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moment or two. The native women here go to no trouble whatever for hot baths; for the week's washing; for housecleaning; for washing up dishes; making tea; cooking all meals; and even lighting fires. Picturesque women they are, too, in crimson and green and purple, puffing stolidly at the inevitable pipe, and with babies slung across their backs.

One of the guides, in order to demonstrate the powers of Nature in this marvelous region, will poke a stick deep under a manuka root and bring it forth red hot and smoking. He blows upon it assiduously until it kindles into flame. When lunch time comes he will ask you whether you prefer your deer meat or leg of mutton roasted or boiled? The steam will do the one, and a water-filled hole dug in the ground anywhere will make the other a possibility at any time. Each quaint and beautifully carved native house has a natural hot bath dug in its compound;

and here lazy infants spend the brilliant cold days of winter (our midsummer) lolling luxuriously up to their coffeecolored shoulders; or seated subaqueously amid the rolling steam-clouds, with toes emerging and head back "thinkin' o' nawthin"!

No more amazing domestic spectacle could be imagined than the scene in one of these compounds of the better kind. In the big pool that has been dug long ago, the father and his troop of children are disporting or smoking, whilst the hard-working mother of the family is either washing out the clothes in another hole which she has dug with her own primitive wooden spade, or else she is peering into queer little cavernous receptacles in the earth looking after the dinner of mutton and sweet potatoes, with many other queer Maori dishes utterly unknown to the white man. Nature is kind to some lands.

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Soda from Dry Lakes

By Harry H. Dunn

ALIFORNIA miners are now as anxious to find soda beds, as they were to strike a good gold mine in the days of '49. Manufacturers are clamoring for soda for domestic and medicinal, as well as for commercial uses. Pure soda commands a fine price, and the great California desert has been found to contain vast deposits of salines, notably soda, in at least one of the dry lakes. Here then is the miners' opportunity, and they are flocking to the soda lakes in great numbers.

Soda occurs in varying forms in this region, but the only beds which are of value from a mercantile point of view, or which furnish quantities enough of the salts to be worthy of operation, are in dried-out lake beds.

saline deposit in the world, and as yet only its borders have been entered by prospectors; development has hardly begun. Concerning this sink, J. Sylvester Brown, one of the best known chemists of the West Coast, has this to say:

"The resources of this mighty sea of Nature's handiwork are so great as to place its possibilities almost beyond human conception. For hundreds and hundreds of acres a continuous sheen of rock salt, sulphate of soda, carbonate of soda, crystalline gypsum and aluminate clay spreads out upon the desert waste. Patient research has revealed the presence of all these salts in astounding quantities and there remains no doubt that this great desiccated lake bed represents the most valuable mineral deposit recorded in scientific history." scientific history." It represents an almost inexhaustible supply.

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The vehicle is supported by a crust of practically pure soda, which covers the entire basin.

The largest and most important of all of these is the one known as Danby Lake, some thirty miles southeast of the small desert town of Danby, in San Bernardino county. This lake not only contains vast beds of pure soda but about eighteen million tons of salt as well. In point of fact this lake is probably the most valuable

The Arizona and California Railroad, a branch of the Santa Fe line crossing the Colorado at Parker and rejoining the main line at Bengal on the California. side, parallels the shore of this immense deposit for some three-quarters of a mile and makes possible work which has hitherto been entirely out of the question.

When this line is completed, practically all of the sink will be brought within easy reach of the best transportation facilities, and many commodities now produced in Germany and in South America can be obtained out here in the Southwest more cheaply than the imported article can be shipped in.

Danby Lake itself lies in a sloping basin about midway between the southeast end of one desert butte known as Old Woman Mountain, and the west end of Iron Mountain, gaunt peaks which have for centuries stood guard above this barren waste. Standing on the slope of either of these hills, the appearance of the lake-which the reader should remember is absolutely dry-is that of a vast bowl, filled with some shimmering white substance, level as a floor, smooth as ice, the whole picture silent as the grave. The basin has no outlet; all the drainage of the surrounding hills, heavy with saline seepages from their rocky hearts, must soak down, down to the

which it contains is forced to the surface and the result is that the crust is practically pure. The deeper the mud bed the deeper the crust above, and vice versa, where the bottom of bedrock is very close to the surface-as is the case around the edge of Danby Lake, the crust is correspondingly thin and of lower value.

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The principal salts held in the deposit in and around Danby Lake and at Soda Lake, a few miles to the north of Danby Lake, is known as "natural" soda. It is composed of sodium composed of sodium carbonate and sodium bi-carbonate, more or less thoroughly intermingled. With these are found other salts which are technically known as "impurities," though they may be very valuable deposits in themselves, without reference to the "natural" soda. Some of these impurities are sodium. chloride and sulphate (at Danby); sodium biborate (in Death Valley); and sodium nitrate (in the niter beds previously described). The first of these

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depths below, forming a bed of mud of unknown depth.

The length of the lake bed is about twelve miles, its width from three to five miles, and the whole basin is covered with a crust of crystallized salts of from a few inches to three or four feet in thickness.

The character and appearance of the crust above this pot of salt-laden mud is best shown by the accompanying photographs. The underground leaching-out of the hills for miles around so adds to this bed that the surcharge of salines

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OLD FORT CADY WITH SODA LAKE IN THE DISTANCE.

A spring among the reeds in foreground is the only water for fifty miles in any direction.

drilling through which, and through the "slat" in dryer parts of the marsh, other deposits of equal value may be found.

In addition to these deposits of sodium salts there are many others. Gypsum, particularly in the transparent form known as Selenite, is very abundant. In many places along the shore line of the dry lake bed, and further back in the hills, are inexhaustible supplies of it. The remarkable thing about it, too, is its purity, the only impurities being clay or sand, which I have removed from small samples by washing. I presume the same thing could be done with larger quantities by adopting wholesale methods.

The third feature of Danby Lake, and of the lesser Soda Lake as well, is the vast quantity of salt which the crusts of both contain. Cheap as this common commodity is, there is no adequate way to tell of the value of these deposits. It occurs here in three forms-first as rock salt; second as pure salt brine, and third as impure salt, mixed in surface deposits with clay, other salts of soda and sand.

Prospectors have proved that the rock salt formation underlies more than six hundred acres of the lake bed. It starts within a few inches of the surface and goes down to an undetermined depth, supposedly twenty-five or thirty feet. Slabs of the mineral, taken from near the surface, are often pure white and almost as transparent as window glass. In fact, it is quite commonly conceded to be the

analysis made a few months ago from samples selected at random, may be of interest:

..

98.79

.33

.86

Sodium chloride Calcium chloride Calcium sulphate Alumina and silica.....Trace. But the second of these salt deposits. seems even more interesting than the first. At a depth of about seventeen feet throughout all the sections of the lake where salt is found to any extent, the prospector comes upon very strong salt brines, flowing from crevices and fissures in the rock salt. The brines are pure white in color and are as clear as was ever bubbling spring when they pour out. Evaporation, of course, produces the very finest grade of salt from these saturated solutions formed in the laboratory of Nature.

Above the brines and the rock salt are the surface deposits-hundreds of acres of crust, composed of salt and clay and sand, capable of working up into a good grade of salt, though by no means so pure as either the brines or the rock salt.

There are, of course, many other minor salines found in this dried-out lakebed, and there is one of them, which, owing to its size and importance as well as its bearing on a very important industry of the Pacific Coast, should also be mentioned. To my mind, looking at it from the view point of the industries of Cali

fornia, it is more important than either the soda or the salt beds. And that is the huge mountain of carbonate of lime, situated a few miles from Danby Lake.

This mountain is practically a huge mine of Portland cement, one of the most valuable mineral products of the entire coast. It covers more than 400 acres, and in addition to the material contained in it there are any number of beds of clays on the lake, especially adapted for use in the making of the cement. As is well known, first class deposits of minerals suitable for the making of this cement are by no means numerous, and each year the increased demand for dams, irrigating canals and other structures to which cement is adapted put greater and greater strain on the few mines that produce the raw materials. Doubtless, too, judging from the stories of prospectors who operate around Danby and Soda Lakes, there are still more extensive beds of cement-making materials in this very region.

The products of this old lake bed, which is only one of several scattered up and down the desert, can be briefly and interestingly enumerated under the subhead of by-products to the great central mineral of the whole deposit, which is of course, sodium. From it can be produced-and doubtless will be when some enterprising firm takes hold of the lakebed-soda ash, caustic soda, chlorate of soda, Glauber's salts, sodium hyposulphite, muriatic acid, sal soda and washing compounds. In addition to these there are the gypsum, the salt, and the cement, all occurring in practically pure form, requiring, in the case of the salt at least, very little in the way of refining. With the cement and the gypsum, the work will be somewhat different, yet it seems that the vast quantities would more than make up for any minor deficiencies in purity which may occur.

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slime beneath lie bare to the sun, in a day or two a second crust will have formed, which, in due course of time, becomes as thick and as rich in salts as was the first. This, in a way, makes the deposit inexhaustible, if worked judiciously and by sections.

Fresh material is being brought in constantly by the small streams flowing underground from the surrounding hills, and as fast as the mire beneath becomes leached-out it can be given a rest just in the same manner as agricultural lands are treated, and, by the time some other end of the bed has been "harvested," the first part will have thrown up a valuable crust again. In this manner the borax fields of Death Valley have been worked year after year, and by like method the soda beds of Danby and Soda Lakes may be exploited.

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