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AROUND THE WORLD.LETTER NO. ONE.Ni» Toft, October It.[I *9 j ot itArtii f oil a plea ur* trip aroun4 tl • yfoha, by proxy. Taat ii to taj, Profcawor D. It. Fc*t*, off Elmira Corl-^c, i* now malm* tha Jmtnie for mt, and will wrre the nem*[mj«er account of hi* (our) trip. No, not Uni exactly—but he will Warni and wi ite letter*, and I shall stay at home and add * dozen jo^ea to each of his letwsia. «oe of u* fril* farnwh the faitry and the jokes, and the oQMr will furnish the ffmcta. 1 am equal to either depavtaant, though statisti *lt; are in} heat h-'id. 1 am perfect!} aitUAcd now. I ha.e long had a dcaire to travel •icar arour.d the wui id iu one ^rand, comprehensive picuic excursion, Hut the fatigue and vexation of it formed one draw hark, and the experts* another. The nece»*ry V-img was to ;'ft somebody to divide the» disjomfi rta witii, and so make them hearabla. Thi i* now accozupLsued. I etmy at home and stand U* fatigue, arid the Professor travels and stands tfce expense. While my Doube in roaming about the Great Plains, and Nevada and CaMorrna. my half off theletters will bo at a dUadvantage, baeauaa I shall be hampered by an intimate personal know lodge of thoee localities; Hut when he get* into Japan, and China and India, I rau *.or *i*b a gorgeous freedom because I •! rTt know any thing about thoee fond*. j, fPr©fee*or F«»ni U a achola ly man; amu whose attainment* over a vast field of knowledge. Hi-kuuwledge ii singularly accurate, t*Hi, whst he kn*»w* he is certain of, and likewise what ho knows he has a happy faculty of communicating to other*. He ia a man o' high s'-cLsl standing and unspotted character. He is a wanu per»«iial friend of mine which is to his discredit, perhaps, Vet would you have a ma ; perfect? Ee is a uuu *ter uf the Gospel, and a /ire one —a ma'i wh*/se religion broadens and adorns his nature, not a religion that dates a man hack into the last eentury and ^p* Lis charily and make- him a bigot. Mr. Fonl’i letters will be written in -11 good faith and honesty, and 1 shall not mar them. 1 aliail merely \ avo a jouJ iUal tv say. 1 trust that the di eliminating readrr wi:l always be able to discover whe**e Ford Uaves off and I begin -•-hough J don't realiv intend be «/«au be able to do that. As Mr. F. jogs silotig, I mean to write paragraph lor paragraph with him, and I sha’l set down all th*A I know abjut the countries h* visits, together with a good deal that neither 1 nor anybody else know* about thciu.[Mr. For Iliad reached Salt Lake * »ty a few da\s ago, and by this time is pruning among the silvei mines of Nevada. His letters areun their way hither, no doul t,but in theiu jantime 1 w ill begin the Journey una^rist’d, with a sketch or so of my owu about The DedSe* of Ualifomia, arid some other curious features of that country. The Professor will sail for Japan in the steamer America, which leaves San Fmceisco on the 4th if November. A twenty-five or thirty day sea voyage, doubled, make* a long interregnum, and so hi?* Japanese letters will not begin to arrive before January. However, I rau run this d -plicate correspondence by myself ti ! then. With the reader’s permission I will now begin— and what 1 say atxut Mono Lake may le a*ept«J at strictly true.I *hall tell no lie?, about it ] Mark Twain.TilK I»KAD SEA.Mono Like or the Dead Sea of California, is one of her most extraordinary curioaiticf, but being situated in a very out-of-the- wav corner of the country, and away up among the eternal snowi of the SisrraH, it is litt'e known and very seldom visited. A mining excitement carried me there once, and I •pent 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 snmmits are hidden always iu the clouds. This solemn, silent, tailless 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 its centre, mere upheav als of rent, and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with grey banks and drifts of pumice stone and ashes, the winding sheet ot the dead volcano, whose vast crater the 1 ike 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 onoe or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had beer through your ablest washerwoman's hands. While we camped there our laundry work was easy. We tied the weeks washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to th«* 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 svater is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin. We had a vaiu-able dog. He had raw places on him. lie had more raw places on him than sound ones. Ife was the .sweat dog 1 almost ever saw. He jumped overboard one day to get away from the Hies. But it was bad judgment. In his condition, it would have Iteeu just as comfortable to juuip 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 how led as he went—and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him —for he had harked the bark all out of his iuside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off hisoutside, and he probably wished he bad 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 summersets, sometimes backwards and sometimes forwards, in the most frantic and extraordinary manner. He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and 1 never saw him take so much interest in any thing before. He finally struck out over tbe mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about 250 miles an hour, and he is going yet. This was about live years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day.A white man cannot drink the water cf Mono Lake, for it ia nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians ia tbe vicinity drink it sometimes, though. It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars 1 ever saw. [There will be no additional charge for this joke, exempt to parties requiring an explanation of it. This joke has received high oommeadation from some of the ableet minds of the age. Horace Greeley remarked to a friend of mine that if he were ever to make a joke like that, he would aot desire to live any longer. J There are no fiah in Mono Lake—no frogs, no makes, no pollywogs—nothing, iu fact, that goes to ssake life desirable. Millions of wild ducks mad sea gulls swim aboat the surface, but no living thing exists uwl*r the surface, except a whitefeathery sort of worm, one-half an inch long, which looka Jake a bit of white thread frayed oat at the sides. If yoa dip up n gallon of water, job will get about fifteen thousand of these. They give to the water a sort ef greyish-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 tins, yea can aae there n halt ef Aire an inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends dear around tha lake—a belt of fiiaa one hand red miles long. If you throw a Mans among them, they swarm ap so thick that they look denee, Mke a eloud. You caa hold them under water se long ee you pleeee they dent mind it—they are only proud ef it. When you lot them go, they pop up to the surface ee dry ae a patent office report, walk off if they hadrar to affording r—tnitiis to mao m that particular way leaves aothiag to g» hy ehanen AH have their nem and their part endplace in Natalia eoenemr. The dosha wdgalls eat the ibee—the dim eat tha —the Indians eat the fliee—the wild eats eat the Indiana—the white folks eat the wild cate when the crepe fail —and thee all things are lovely.Mono Lake ia 150 seilsa in a straight line from the eeoan—and between it and the oeaaa are one or two rangse of meiietaine-yot thousands of see gulls go there every ■ee son to lay their eggs and rear their yooag. Oae would ae soon expect to dad sea-gulls in Tennmsss. And ia this connection let us observe another inatanee of Nature s wisdom. The islands in the lake being merely huge mneeas of lava, coated over with ashes and pumiceatona, end utterly innocent of vegetation or anything that would hum; and eea guile* eggs being entirely nsHsae to any body ualoes they be cooked. Nature has provided an unfading spring of boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there, aad in four minutesyou can boil them ee hard as any statement L have made duringthe past fifteen years. Within tea feet ofthe boiling spring is a spring of pure ooldwater, sweet and wholesome. So, in thatisland you get your board and washing freeof charge—and if nature had gone furtheraad furnished a nice American hotel clerkwho was crusty and disobliging, and didn'tknow any thing about the time tables, crthe railroad routes—or—any thiug—andwas proud of it—I would not wish for amore desirable boarding house.Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not s stream of ar y kind flows out of it. It neither rises nt r falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody my s-tery. All the rivers of Nevada sink into the earth mysteriously after they have run 100 milss or so -none of them flow to the sea, as is tbe 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 ouc Winter ai:J the beginning of tbe next. More thau once I have seen s perfectly blistering morning open up with the thermometer at ninety degrees at eight o’clock, and n the mow fall fourteen inches Jleep ai. 1 that same identical thermometer go down to forty-four degrees under shelter, before 0 o’clock at night. Under favorable circumstance* it scows at least ones 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 thty 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 ar.d 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 don’t endorse that statement I simply give it for what it is worth—and it is worth —well, I should say, millions, to any m»D who ean believe it without straining himself. But I do endorse the snow on the Fourth of July—because I know that to be true.|ro nr. coxtibi sd. |i:tl0clh,StJtatE’vVt?OfTtif:tili8.o!e'haitin,81flntimTo!YauUeC ttlbufl1bIII 1 UtfaII■Xa§xtttxi'J1ccIIF4itx4I4IItm4i«
Newspaper Details
Buffalo Express
Buffalo, New York, US
Sat, Oct 16, 1869
Page 1
Full Page
Clipped by
Dean T.
USA 30 Nov 2022
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