Читать книгу Roughing It - The Original Classic Edition - Twain Mark - Страница 2

log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California endured?

At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The "Sink" of the Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred miles in circumference. Carson River empties into it and is lost--sinks mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun again--for the lake has no outlet whatever.

There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious fate. They end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of

them. Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake, Walker Lake, Mono Lake, are all great

sheets of water without any visible outlet. Water is always flowing into them; none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always

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level full, neither receding nor overflowing. What they do with their

surplus is only known to the Creator.

On the western verge of the Desert we halted a moment at Ragtown. It consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map.

This reminds me of a circumstance. Just after we left Julesburg, on the

Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said: