Strange tales come out of the desert. Every one who has ventured into its vastness, and who has lived to return, has brought reports of experiences and observations fraught with the deepest interest, which tend to awaken the spirit of adventure in the listener. The most famous of the American deserts are the Great Mojave and the Colorado, the latter lying partly in the United States and partly in Mexico. As trackless as the Sahara, as hot and sandy as the Great Arabian, they contain mysteries which those deserts cannot boast. Within their borders are the great salt fields of Salton and of Death Valley, which have no counterpart in the world; the "Volcanoes," a region abounding in cone-shaped mounds which vomit forth poisonous gases, hot mud, and volcanic matter, and over which region ever hang dense clouds of steam; the great niter fields and borax plains of the Mojave, and other equally strange exhibitions of nature. There are other mysteries in the desert. Amid its sands are gold and gems for the fortunate finder, and many are they who have lost their lives in search of these treasures. Hovering over the desert, too, is that phantom, that desert apparition, the mirage, a never-ceasing wonder to the fortunate traveler who wants not for water and who is in no doubt as to his way across the dreary waste, and a never-ceasing torment and menace to the thirst-tortured wayfarer lost in the dread solitude. Imagine the mockery to the thirsty traveler of a rippling sheet of water, its blue waves rolling ever in view but receding as he advances, leaving only the burning sands to the perishing one! Is it any wonder that men go mad in the desert? And yet, locked in the breast of this waste is more fertility than is necessary to supply the continent with sustenance. [Illustration: MOUNT SAN JACINTO FROM THE DESERT From photograph by C. C. Pierce & Co.] The Colorado Desert is thus called because the great river of that name carved it out of the sea. It is also destined to lose the name of desert because of that same river. At one time the Gulf of California extended nearly up to Banning, where rise those two sentinels of the plain, Mt. San Jacinto and Mt. Grayback, each towering nearly two miles above the surrounding country. This was before the Colorado River had cut its way through the mountains to the sea, forming that magnificent chasm known as the Grand Cañon. For endless centuries the great river has been eating out the heart of the continent, pulverizing the rock and earth, and bearing it in its turbid tide down from the mountains and tablelands to the lower plains and to the sea.