locks of the knights of flamingo-plush and bell-hanging shoulder-knot, and there is a clammy stickiness, which is exceedingly unpleasant. Salt, moreover, may be scraped from the skin—imaginative bathers have compared themselves to Lot’s wife—and the Ethiop, now prosaically termed "nigger," comes out after a bath bleached, whitewashed, and with changed epidermis.
Notwithstanding the fumet from the kitchen of that genius loci whom I daurna name, we dined with excellent appetite. While the mules were being hitched to, I found an opportunity of another survey from below the Black Rock: this look-out station is sometimes ascended by those gifted with less than the normal modicum of common sense. The lands immediately about the lake are flat, rising almost imperceptibly to the base of abrupt hills, which are broken in places by soft and sandy barriers, irreclaimable for agriculture, but here and there fit for grazing; where springs exist, they burst out at too low a level for irrigation. The meridional range of the Oquirrh, at whose northern point we were standing, divides the Great Salt Lake Valley from its western neighbor Tooele or Tuilla, which in sound curiously resembles the Arabic Tawíleh—the Long Valley. It runs like most of these formations from north to south: it is divided by a transverse ridge declining westward, and not unaptly called Traverse Mountain, from Rush Valley, which again is similarly separated from Cedar Valley. From the point where we stood, the only way to Tooele settlement is round the north point of West Mountain, a bold headland, rugged with rocks and trees. Westward of Tooele Valley, and separated by a sister range to the Oquirrh, lies Spring Valley, so called because it boasts a sweet fountain, and south of this "Skull Valley"—an ominous name, but the evil omen was to the bison.
Bidding a long farewell to that inland briny sea, which apparently has no business there, we turned our faces eastward as the sun was declining. The view had memorable beauties. From the blue and purple clouds, gorgeously edged with celestial fire, shot up a fan of penciled and colored light, extending half way to the zenith, while in the south and southeast lightnings played among the darker mist-masses, which backed the golden and emerald bench-lands of the farther valley. The splendid sunset gave a reflex of its loveliness to the alkaline and artemisia barrens before us. Opposite, the Wasach, vast and voluminous, the storehouse of storms, and of the hundred streams that cool the thirsty earth, rose in stern and gloomy grandeur, which even the last smile of day failed to soften, over the subject plain. Northward, to a considerable distance, the lake-lands lay uninterrupted save by an occasional bench and a distant swell, resembling the upper convexity of a thunder-cloud. As we advanced, the city became dimly discernible beyond Jordan, built on ground gently rising away from the lake, and strongly nestling under its protecting
