an arid and hopeless waste, you come suddenly
upon the brink of a narrow ravine,
sharply defined as if cut out with an axe,
and packed to the brim with enchanting and
voluptuous fertility. Or you will come upon
mountains which sweep upward out of burning
death into sumptuous life. When the
monotony of life meets the monotony of
death, Southern California becomes a land
of contrasts; and the contrasts themselves
become monotonous.

General Trednoke's ranch was very near
the borders of these two mighty forces. An
hour's easy ride would carry him to a region
as barren and apparently as irreclaimable as
that through which Childe Roland journeyed
in quest of the Dark Tower; lying,
too, in a temperature so fiery that it
coagulated the blood in the veins, and stopped
the beating of the heart. Underfoot were
fine dust, and whitened bones; the air was
prismatic and magical, ever conjuring up
phantom pictures, whose characteristic was
that they were at the farthest remove from
any possible reality. The azure sky
descended and became a lake; the pulsations
of the atmosphere translated themselves into
the rhythmic lapse of waves; spikes of sage-
brush and blades of cactus became sylvan