Middletown transcript., 1869-12-11
THE DEAD SEA OF cAL1FoRsrA.

| DuHalO Express MONO Lake, OF tnc
Dead Sea of California, is one of her most
extraordinary curiosities, but being situa-
ted in very out-of-the-way corner of the
country, and away up among the eternal
SHOWS Of the SierraE, it is little known and.
very seldom visited. A mining excite
ment carried me there once, and | spent
several months in its vicinity. 1t lies in a
lifeloss treeless, hideous desert, 5000 feet
above the level of the sea, and is guarded
by mountains 1000 feet higher, whose
SUBMITS are hidden always in the clouds.
| This solemn, silent, salless sea--ths lone
ly tenant of the loneliest spot on Garth
is little graced with the picturesque, 1t
is an unpretending eXpanse of grayish wa
! ter, about hundred miles in eircumfer-
ence, with two islands in its centre. mere
upheavals of rent and scorched and bills
tered lava, showed over with gray banks
and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the
winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose
vast crater the lake had seized upon and
occupied. ia sF
The lake is 200 feet deep, and its sing
gish waters are so strong with alkali that
| if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled
garment into them once or twice, and
wiring it out, it will be found as clean as
if it had been through your ablcst washer
woman's hands While we camped there
our laundry work was easy. We tied the
weeks washing astern of our boat, and
sailed quarter of mile, and the Job
was complete, all to the wringing out. If
we threw the water on our heads and gay.
them rub or SO, the white lather would
pile up three inches high. This water is
not good for bruised places and abrasions
of the skin.
\ man cannot drink the water of Mono
Lake, for it is nearly pure I've. ..la.s
There are no fish in Mono Lake-no
| frogs, no snakes, nothing, in fact. that
goes to make life desirable. Millions of
wild ducks and seagulls swim about the
surface, but no living thing exists uader
the surface, except white, feathery sort
of worm, one-half an inch long, which
looks like bit of white thread frayed out
at the sides. If you dip up a gallon of
water, you viii get about fifteen thousand
of these. They give the water a sort of
grayish-white appearance. Then there is
fly, which looks something like our house
| dy. These settle on the beach to cat the
worms that wash ashore-and any time
you can see there a belt of flies an inch
deep and six feet wide, and this belt ex-
tends clear around the lake-a belt of flies
one hundred miles long. If you throw a
stone among them, they swarm up so thick
that they look dense, like cloud. You
can hold them under water as long as you
ploase-thcy don't mind it. When you
let them go, they pop up to the surface as
dry as Patent Office report, and walk off
as uneoncernodly as if they had been ed
ucated especially with view to afording
instructive entertainment to man in that
particular way. Providence leaves moth
ing to go by chance. All things have
their uses and their proper place in Ma
ture's economy. The ducks and gulls cat
the fies-the flies cat the worms-thc In
dams eat the nics-the wildcats eat the
Indians-thc white folks cat the wildcats
when the crops fail--and thus all things
are lovely.
Mono Lake is $50 miles in straight
line from the ocean-and between it aud
the ocean are one or two ranges of noun
tains--yet thousands of seagulls go there
every season to lay their eggs and renr
their young. And in this connection let
us observe another instance of Natures
wisdom. The islands in the lake being
merely huge masses of lava, coated over
with ashes and pumicc-stone, and utterly.
innocent of vegetation or anything that
would burn; and sea-gulls' eggs being en-
tirely useless to anybody unless they be
cooked, Nature has provided an unfailing.
spring of boiling water ON the largest is
land, and you can put your eggs in there
and in four minutes you can boil them
hard. Within ten feet of the boiling
spring is a spring of pure cold water. ewect.
and wholesome. So, iii that island you
get your board and washing free of charge
and If Nature had gone further and fur
nishcd nice American hotel clerk WHO.
was crusty and disobliging, and didn't
know anything about the time tables, or
the railroad neutrality-suspicious.
was proud of til would not wish for
more desirable boarding g-house.
Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow
into Mono Lake. but not a stream of any
kind flows out of it, 1t neither rises nor
falls, apparently, and what it does with its,
surplus water, is mystery. All the riv-
ers of Nevada sink into the earth myster-
iously after they have run a hundred miles
or so--none of them flow to the sea, as is
the fashion of rivers in all other lands.
There are only two seasons in the region
round about Mono Lake. and these are
the breaking up of one winter and the be-
ginning of the next More than once
have seen perfectly blistcring morning
open up with the Thermometer at ninety
degrees at 8 o'clock, and seen the snow
fall II inches deep and that same ider-
tical thermometer go down to forty-four
degrees under shelter, before clock at
night. Under favorable circumstances it
SHOWS at least once in every month in tho
year, in the little town of Mono So un-
certain is the. climate in. summer that la