The basin that lies between these mountains is the waste known as the
Mojave desert. It stretches north and south from San Pasqual, fading
away into nothing, into impalpable, unlovely, soul-crushing suggestions
of space illimitable; dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it
seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play
tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the
midst of this desolation, stretch forth their fantastically twisted and
withered arms, seeming to invoke a curse on nature herself while
warning the traveler that the heritage of this land is death. There is
a bearing down of one's spirit in the midst of all this loneliness and
desolation that envelops everything; yet, despite the uncanny mystery
of it, the sense of repression it imparts, of unconquerable isolation
from all that is good and sweet and beautiful, there are those who find
it possible to live in San Pasqual without feeling that they are
accursed.

At the western boundary of the Mojave desert lies San Pasqual, huddled
around the railroad water tank. It is the clearing-house for the
Mojave, for entering or leaving the desert men must pass through San
Pasqual. From the main-line tracks a branch railroad now extends north
across the desert, through the eastern part of Kern county and up the
Owens river valley into Inyo, although at the time Donna Corblay enters
into this story the railroad had not been built and a stage line bore
the brunt of the desert travel as far north as Keeler--constituting the
main outlet from that vast but little known section of California that
lies east of the Sierra Nevada range.

Hence, people entering or leaving this great basin passed through San
Pasqual, which accounted for the town that grew up around the water