" George" wrote in message
. ..

"rick++" wrote in message
om...
Hibernating Martian life between droughts.

Sons and daughters of "the blob"? Oh, nevermind.

Petrified gulls' eggs?

On that score the naturalist and explorer Samuel Clemens had some
interesting observations about life in a briny lake near the town of Mono,
California, in his book "Roughing It":

Mono Lake lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert, eight thousand feet
above the level of the sea, and is guarded by mountains two thousand feet
higher, whose summits are always clothed in clouds. This solemn, silent,
sail-less sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth--is little
graced with the picturesque. It is an unpretending expanse of grayish
water, about a hundred miles in circumference, with two islands in its
centre, mere upheavals of rent and scorched and blistered lava, snowed over
with gray banks and drifts of pumice-stone and ashes, the winding sheet of
the dead volcano, whose vast crater the lake has seized upon and occupied.

....

The lake is two hundred feet deep, and its sluggish waters are so strong
with alkali that if you only dip the most hopelessly soiled garment into
them once or twice, and wring it out, it will be found as clean as if it had
been through the ablest of washerwomen's hands.

....

There are no fish in Mono Lake--no frogs, no snakes, no polliwigs--nothing,
in fact, that goes to make life desirable. Millions of wild ducks and
sea-gulls swim about the surface, but no living thing exists under the
surface, except a white feathery sort of worm, one half an inch long, which
looks like a bit of white thread frayed out at the sides. If you dip up a
gallon of water, you will get about fifteen thousand of these. They give to
the water a sort of grayish-white appearance. Then there is a fly, which
looks something like our house fly. These settle on the beach to eat the
worms that wash ashore--and any time, you can see there a belt of flies an
inch deep and six feet wide, and this belt extends clear around the lake--a
belt of flies one hundred miles long.

If you throw a stone among them, they swarm up so thick that they look
dense, like a cloud. You can hold them under water as long as you
please--they do not mind it--they are only proud of it. When you let them
go, they pop up to the surface as dry as a patent office report, and walk
off as unconcernedly as if they had been educated especially with a view to
affording instructive entertainment to man in that particular way.

....

Mono Lake is a hundred miles in a straight line from the ocean--and between
it and the ocean are one or two ranges of mountains--yet thousands of
sea-gulls go there every season to lay their eggs and rear their young. One
would as soon expect to find sea-gulls in Kansas.

....

Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of
any kind flows out of it. It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what
it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.

....

In speaking of the peculiarities of Mono Lake, I ought to have mentioned
that at intervals all around its shores stand picturesque turret-looking
masses and clusters of a whitish, coarse-grained rock that resembles
inferior mortar dried hard; and if one breaks off fragments of this rock he
will find perfectly shaped and thoroughly petrified gulls' eggs deeply
imbedded in the mass. How did they get there? I simply state the fact--for
it is a fact--and leave the geological reader to crack the nut at his
leisure and solve the problem after his own fashion.

Project Gutenberg e-text: http://tinyurl.com/yru9p