Desert mirages are ever on exhibition in the land of little rain.  I was riding an Indian Pony along the margin of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.  The afternoon had been filled with a series of tantalizing mirages.  A lake, a grove, and green fields had again and again been shown to the right of us and to the left of us.  Canteens were empty.  All concentration for a spring, I ceased to notice the mocking pictures of the mirage.  We were seriously wondering if we had made a mistake in failing to turn off to search for water in the mouth of that desolate canyon.  The map placed a spring here, but finding a spring where not a tree stood and in a locality without distinguishing landmarks would be a case mostly of luck.
   My pony with a sudden stop gave welcoming neigh.  His eager ears pointing to two loose horses less than a quarter mile off.  A bay and a pinto were standing in alkaline sand near the mouth of a canyon.  They suggested camp and a spring.  All concentration, my pony started gingerly for them.  Head to head the horses stood; possibly looking at each other, possibly staring sleepily at the hot dull sand.  I looked through my glass farther into the gorge beyond them. My pony made another sudden stop.  The horses vanished.
   “Well, Piute,” I said, “I am a tenderfoot in the Great Basin, but you—born on the desert—have let a mirage deceive you.”
   He looked this way and that.  He did not act foolish; he still had faith in his eyes and those horses.  They simply had dodged while he was hustling over the high sand dunes.  He wanted to look behind a rock ledge and I let him; then he clambered over the dunes.  Unwillingly, he turned back into our course along the dim trail.  After going a quarter of a mile, he turned, looked, neighed wildly, listened, then—puzzled—went slowly forward.
   The wireless transfers sounds and music through uncharted space.  On a desert, light becomes wireless—transfers or transplants scenes.  These may be brought from beyond the horizon and places in the foreground in the vision of the beholder.  It often is impossible to tell how much of the scenic desert is real and how much is mirage — scenes transferred by wireless.
   We were on the edge of an old lake bottom as level as a floor, an extensive plain, or basin, surrounded by detached mountain ranges.  A range on our left rose several thousand feet.  It was so narrow and so abrupt, there was a suggestion that its foothills were buried.  Earlier, we had passed the end of a similar mountain, and dimly off in the southwest stood two others.  Each separately pierced the desert floor.  The mountain slopes rose barren for two thousand feet, then had a broad belt of cedars, pines, and spruces.  All day we had not passed a single tree, and the total number of stunted sages and bunches of grass was less than a score.
   Stretches of the level lake bottom were yellow pavement of sun-baked, sun-cracked sediment. But most of it was covered with soda dust, sand borax, and salt.
   On, Piute and I traveled, looking for a spring.  By a barren water-worn rock we spent the night, without water in the dusty sediment of an ancient lake.  Piute stood near me all night, watching my every move and depending on me to get him out of this predicament.  Far off through the night we saw a light; probably the camp fire of a prospector with burros high up on a mountain-side, in the woods with grass and water.  A red volcano in the eastern horizon and dawn was on the desert!  Green fields and cool lakes lay just ahead — false promises of the mirage.  By seven o’clock the alkaline dust was sizzling.
   We aimed straight across the level desert for a spring twenty-eight miles distant.  All day I saw what I had come to the desert to see — desert shore lines and the dry bottom of a fossil lake.
   Piute and I were tortured with thirst.  A hot wind, fortunately behind us, showered us with powdery alkaline dust and filled the air with salty sand for hours.  The storm ended, and I walked to save Piute, who had been staggering along.  He stumbled, went down, and for minutes lay groaning.  After two desperate trails he rose and slowly followed me.
   I was half blinded; the stinging alkaline dust burned my eyes.  We were forcing ourselves along when Piute pricked up ears and turned gingery off to the right.  He headed straight for a mirage waterfall that seemed so close that one should hear its waters roar.  But he was in home territory and brought up at a spring.  The water was like Epsom salts, and we dared use but little.
   Piute was restless, and long before morning I obeyed his urging, and we moved on.  Evidently, he knew where there should be real water.  He was hurrying forward when we met a prospector.  Still maddened with heat and thirst, I called to him, “Where are we?”
   “You are in the northwest corner of Nevada, with Oregon a few miles norther and California several miles to the west,” he said.
   “But how far to water?” I asked, while Piute was pulling and stepping about trying to go on.
   “About a mile — your pony knows the way,” was the answer.
   After an afternoon and night at the spring, we started across a less barren desert for Malheur Lake, Oregon, where I was to see thousands of waterfowl.  Mid-afternoon, Piute turned aside and stopped by a spring.  I had planned to camp five miles farther along, but, rather than disappoint the pony, I camped here.
   While stopping at this spring, a mirage placed a lake, teeming with waterfowl, just beyond camp.  Geese and ducks were swimming in the water, feeding and sunning themselves along the shore.  We traveled on to the real lake.
   After two weeks with Piute and the desert, I gave him up at the lake and hurried away by speedier transport: a dry-as-dust vacation, but one decorated with mirages and many things for the imagination.  As is common for those who know the desert for a week or longer, I went away planning to return.
   During my next desert visit, light — the desert magician — showed another lake picture.  Early one morning, a mirage lake appeared in the scene before my camp in western Utah.  As I looked, a bighorn ram raised his head like a periscope through the silvery surface of the lake.  The remainder of his body appeared to be submerged in the water.  For a few seconds, his head also went out of sight, then reappeared.
   There was a blur, and the next scene showed a ram, three lambs, and two ewes, all knee-deep in the shallow water of the lake.  Shallow, short-lived lakes are common in the Great Basin.  But how, a moment before, had the ram shown only his head, and where had been the others of the flock which now stood by him?
   The ram walked forward a few steps, stopped, and turned his head.  Others of the flock were starting to follow when the picture faded.  After a few minutes, the lake vanished — but not the sheep.  There on the desert, correct for distance and direction, stood the six sheep — a ram, three lambs, and two ewes — that had been in the mirage scene.
   Evidently, the air was made up of layers of different density or of different humidity.  The top of this obscuring layer must for a time have been just beneath the ram’s head.  Later, it dropped to knee level, or the sheep walked to slightly higher level.  Here was a mirage stage-setting with real and undistorted figures in it.
   From this camp, the following afternoon, a scene of different type was staged.  It was intensely hot, and the sun seemed like molten metal in the hazy, coppery sky.  Round me were level, seared, desert distances without a butte or a cloud.
   A bit of seashore suddenly had a place in the hot dry landscape.  A wave rolled easily in and flattened on the shore.  Swell after swell, then breaker after breaker, rolled in upon the shore before me.  Far out, I saw a heavy breaker coming in.  It rose higher as it approached the shore, curled and broke almost at my feet.  But there was no sound.  It was uncanny.  A transformation came so quickly that I could not follow.  In apparently the same scene, without a breeze, a heavy fog bank came drifting in.  The sun touched its edges to glass as it came on.  For a moment, it obscured the sun.  I said to myself, “This is exactly like real fog.  If so, it will be moist and cool, wind or no wind.”  For a moment, there was gray obscurity; then, again, the soda-dusted sand dunes lay shimmering in the furnace air before me.
   A mirage is the reflection of something; sometimes the mixed reflection of something; sometimes the mixed reflection of several things.  It appears that an object or a landscape is lifted, perhaps by reflection, projected afar, and then set down in another place as a mirage.  It may be of something near or of something miles off.  It may be right side up or upside down.  It may be photographically clear, or vague and cloudy, or a confused mixture.  This confusion may be due to several reflections mingling in the same picture, like several images being taken on the same negative.
   Few mirage river pictures are a realistic and artistic success.  The best one I have seen appeared to be a loaned section of the Platte River out on the plains — low banks and a thin flow that covered part of a wide sand channel.  The remainder of the channel was of dunes, drift, and ripple-marked sand.  The short squatty shadow of a long-armed cottonwood said high noon.  I expected a cowboy or coyote to come into the scene, but none did.
   Most of the striking and distinct mirages made for me their momentary place, their brief pause, in a western or southwestern desert.  Museums are installing splendid natural history and other groups, and I hope that some time a grandly reproduced mirage will have a place of distinction in every large museum.
   I was wanting a place to camp where there was wood.  With canteens full, I was not concerned for water.  In the dim distance to the right stood a cottonwood tree.  As I did not want mirage firewood I looked closely before starting toward it.  On the desert, one cannot always believe his senses.  There are deceptive illusions.  The mirage shows many ambiguous images.  Desire often insists we are seeing the thing we want.  There were two old cottonwoods, one behind the other.  Both carried the usual mistletoe clusters in their tops.
   But as I approached them, they leaped up and landed on a steep near-by mountain-side. Except that they shot upward, the performance would have passed for a landslide.  But it was without sound.  The trees sank slowly into the mountain-side and I turned away to search elsewhere for firewood.  Surely these trees must have been reflected from another horizon; anyway, they no longer stood in mine, and I commanded miles of distance.
   Camels once, ages ago, inhabited American deserts.  They are so frequently pictured with palms and deserts that it is not easy to dissociate them.  If one be seen separately, the imagination either supplies the others or begins a search for them.
   The camels are gone from the Southwest, but a few palms survive to give a touch of decoration and poetry to the desert’s rim.  In retreating from an adventure into Death Valley I looked eagerly toward the horizon where a cluster of palms with a proper topographic setting stood beside a pleasant spring.  Near the seven palms were two camels.  No one had heard of two camels in the desert, but prospectors are enterprising, and it seemed likely that a prospector might have discarded burros for these higher-geared transports.
   I climbed over ridges of sand, and in due time arrived at the palms and the spring by the foothills.  Two prospectors were in camp with two burros.  But I had seen two camels: one with a pack on his back and the other with a pack on the earth by him.  After a few drinks and an exchange of experiences with the prospectors, I edged out for a look at the camels.  Not seeing them, I walked over to the spot where they were standing when I saw them across the desert.  I could not find a track.  I called to the prospectors “Camels!”
   None was at the spring, nor had there been.
   All one morning I sat on a foothill in a California desert watching an antelope below.  Behind me the mountains rose in steep, sharp-edged, naked rock walls.  There were a few scattered shrubs in the short canyons.  Beyond me, the desert was brown and level with widely spaced vegetation.  Distant sage zones appeared like dwarf orchards, and cactus groups like aggregations of weird, much-branched posts.  Big ragged-edged spaces of sand in the sun shone dazzling in the purple distances.  When the antelope moved out of sight, I left the water hole to go down and out upon the endlessly level desert.  But, after a few steps, a desert water hole came into view, and I lingered to watch this institution.  A shallow basin of water showed below a mere trickle of a spring.  At two places a few steps from it, white bones were scattered.  Close to the spring lay a carcass, apparently that of a burro.  At this, three coyotes and twice as many buzzards were tearing and quarreling.  Overhead, other buzzards were sailing.  All this seemed intensely real, and it probably was.  I did not go down to verify.  Places in it, possibly sections of it, may have been modified or enchanted scenes superimposed over entire spaces.
   Desert springs and water holes are far apart.  All trails and air avenues end by them.  To them come birds and antelope, rabbits and butterflies, skunks and snakes.  The coyote comes to eat as well as to drink.  Here animals and birds often rest for hours, and there they often play.  This picturesque watering, gathering place, though often a life saver in the desert, is not always set in poetry.  It shows records of grim feasts; it has a circle of skeletons.
   The turning of my field glass upon a mirage often changed it into nothing — or formless light and shadow.  Now and then, however, the glass gave me a correct focus on the object.
   One day, steadying myself against a dead and thornless angle of a towering bent-armed cactus, I turned my glass upon a newly created and barren mirage mountain; but through the glass it was forested, and up a zigzag trail climbed a prospector with a pick upon his shoulder, leisurely following a burro with a pack.  The burro stopped for a bite of something.  The prospector stopped and used his pick.  The burro lay down.  The prospector rose up and looked at him.  The burro started to roll.  The prospector was hastening toward the burro when the mountain became barren and lifeless again.
   The mirage can multiply and enlarge.  One day, a small vague village of one street hung against a distant sky.  This, if I be not mistaken, was created from twin, face to face, square-cut cliffs on a ridge near camp.
   I left a ranch on the Carson River, Nevada, to walk across the desert mesa to another ranch.  Late afternoon, I appeared to be arriving, for below me lay a stream, a fenced yard, a house, and a scattering of trees.  This answered the description of the place sought.
   A dark storm cloud with streams of silver was approaching the sunny ranch.  Lightning, golden crooked rivers of it, flashed against the dark background of cloud.  Everything grew darker with the advance of the storm.  Lightning flashed splendidly down and appeared to strike a cliff on the mesa behind the house.  I stopped and listened, but thunder did not crash or roll.  Slowly, the dry mesa with its stunted and scattered sage returned, and I went on looking for the ranch.
   Reflection and refraction staged a scene before my Utah camp that caused me to do some reflecting.  I was on the frayed outstretched margin of the desert: foothills half covered with scanty grass; acres of prickly pear; stunted and thinly planted cedars and pines; sandhills; gorges with southerly facing walls bare and brown, and northerly ones carrying a green tone of vegetation.  I had just examined a near-by cliff with my glass, and on lowering the glass, a stout grizzly bear came walking along where a second before no bear was present.  Along the bottom of the cliff, which was a block in length, he walked toward me.
   His movement, size, stride, and colour were correct.  He was a grizzly.
   “A mirage can make a desert blossom, build mushroom cities, and exhibit prehistoric life,” I said to myself.  “But it cannot, when I am watching, slip a real grizzly into the scene right under my nose.”
   Theoretically, the mirage cannot do this, but there was a real grizzly, and almost close enough for an introduction.
   “If that is a real grizzly,” I said to myself, “he will run if I yell.”
   He was close enough for me to see a scar over his left eye.  Suddenly, he stopped and rose up; he sniffed as though scenting me.  He should have seen me, for I saw him.  I yelled.  He nearly fell over backward.  He retreated with a rushing gallop.  The third or fourth jump the mirage fell to nothing.  There was a cliff, sphinxlike, but not a bear in sight.  I had not seen a bear.  I walked round the cliff.  Behind the farther end, I found fresh grizzly tracks in the sand.  The mirage had bent the light rays round the corner as it were.  I don’t know just how it was done.  I saw the bear.
   A mirage is occasionally seen over lakes, plains, and the sea, but the desert it a prolific producer of images.  On the desert, the mirage is weird, splendid and uncanny.  But it is also peaceful and artistic.  I have wished that more artists might see the mirages of the desert.
   Apparently, desert air is the environment of the mirage.  It is a magician and master conjurer.  It produces air castles, green fields, bits of paradise.  Earthly horizons and landscapes in its legerdemain are mixed with mystery and colour.  The mirage is an artist — it creates new landscapes from old.
   Sight-seeing by wireless likely is near us.  Ere long, an Edison may seize and transport these mirages by science and show them as they are before assembled audiences.
 

Directory of Stories by Enos A. Mills

Copyright 2000 by Enos Mills Cabin, Temporal Mechanical Press
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