seems to divide the town into two; on the top of its steep bank stands a military post, a group of bungalows, single-storied, white-walled, green-shuttered, verandahed. On the opposite side cluster low, flat-roofed houses, walled in with mud, while here and there a white-washed bungalow, with broad projecting eaves, stands in its own compound. Brown-skinned men with only a waistcloth round the loins loaf around, and in the sandy spaces that separate the buildings lean pariah dogs lie about, languid with the heat. The dreadful temperature assists to complete the delusion, and finally the mosquitoes of the Colorado river have all the ferocity of those that hatch on the banks of the Indus.