The Dead Sea of California.

Cromwell Argus, Volume I, Issue 16, 2 March 1870, Page 3

The Dead Sea of California.

Mark Twain, writing in the Buffalo Express, thus describes this singular, lake : _ Mono Lake, or the Dead Sea of California, is one of the most extraordinary curiosities, but being situated in a very out-of-the-way corner of the country, and away up among the eternal snows of the Sierras, it is little known and very seldom visited. A mining excitement carried me there once, and I spent several months in its vicinity. It lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, 8000 feet above the level

of the sea, and is guarded by mountains 2000 feet higher, whose summits are hidden always in the clouds. This solemn, silent, sailless sea—this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth—is little graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of greyish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in the centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with grey 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 200 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 your ablest washer-

woman's hands. While we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the week's washing astern of our boat, and sailed for a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all po wringing out. If we threw tho water on our heads, and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high. The water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. A white man cannot drink it, for it is nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though. There are no fish in Mono lake—no frogs, no snakes, no pollywogs—nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and seagulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the surface except a white feathery sort of a worm, 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 the water a sort of greyish-white appearance. Then there is a fly which looks something like our house fly. These settle on the beach to eat ths • ;.rnu ihat 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 flie; ■•. hundred miles long. Mono Luke is 150 miles hi a straight line from the ocean, yet thousands of seagulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. 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 seagulls' eggs being entirely useless to anybody unless tlieybe 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. 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 whatever it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery. AH the rivers of Nevada sink into the earth mysteriously after they have run a hundred miles or so—none of them flow to the sea, as is the fashion of rivers in all other lands.

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. Under favourable circumstances it snows at least once in every single month in the year, in the little town of Mono.