floods of torrents born of cloudbursts, the chief cause of the sculpturing and the smooth, clean lines of the mock buildings. There were Joshua trees, clumps of greasewood and silver sage. Banks were splotched with vivid bloom, like the scraping of a Futurist's palette; magenta Mariposa tulips, scarlet Indian Painter's-brush, baby-blue-eyes, wide cupped, staring innocently up at the masses of clay and gravelly sand and silica, bound with a cementing substance here and there that preserved the architectural shapes.
There was one apparent edifice that resembled a cathedral so exactly it seemed impossible that it had not been actually designed and raised by man, then ruined by Huns and the devastation softened by time. It showed even the suggestion of a stained-glass window, cracked across its front, mullioned, corbelled, colored in vivid hues. The entrance was twenty-five feet high, Gothic pointed, solidly blocked twelve feet in as if to preserve the shrine from further desecration. The mutilated images of saints appeared to be set in niches all about the portal. There was a structure like a heavily buttressed Spanish Mission, of white stone, with an entrance fissure that aped a ruined doorway and spaces where bells might have hung. Everywhere was inspiration for architect, despair for artist.
A side ravine opened to the left and they turned into it.
"Bonanza Canyon, pretty," announced Hollister. "A lucky guy turned up a six-hundred dollar nugget in this place one time. Me, I'm bringing in my
