Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds.This solemn, silent, sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth --is little graced with the picturesque.It is an unpretending expanse of grayish water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.
The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands.While we camped there our laundry work was easy.We tied the week's washing astern of our boat, and sailed a quarter of a mile, and the job was complete, all to the wringing out.If we threw the water on our heads and gave them a rub or so, the white lather would pile up three inches high.This water is not good for bruised places and abrasions of the skin.We had a valuable dog.He had raw places on him.He had more raw places on him than sound ones.He was the rawest dog I almost ever saw.He jumped overboard one day to get away from the flies.But it was bad judgment.
In his condition, it would have been just as comfortable to jump into the fire.
The alkali water nipped him in all the raw places simultaneously, and he struck out for the shore with considerable interest.He yelped and barked and howled as he went--and by the time he got to the shore there was no bark to him--for he had barked the bark all out of his inside, and the alkali water had cleaned the bark all off his outside, and he probably wished he had never embarked in any such enterprise.He ran round and round in a circle, and pawed the earth and clawed the air, and threw double somersaults, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, in the most extraordinary manner.He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and Inever saw him take so much interest in anything before.He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet.This was about nine years ago.We look for what is left of him along here every day.
A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye.It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though.It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.[There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation of it.This joke has received high commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.]