The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1895-06-29
A Type of Sheol.


citation and horrid animal life, make
the place fit type of sheol. The sur
face is waste of sand and salt; the
temperature reaches 13O deg, and
there is no shade whatever. At night
the fauna peculiar to the region
come forth, all in keeping with the
diabolical surroundings; all like so
many imps from the inferno. Lizards
approaching yard in length come
with an ambling squirm from their
hot burrows under the alkali crust;
rattlesnakes wriggle along their way;
horned toads, scorpions and huge tar
antulas-all are now in quest of prey.
Here may also be found that most
hideous, loathsome and wretched of
all American reptiles, the gila (heela)
monster. Even the mammalia seem
crossed with the reptilia, all of them
are abnormally armed, and most of
them are intensely venomous.
The iron work of the cars burns
the hand; the hot wind parches and
scorches like furnace blast; if on
foot the sand is so hot that in few
miles the shoes will be burned from
the feet; the blowing sand cuts like
needles, and after short time with
out water the traveller becomes in
sane, and dies in agony of heat with
out and thirst within.
1t seems impossible to believe that
only few miles west of this Inferno
are the paradise gardens of California;
and that the arid, torrid atmosphere
of the Desert is the mandatory of
the wonderful climate of the Land of
the Sunshine. Yet so it is. What the
furnace is to the home, the Desert is
to Southern California. The intense
heat rises to the mountain tops, is
cooled by the mountain air, descends
to the valleys over the range, and
combines with the cool trades winds
that come from the Pacific, and create
climate that has no equal anywhere
in America.
Who that has ever seen this track
less, melancholy waste, and realized
its tawny immensity of desolation,
can ever need any other type of hor-
ror? Without actual experience no
one, says an old prospector, can have
any conception of the horrors of
desert thirst, or that deathly faintness
that comes over one when, miles away
from water he finds that his canteen
is empty; of the madness which fol-
lows in few hours, of the shriveled
lungs and parched throat; of the
cracked, swollen, blackened and pro-
truding tongue; the starting eyeballs
burned to fiery red; of the tantaliz
ing visions of CLASSY lakes between
banks of mossy green; and the tink-
ling of icy water tumbling over
powders in imaginary canyons just
beyond; of the maddened frenzy with
which he tears the clothing from his
body and runs naked over the blister
ing sands; of the frantic endeavor to
dig with torn and bleeding fingers
for water; of that last hoarse cry on
the desert stiffness to a God that
hears him not"
Advice to Visitors.
Two days in May, from the favor
able situation of the railway car, and
the hotel, with a fve-mile drive
through the sand, gave me an inkling
of the horrible reality. And my ad-
vice to those who would visit the ter
rible locality, for at least nine months
OF the year, is the advice Punch gave
to those about to marry-"Don't!"
Thou brown, bare-breasted. voiceless mystery,
Cactus-crowne Sphinx of Nature, what hast
done?
Unclothed and mute as when dread chaos
turned
Thy naked. burning bosom to the sun.
The mountain-silence speaks. the rivers
sing,
Thou answerest never unto anything.
Pink-throated lizards pant In thy slim shade;
The horned toad runs rustling in the heat;
The shadowy gray coyote, born afraid.
Steals to some brackish spring and laps. and
prowls,
And howls. and howls. and howls, and
howls,
Until the solitude is shaken with an added lone
illness.
The sharp mescal shoots up giant stalk,
Its century of yearning to the sunburnt skies,
And drips rare honey from the lips
OF yellow waxen flowers and dies.
Some lengthwise, sun-dried shapes with feet
and hands,
And thirsty mouths pressed on the swelter-
ing sands.
Mark here and there gruesome. graveless spot.
Where some one drank the scorching holiness
and is not.
God must have made thee in his anger, and for
goti
From the San Gabriel Valley to tt e
Colorado Desert and back may well
be called journey to and from To-
phet.
PASADENA, CAL.