Of the 157,000 square miles of territory which comprise the State of California, 35,000 square miles are desert. Of this area more than two thousand square miles lie below the level of the sea. The lowest point in all this submarine field is found in Death Valley, the most terrifying and forbidding region in the world. Death Valley has been rightly named. It was christened with blood and has ever lived up to its title. Sixty-eight out of the seventy Mormon emigrants who wandered into that dread region, in 1849, gave their lives to the christening. The story of their terrible death from tortures of thirst and agonies of heat is too horrible to print. They came into a nameless region and their bodies were there consigned to unmarked graves. There lie to-day the remains of all that party save two. These two, when they came away, left behind them a region with a name--Death Valley. [Illustration: TEAMING IN DEATH VALLEY From photograph by C. C. Pierce & Co.] Since then other names have been given to localities within this terrible region, and they have been, for the most part, names in keeping with the awfulness of the place. The mountains which tower above the fearful sink, shutting it off from the great desert outside, have been named "Funeral Mountains." There is "Furnace Creek," whose waters, bitter, poisonous, and unpalatable, flowing through burning sands, become heated as though literally flowing from a glowing furnace. There are "Ash Meadows," a plain strewn with scoriac débris--a Sodom of the Western world. There is the "Devil's Chair," a gigantic and realistic throne worn by erosion from the huge bluffs which form the portals to the valley, a seat appropriate to his Satanic majesty were he to choose a throne upon earth. Indeed, according to a notice posted by a Government surveying party in the pass into the valley, the home of the chief of imps is not far distant. The notice reads thus: DRY PLACE PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS SARATOGA SPRINGS SODA, BORAX, AND NITER MINERAL MONUMENT DEATH VALLEY, 365 FEET BELOW SEA-LEVEL 05 MILES TO RANDSBURG 85 MILES TO DAGGETT 20 MILES TO EVANS' RANCH 30 MILES TO RESTING SPRINGS 10 MILES TO OWL SPRINGS 10 MILES TO SALT SPRINGS 32 MILES TO COYOTE HOLES ERECTED BY THE BAILEY GEOLOGICAL PARTY CHRISTMAS DAY, 1900 20 MILES FROM WOOD 20 MILES FROM WATER 40 FEET FROM HELL GOD BLESS OUR HOME