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the eminent geologist. Needlessly we told him of the tales which had reached us.

    "’You caver’s should know better,’ he twitted us. ‘Dort might have found more cave than is known today, but certainly nothing like what he claimed. Why don't you go over and see Herman Wallace in Highland Park? He's an officer on the company and can tell you all about the caves!’

    “Mr. Wallace proved a particular friend. He himself had descended to the bottom of tie three caves of Kokoweef Peak without finding the gold. Even more important, he had obtained the incredible story firsthand from Dorr. Wallace's son had prepared a sketch map of the lost river of gold under Dorr's direct supervision.

    “As Herman Wallace talked, the tale began to make a twisted kind of sense. Clearly, some of these fantastic tales were merely confused with those of the Cave of the Winding Stair. What remained was incredible beyond belief. Yet the story was so coherent and so filled with plausible details that Dorr had never contradicted himself.

     “For untold years, it seemed, prowling prospectors of the Mojave Desert had known of a wide, deep cavern on the rocky flank of juniper-clad Kokoweef Peak. In the 1920's weeks often elapsed in this Joshua-tree wilderness without the passing of more than a single prospector and his companionable burro. During those dimming years, hopeful prospectors and other ‘desert rats’ wandered in and out of shack towns at isolated wells along the nearby Los Angeles-Las Vegas road. Even they were few.

    “At one of these tiny communities, someone announced one evening that he had found another vertical cave on Kokoweef Peak. Maybe it was Dorr. Some said that Dorr had a ‘treasure map of Spanish or Indian origin,’ but this seems to have been wishful thinking. In any event, Dorr was fascinated by the new cavern.