When I first stood there, one bright day before sundown, the lake was
fairly blooming in purple light, and was so responsive to the sky in
both calmness and color it seemed itself a sky. No mountain shore
hides its loveliness. It lies wide open for many a mile, veiled in no
mystery but the mystery of light. The forest also was flooded with
sun-purple, not a spire moving, and Mount Shasta was seen towering
above it rejoicing in the ineffable beauty of the alpenglow. But
neither the glorified woods on the one hand, nor the lake on the
other, could at first hold the eye. That dark mysterious lava plain
between them compelled attention. Here you trace yawning fissures,
there clusters of somber pits; now you mark where the lava is bent and
corrugated in swelling ridges and domes, again where it breaks into a
rough mass of loose blocks. Tufts of grass grow far apart here and
there and small bushes of hardy sage, but they have a singed
appearance and can do little to hide the blackness. Deserts are
charming to those who know how to see them--all kinds of bogs,
barrens, and heathy moors; but the Modoc Lava Beds have for me an
uncanny look. As I gazed the purple deepened over all the landscape.
Then fell the gloaming, making everything still more forbidding and
mysterious. Then, darkness like death.

Next morning the crisp, sunshiny air made even the Modoc landscape
less hopeless, and we ventured down the bluff to the edge of the Lava
Beds. Just at the foot of the bluff we came to a square enclosed by a
stone wall. This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers,
most of whom met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the
boards marking the graves--a gloomy place to die in, and deadly-looking
even without Modocs. The poor fellows that lie here deserve far
more pity than they have ever received. Picking our way over the