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TUB DEAD SEA OP CALIFORNIA.Mark Twain writes us follows to the* Buffalo Express:—Mono Lake, or tlic Dead Sea of California, is one of her 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 nud very seldom visited. A mining excitement carried me there once, and I spent several months in its vicinity. It lies in u ! lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, 8,000 feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded 1 by mountains 2,000 feet higher, whose | summits are hidden always in the clouds, j This solemn, silent, soilless sea—thielone-I ly 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 I upheavals of rant and scorched and blis-j to red lava, snowed over with gray banks i and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whoso vast crater the lake had 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 washerwoman’s hands. While wc 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 ga\ • 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.A man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye.There are no fish in Mom Lake—uo I frogs, no snakes,—nothing, in fact, that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and seagulls swim about the surface, but no living thing cxits under the surface, except a white, feathery sort of a 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 iifteon thousand of these. They give 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 cat thej worms that wash ashore—and any time you can see there a belt of flies an inch 1 deep and six feet wide, and this belt ex-| tends clear around the lake—a belt of flius ; | 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 don’t mind it. When you let them go, they pop up to the surface a# dry as a Patent Office report, and walk olf as unconcernedly as if they had bceu educated especially with a view to affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular way. Providence leaves notb-A I iug to go by chance. All things hnvo their uses and their proper piaec in Nature’s economy. The ducks and gulls eat the flies—the flics cat the worms—the Indians oat the flics—the wild-eats cat the Indians—the white folks cat the wiUl-cats I when the crops fail—and thus all things j are lovely. ' Mono Lake is 150 miles in a straightline from the ocean—and between it and 1 the ocean are one or two ranges of moun-I ' tains—yet thousands of Bengalis go there i 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 sea-gulls’ eggs being entirely useless to anybody unless they bo cooked, Nature has provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island, and you cun put your eggs in there and in four minutes you can boil themhard. Within ten feet of the boilingspring 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—1 would not wish for a moro desirable boarding-house,II Haifa 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 mystery. All the rivers of Nevada sink into the earth mystcr-n*; iously 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 j round about Mono Lake, and these are e- j the breaking up of one winter and the be-| ginning of the next. More than oueo I have seen a perfectly blistering morning | open up with the thermometer at ninety 11 degrees at 8 o’clock, and soon the snow re fall 14 inches deep and that same ideu-id tical thermometer go down to forty-four i degrees under shelter, before 9 o’clock at night. Under favorable circumstances it di snows at least oucc in every month in tho n, year, in the little town of Mono. Ho un-I certain is the. climate in summer that a la-! dy who goes out visiting cannot hope to be ill prepared for all emergencies unless she be takes her fan under one arm and hor snow-, shoes under the other.orr11I,nu.ss-.0•
Newspaper Details
Middletown Transcript
Middletown, Delaware, US
Sat, Dec 11, 1869
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Dean T.
USA 30 Nov 2022
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