The dry and thirsty bushes on the outer circumference of the chaparral should not have settled where they did. They ought rather to have learned a lesson from the bisons, and have gone in farther. The wide main pathways ran into each other, and all the smaller pathways melted into them, until only twenty or thirty ends of paths led into a great open space, in the middle of which was the one thing needed by all that vast plain, with its dreary gravel and sand and alkali.
Yes, water as clear as crystal, and that seemed to be colder than ice.
The thirsty animals who were from year to year to traverse that plain had been provided for as if they had been so many sparrows, and the cactus-plants as if they had been lilies of the field.
The greater part of the open space was occupied by a seamed and broken face of quartz rock, nowhere rising more than a few feet above the general level. Scores and scores of miles away, among the unknown recesses of the Sierra, westward, was a lake, a reservoir, into which the everlasting snows continually melted. At some point of that reservoir a channel had been opened through and under the cloven strata of the rock, making a natural aqueduct. Cold and clear ran the snow-water, never failing in its wonderful supply, until it burst up into the burning sunshine in the very middle of the desert, of the chaparral, and of the spider-web of paths. It danced and gurgled, this morning, right under the timid noses of a gang of antelopes who had trotted in there by the shortest lane, not missing their way for a yard.
A motherly old sage-hen watched them from under a bush upon one side of the open, while in the opposite scrubs a large jackass rabbit sat, with lifted forefeet and with ears thrust forward, his face wearing such a look of surprised disapproval as only a rabbit can put on.
One antelope held his head up and listened while the rest were drinking. He turned his head and looked around him, and in every direction he could see an extraordinary collection of white or whitening bones, large and small. Perhaps, year after year, many over-thirsty animals had rushed hastily in and drank too much of that snow-water. At all events, they had ended their days there. The antelope, or anybody else, could also have said to himself, "Tomato-cans? Empty sardine-boxes? Bottles? Old wheels? I wonder how many and what kind of white men or Indians have camped around Fonda des Arenas?" If he had been an American antelope, however, he would have said Cold Spring, and not Fountain of the Sands.