Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight
thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by
mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always
clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent, sail-less sea—this
lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced
with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish
water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands
in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered
lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and
ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater
the lake has seized upon and occupied.
The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are
so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly
soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will
be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of
washerwomen’s hands. While we camped there our laundry work was
easy. We tied the week’s washing astern of our boat, and sailed a
quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing
out. If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or
so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. This water
is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. We had
a valuable dog. He had raw places on him. He had more raw places
on him than sound ones. He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw.
He jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies. But it
was bad judgment. In his condition, it would have been just as
comfortable to jump into the fire.
The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places
simultaneously, and he struck out for the shore with considerable
interest. He yelped and barked and howled as he went—and by the
time he got to the shore there was no bark to him—for he had
barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had
cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he
had never embarked in any such enterprise. He ran round and round
in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw
double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in
the most extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog, as
a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind,
and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before. He
finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we
estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is
going yet. This was about nine years ago. We look for what is
left of him along here every day.
A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is
nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity
drink it sometimes, though. It is not improbable, for they are
among the purest liars I ever saw. [There will be no additional
charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation
of it. This joke has received high commendation from some of the
ablest minds of the age.]
There are no fish in Mono Lake—no frogs, no snakes, no
polliwigs—nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable.
Millions of wild ducks and sea-gulls swim about the surface, but
no living thing exists under the surface, except a white feathery
sort of worm, one half an inch long, which looks like a bit of
white thread frayed out at the sides. If you dip up a gallon of
water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these. They give to
the water a sort of grayish-white appearance. Then there is a
fly, which looks something like our house fly. These settle on
the beach to eat the worms that wash ashore—and any time, you
can see there a belt of flies an inch deep and six feet wide, and
this belt extends clear around the lake—a belt of flies one
hundred miles long. If you throw a stone among them, they swarm
up so thick that they look dense, like a cloud. You can hold them
under water as long as you please—they do not mind it—they are
only proud of it. When you let them go, they pop up to the
surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk off as
unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a view
to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular
way. Providence leaves nothing to go by chance. All things have
their uses and their part and proper place in Nature’s economy:
the ducks eat the flies—the flies eat the worms—the Indians eat
all three—the wild cats eat the Indians—the white folks eat the
wild cats—and thus all things are lovely.
Mono Lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the
ocean—and between it and the ocean are one or two ranges of
mountains—yet thousands of sea-gulls go there every season to
lay their eggs and rear their young. One would as soon expect to
find sea-gulls in Kansas. And in this connection let us observe
another instance of Nature’s wisdom. The islands in the lake
being merely huge masses of lava, coated over with ashes and
pumice-stone, and utterly innocent of vegetation or anything that
would burn; and sea-gull’s eggs being entirely useless to anybody
unless they be cooked, Nature has provided an unfailing spring of
boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in
there, and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any
statement I have made during the past fifteen years. Within ten
feet of the boiling spring is a spring of pure cold water, sweet
and wholesome.
So, in that island you get your board and washing free of
charge—and if nature had gone further and furnished a nice
American hotel clerk who was crusty and disobliging, and didn’t
know anything about the time tables, or the railroad
routes—or—anything—and was proud of it—I would not wish for a
more desirable boarding-house.
Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but
not a stream of any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor
falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a
dark and bloody mystery.
There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono
Lake—and these are, the breaking up of one Winter and the
beginning of the next. More than once (in Esmeralda) I have seen
a perfectly blistering morning open up with the thermometer at
ninety degrees at eight o’clock, and seen the snow fall fourteen
inches deep and that same identical thermometer go down to
forty-four degrees under shelter, before nine o’clock at night.
Under favorable circumstances it snows at least once in every
single month in the year, in the little town of Mono. So
uncertain is the climate in Summer that a lady who goes out
visiting cannot hope to be prepared for all emergencies unless
she takes her fan under one arm and her snow shoes under the
other. When they have a Fourth of July procession it generally
snows on them, and they do say that as a general thing when a man
calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it off with
a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar. And it is
further reported that the old soakers haven’t any teeth—wore
them out eating gin cocktails and brandy punches. I do not
endorse that statement—I simply give it for what it is
worth—and it is worth—well, I should say, millions, to any man
who can believe it without straining himself. But I do endorse
the snow on the Fourth of July—because I know that to be
true.
