The Desert Home

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Excerpt from The Desert Home: Or the Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness There is a great desert in the interior of North America It is almost as large as the famous Saara of Africa. It is fifteen hundred miles long, and a thousand wide. Now, if it were a regular shape, - that is to say, a parallelogram, - you could at once compute its area, by multiplying the length upon the breadth, and you would obtain one million and a half for the result - one million and a half of square miles. But its outlines are as yet very imperfectly known, and although it is fully fifteen hundred miles long, and in some places a thousand in breadth, its surface extent is probably not over one million of square miles, or twenty-five times the size of England. Fancy a desert twenty-five times as big as all England! Do you not think that it has received a most appropriate name, when it is called the Great American Desert? Now, my young friend, what do you understand by a desert? I think I can guess. When you read or hear of a desert, you think of a vast level plain, covered with sand, and without trees, or grass, or any kind of vegetation. You think, also, of this sand being blown about in thick, yellow clouds, and no water to be seen in any direction. This is your idea of a desert, is it not? Well, it is not altogether the correct one. It is true that in almost every desert there are these sandy plains, yet there are other parts of its surface of a far different character, equally deserving the name of desert. Although the interior of the great Saara has not yet been fully explored, enough is known of it to prove that it contains large tracts of mountainous and hilly country, with rocks and valleys, lakes, rivers, and springs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.