"Anything to eat?" inquired the man behind the counter.
"Your mesquite chiliburger," said Loren. "And coleslaw."
"I'm not real hungry," said Pitt. "I'll just have the coleslaw. Do you own this place?"
"Bought it from the original owner when I gave up prospecting." He set their beer on the bar and turned to his stove.
"The box cars are interesting relics of railroad history. Were they moved here, or did the railroad run through at one time?"
"We're actually sitting on the siding of the old main line," answered the diner's owner. "The tracks used to run from Yuma to El Centro. The line was abandoned in 1947 for lack of business. The rise of truck lines did it in. These cars were bought by an old fella who used to be an engineer for the Southern Pacific. He and his wife made a restaurant and gas station out of them. With the main interstate going north of here and all, we don't see too much traffic anymore."
The bartender/cook looked as if he might have been a fixture of the desert even before the rails were laid. He had the worn look of a man who had seen more than he should and heard a thousand stories that remained in his head, classified and indexed as drama, humor, or horror. There was also an unmistakable aura of style about him, a sophistication that said he didn't belong in a godforsaken roadside tavern on a remote and seldom-traveled road through the desert.
For a fleeting instant, Pitt thought the old cook looked vaguely familiar. On reflection, though, Pitt figured the man only resembled someone he couldn't quite place. "I'll bet you can recite some pretty interesting tales about the dunes around here," he said, making idle conversation.
"A lot of bones lie in them, remains of pioneers and miners who tried to cross four hundred kilometers of desert from Yuma to Borrego Springs in the middle of summer."
"Once they passed the Colorado River, there was no water?" asked Loren.
"Not a drop, not until Borrego. That was long before the valley was irrigated. Only after them old boys died from the sun did they learn their bodies lay not five meters from water. The trauma was so great they've all come back as ghosts to haunt the desert."
Loren looked perplexed. "I think I missed something."
"There's no water on the surface," the old fellow explained. "But underground there's whole rivers of it, some as wide and deep as the Colorado."
Pitt was curious. "I've never heard of large bodies of water running under the desert."
"There's two for sure. One, a really big sucker, runs from upper Nevada south into the Mojave Desert and then west, where it empties into the Pacific below Los Angeles. The other flows west under the Imperial Valley of California before curling south and spilling into the Sea of Cortez."
"What proof do you have these rivers actually exist?" asked Loren. "Has anyone seen them?"
"The underground stream that flows into the Pacific," answered the cook, as he prepared Loren's chiliburger, "was supposedly found by an engineer searching for oil. He alleged his geophysical instruments detected the river and tracked it across the Mojave and under the town of Laguna Beach into the ocean. So far nobody has proved or disproved his claim. The river traveling to the Sea of Cortez comes from an old story about a prospector who discovered a cave that led down into a deep cavern with a river running through it."
Pitt tensed as Yaeger's translation of the quipu suddenly flashed through his mind. "This prospector, how did he describe this underground river?"
The diner's owner talked without turning from his stove. "His name was Leigh Hunt, and he was probably a very inventive liar. But he swore up and down that back in 1942 he discovered a cave in the Castle Dome Mountains not too far northeast of here. From the mouth of the cave, through a chain of caverns, he descended two kilometers deep into the earth until he encountered an underground river rushing through a vast canyon. It was there Hunt claims he found rich deposits of placer gold."
"I think I saw the movie," said Loren skeptically.
The old cook turned and waved a spatula in the air. "People at the assay office stated that the sand Hunt carried back from the underground canyon assayed at three thousand dollars per ton. A mighty good recovery rate when you remember that gold was only twenty dollars and sixty-five cents an ounce back then."
"Did Hunt ever return to the canyon and the river?" asked Pitt.
"He tried, but a whole army of scavengers followed him back to the mountain, hungering for a piece of the River of Gold, as it became known. He got mad and dynamited a narrow part of the passage about a hundred meters inside the entrance. Brought down half the mountain. Neither Hunt nor those who followed him were ever able to dig through the rubble or find another cave leading inside."
"With today's mining technology," said Pitt, "reexcavating the passage should be a viable project."
"Sure, if you want to spend about two million dollars," snorted the cook. "Nobody I ever heard about was willing to gamble that much money on a story that might be pure hokum." He paused to set the chiliburger and coleslaw dishes on the counter. Then he drew a mug of beer from a tap, walked around the bar and sat down on a stool next to Pitt. "They say old Hunt somehow made it back inside the mountain but never came out. He disappeared right after he blew the cave and was not seen again. There was talk that he found another way inside and died there. A few people believe in a great river that flows through a canyon deep beneath the sands, but most think it's only another tall tale of the desert."
"Such things do exist," said Pitt. "A few years ago I was on an expedition that found an underground stream."
"Somewhere in the desert Southwest?" inquired the cook.
"No, the Sahara. It flowed under a hazardous waste plant and carried pollutants to the Niger River, and then into the Atlantic where it caused a proliferation of red tides."
"The Mojave River north of here goes undergro
und after running above the surface for a considerable distance. Nobody knows for certain where it ends up."