Excerpt from California Desert Trails But I confess that the fascination of the untamed desert has proved to be of too subtle a quality for words of mine to render. That would necessarily be true, of course, of anybody's attempt in any field of Nature: but it would be tenfold true with respect to the desert, and I will be bold to say that it would be true without regard to the person in the case. Whether it be that the desert is too intrinsically alien to our psychology, or for some other reason, too baffling to trace, I believe it to be the fact that its genius is the rarest and the most elusive of all the elements that make up the wonder of this transcend ent world. No last word on the desert will ever be written; no statement, I mean, that, to those who know the subject in any real degree, will not seem to fail of getting at the essence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.