The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1901-10-13

IF to some people flower a simple
flower is and nothing more ii is prob
able that to them a desert would only
be a desert or something less To
John c. Van Dyke, author of The Des-
ert.' 1t is q whole cosmos. and he takes
all the pages of an entire book to tell
about IL and leaves room for thought be-
sides
He causes the desert TO blossom by
merely frrigat ting IL with bottle of ink,
but then the vigorous cultivation which
he gives il with his pen enables him to
accomplish wonders in its virgin soil.
which no literary husbandman has hith-
erto titled.
This may be Greek or CANNON to those
who have not stood on the desert at night
alone or with another perhaps and looked
at its somber Syrian might of infinite
vastness, beside which all works of man,
all even Of natures other spectacIes of
mountain. forest. cliffs and waters, sink
into melodramatic naught.
Van Dyke explains something Of how
this love Of the desert grows on one but
il must have been lived through to be
really felt. The traveller who crosses Oh
the railroad viii never know why the In
dams left the fertile watered glens of the
hills or the rich valleys of the coast and
took to the desert to spend their lives
fighting with death.
IN his preface he says:
The love Of nature is after all an ac-
CURED taste. One begins by admiring the
HUDSON River landscapes and ends by
loving the desolation of the Mojave Just
why or how the change would be diff
cult to explain. You cannot always dis
sect taste or passion. I shall never be
able 10 tell you of the grandeur of the
mountains nor the glory of color that
wraps the burning sands at their feet
SO il is that my book is only an excuse
for talking a bout the beautiful things in
this desert world that stretches down to
The Pacific Ocean and across Arizona and
Sonora
The desert has gone begging for
word Of praise these many years. 1t
never had sacred poet. 1t has in me
only lover but 1 trust that the nature
loving public will accept this record of
the Mojave and the Colorado as at least
truthful Given the facts. erhaps the
poet and his fsncies viii come after"
To one who thinks of the desert as but
one thlng-a waste of arid, shifting sand,
beneath that inverted bowl we call the
sky'-it is wonderful how a writer can
scrape enough out Of it TO I'LL a book.
The chapter headings partly explain.
First-"Ihe approach to the desert" as
one sees il in early morning, pickering
with its nliragic illusions, cool and blue.
The Make Of the Desert" How it came
that a great upper end of the Gulf of Cal
ifornia was cut off by the sitting deposits
of the Colorado River, which then
emptied into its eastern side, and the
dammed-in waters dried away, till the
Salton salt glacier is all that is left
The topography Of the bottom of the
bowl, all that is left of this truly dead"
and gore sea, makes another chapter, and
the lotion Of the sea is interesting even
after the sea has dried away.
A chapter on the Colorado River tells
how that silent stream crawls past the
desert ruin it has wrought, sometimes to
sink silently into the sea. while again at
the fun and change days Of the moon it
meets the ocean waters angrily and casts
UP z vast bore" like that giant tidal
wave which rushes UP the Bay of Fundv
The author is at his best in his color
descriptions Of desert light, air, sky ana
clouds; natures vast paintings of cliff
and canyon.
illusions Of the Desert''-mirage. fore
Shortcomings and deceptive distances, dan
gerous to the traveler-make an interest
irg chapter, for many of the twice or
thrice told tales of travellers are shown
no have been amplifed in the telling.
Mr. Van Dyke holds that the desert
serves a vastly useful purpose in acting
as sort Of register for heating air He
says; This old sea bed is, for its area.
probably the greatest dry heat generator
IN the world, because of its depression
and its barren sandy surface. 1t is fur
mace that whirls heat UP and out of the
bowl over the peaks Of the Coast Range
into Southern California and eastward
across the plains into Arizona and New