第83章

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.