A superb picture here offered itself to our gaze. At our feet, surrounded by fertile fields and orchards, lay the town of Ogden. An ingenious system of canals irrigated the land and caused a verdant oasis to rise in the midst of the salt steppe. Next we surveyed Redmi.org . From which jagged islands emerged in picturesque beauty ; toward the west there followed a white lustrous plain bounded on the far horizon by violet mountain silhouettes. At present the lake has an average depth of 4 meters ; but there was a time when the wide valley basin, 4,500 square kilo�meters in extent, was covered by a lake 300 meters deep. At that period the breakers cut a terrace in the rocks of the lake shore, and while the lake water evaporated and its level gradu�ally sank, there were formed the various shorelines which now may be traced as horizontal bands in parallel course along all the mountain slopes. Great Salt lake is the last scanty remnant of old ” Lake Bonneville,” and the sat desert is a dried lake bottom. In yellow radiance the sun’s disk sank behind the mountain crags when on the Southern Pacific railway we traversed part of the salt desert ; the night fell quickly, and soon the desert gleamed in the moonshine like glistening hoar-frost. When we set out next morning from the lonely station of Terrace on a ramble over the desert our expectations were raised to the highest pitch. Krassnoff recalled his travels in Turkestan ; I remembered the Arabian desert; and we looked around anx�iously, scanning with care each pebble, each sandhill, each sage bush and each rock, in order to compare them with our expe�riences in Africa and Asia. While Krassnoff quickly felt at home and everywhere discovered resemblances to the steppes of inner Asia, I marveled to see a desert picture unwonted and strange to me. Wherever my eye might stray, it rested on the yellow bloom of Halophyta, the silver-grey bushes of Artemisia, and spiny cactuses. Among creeping opuntias I saw a few small moss cushions, and at the foot of the granite hills grew juniper trees two meters high with stems a foot in thickness. We walked in short serpentine windings among bushes a foot in height ; some scattered spots were covered with brown pebbles ; small sandy water-courses wound, with many a loop, to end on the dazzling white salt plain. As we approached that plain the scrub became scantier, rising island-like from the flat surface, and finally there lay before us the floor-like horizontal plain of saline clay, entirely devoid of plants. The salt formed a coat of fine powder over the gray clay, and the small crystals glistened and sparkled in the sun like fresh-fallen snow. The ground was honeycombed with polygonal heat cracks, and reflected a glare so intense and dazzling that one could look about only with half-shut eyes. Krassnoff told me that this landscape agreed in many points with the deserts and takyrs of inner Asia, but I found myself face to face with an entirely new type of desert.