looking eastward across the dreary, desolate waste of sand, rocks, and
alkali, it is with positive regret that I think of leaving the cool,
sparkling stream that has been my almost constant companion for nearly
a hundred miles. It has always been at hand to quench my thirst or furnish
a refreshing bath. More than once have I beguiled the tedium of some
uninteresting part of the journey by racing with some trifling object
hurried along on its rippling surface. I shall miss the murmuring music
of its dancing waters as one would miss the conversation of a companion.

This Forty-mile Desert is the place that was so much dreaded by the
emigrants en route to the gold-fields of California, there being not a
blade of grass nor drop of water for the whole forty miles; nothing but
a dreary waste of sand and rocks that reflects the heat of the sun, and
renders the desert a veritable furnace in midsummer; and the stock of
the emigrants, worn out by the long journey from the States, would succumb
by the score in crossing. Though much of the trail is totally unfit for
cycling, there are occasional alkali flats that are smooth and hard
enough to play croquet on; and this afternoon, while riding with careless
ease across one of these places, I am struck with the novelty of the
situation. I am in the midst of the dreariest, deadest-looking country
imaginable. Whirlwinds of sand, looking at a distance like huge columns
of smoke, are wandering erratically over the plains in all directions.
The blazing sun casts, with startling vividness on the smooth white
alkali, that awful scraggy, straggling shadow that, like a vengeful fate,
always accompanies the cycler on a sunny day, and which is the bane of
a sensitive wheelman's life. The only representative of animated nature
hereabouts is a species of small gray lizard that scuttles over the bare
ground with astonishing rapidity. Not even a bird is seen in the air.
All living things seem instinctively to avoid this dread spot save the
lizard. A desert forty miles wide is not a particularly large one; but