From Los Angeles to San Bernardino is a matter of two hours, through the San Gabriel Valley, one of the famous valleys of the state. We were rather disappointed. Where we had expected to see an unbroken succession of cultivated groves and gardens, we found half of the land still in sage brush. Like most of the far west, the land is cultivated in spots only. They said there was not enough water for all the fields. After leaving San Bernardino we went through a mountain pass and emerged, early in the afternoon, on the fringes of the Mojave desert, perhaps the dreariest area on the American continent. Hundreds of miles of utter barrenness! The famous Death Valley, 400 feet below the top of the ocean, is part of this desert. It is on this journey that one learns the value of water. Water, the great alchemist, the creator and sustainer of life. How men and women follow the water, here in the semi-arid west! There is no place in the mountains where a bit of a stream trickles down that human beings are not found. A little house, a little garden, and a cow, all gathered about that bit of water which is all of life to them. In these regions water is everything and even real estate men do not sell land, but water. A hot, dusty, disagreeable ride this is, through the Mojave desert. Nothing of the kind could be worse. We were favored, too, for all afternoon thunder clouds were toying with mountain peaks, black clouds and vivid lightning and the deep reverberations of thunder--all so suggestive of copious falls of water, but only once did our train succeed in overtaking one of these showers. And of what use is a shower in a desert? We retired for the night, after we had passed the Needles, on the Colorado River, between California and Arizona. When we arose in the morning we were in a green country again. The desert had faded away and trees and flowers had come in again. Strange freak of nature, that the clouds should pass over the intervening desert and drop their moisture in central Arizona, where July and August are the rainy months of the year. It was good to see the trees again, the big trees, and the grass and the flowers in the green fields. Our train reached Williams early in the morning. From Williams it is sixty miles to the rim of the Canyon, a side journey which one can make in the comfort of a Pullman car. I had heard so much about the Grand Canyon that I was afraid to look at it, though now within a stone’s throw of it--afraid of being disappointed. The disillusionments had been so many on this western journey, so many things had proved to be less than they had been reported in the guide books and in the letters of travelers that I was minded to save one dreamed of great thing from the wrecks of travel, at least a little while longer. So we sat down to breakfast first--the Grand Canyon would wait.