Go over the next ridge, or perhaps the one beyond that, and you will see a still stranger sight--a great, black, angular dredge, a one-armed iron giant scooping up the sand tons at a time, in his huge palm, weighing it in the air, and then, with outcrooking elbow, majestically dropping it upon the desert. There is a little black engine behind burning mesquit-wood, and a silent, grimy man chewing tobacco and grumbling at the heat. They entered the desert forty miles away at the bank of a great river, and they have burrowed their way through the sand, with the water following in a broad brown band. [Illustration: View among the cacti.] "Yes, sir," says the man, in a matter-of-fact voice; "this canal will irrigate half a million acres of land in this desert. In ten years there will be a hundred thousand people settled here. You see that mesquit-tree over there? Well, that's where we're going to locate the city. The railroad will come in along that ridge and cross over near those chollas." ... So you may go from ridge to ridge through all the great desert, and may find miners delving in the dry earth for gold; see herders setting up windmills; see farmers boring holes for artesian wells; see miners of wood digging in the sand for the fat roots of the mesquit; see irrigation engineers making canal-levels, and railroad contractors spinning their threads of steel where no man dreamed of living. And you will feel as you never have felt before, and your heart will throb with the pride of it--this splendid human energy and patience and determination. Here men separate themselves from their homes, from the society of women; they suffer thirst and hardship; they die here in the desert, but they bring in civilization. And the crying wonder of it all is that these are ordinary men, good and evil, weak and strong, who have no idea that they are heroic; who would laugh at the suggestion that they are more than earning a living, making a little money for themselves, and hoping to make more in the future. Yes, the time has come when humanity will not tolerate deserts. Yet, judging by the limited vision of the individual man, there are still desert places in the West. A man is so small and weak, and his physical wants, his need of water and food and a resting-place, are so incessant and commanding, that he can see only a little way around him and creep only a few miles in a day. If he know not the desert, he may be lost within half a dozen miles of a ranch or within a hundred yards of a spring, and die there of thirst. To him, in such cases, it is all as much of a desert and quite as dangerous as if there were not a human habitation within a thousand miles. But to the man who is reasonably schooled in the wisdom of trails and the signs of water, the desert has been robbed of nearly all its terrors. With proper care and preparation he may go anywhere without fear, although frequently not without acute discomfort and even suffering.