p. 106 | ETERNAL DESOLATION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 3, 1879

ETERNAL DESOLATION.

In the north-west corner of San Bernardino county, Cal., lying partly in Inyo county, and partly also in the State of Nevada, is a region paralleled by few spots on the face of the earth. We say the world is instinct with life. Here, if the phraseology may be pardoned, is a place instinct with death. A huge basin, whose rim is the ancient hills stricken with the barrenness of eternal desolation, whose bosom is the blasted waste of the desert—treeless, shrubless, and waterless, save a few bitter pools like the lye of potash water; surrounded by mountains that tower thousands of feet above the sea-level, itself lying three hundred feet below the sea. It is a very “Gehenna,”—a place of death and bones. Birds do not fly over it. Animals do not enter it. Vegetation cannot exist in it. The broad sands absorb the heat, the bare mountains reflect it, the unclouded sun daily adds to it. Ninety degrees in the shade (artificial shade, there is no other) means winter. One hundred and thirty and one hundred and forty degrees, that is summer.

The hot air grows hotter, wavers, trembles with heat, until nature, goaded to madness, can endure no more; and then the burning blast rouses itself—rouses in its might,—rouses as an angry beast, with a hoarse, ominous roar, sweeps mile after mile, on, ever on, over the broad reach of the desert, bearing on its black, whirling bosom—black as midnight—dust, sand, alkali, and death. Sometimes a murky cloud gathers upon the

mountains above; then there is a rush, a warning sigh on the winds, a low rumbling in the air; the hills quiver, the earth trembles, and a torrent, half water, half mud, bounds from the hills, leaps into the desert, plowing chasms like river-beds in the loose sand. The clouds scatter, the sun comes again, the eternal thirst of the desert is not quenched. The raging river was only a dream.

In the year 1849 a party of emigrants entered the basin. Day after day they toiled on, thirsting, dying. The pitiless mountains walled them in; no escape. One by one they dropped and died. A few, abandoning everything, scaled the mountains and escaped. The others lie as they fell, dried to mummies—no birds even to devour their flesh; no beasts to prey upon them; the wagon-tires unrusted, gun-barrels bright, untarnished. Such is the place. Mile after mile silence reigns; silence—and death.—Selected.