Читать книгу In an Unknown Prison Land. An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and home онлайн

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Salt Lake, the Dead Sea of the Mormon Land of Promise, is smaller now by a good many scores of square miles than it was some thirty years ago, when the Southern Pacific was connected up with the Union Pacific, and so completed the iron chain which links the Hudson with the Sacramento.

For three or four hours the train runs over embankments surrounded by vast salt mud-flats, which in those days were covered by the fast-shrinking waters. It is the old story, the story of nearly all these upland desert regions. Every year less rain falls in the valleys and less snow on the mountains. As the clouds grow thinner and fewer the sun blazes hotter and sucks up more and more vapour, and so year by year the waters of the Great Salt Lake are getting less great and more salt.

With all due deference to American susceptibility on such points, I must say that the scenery of the Rockies which one sees from the windows of a car on the Union Pacific does not begin to compare with the scenery along the Canadian Pacific line. Even Echo Cañon and Weber Cañon, the show places of the line, struck me as comparatively insignificant when I remembered the splendours of Eagle Pass and the grandeurs of Bear Cañon.