The local habitation of the lost family is a nook in the Great American Desert—­a nook in a desert twenty-five times the size of England!  But this wilderness of about a million square miles is not all sand or all barren earth:  it contains numerous other features of interest besides mountains and oases; it includes the country of New Mexico, with its towns and cities; the country round the Great Salt and Utah Lakes, where the germ of a Mormon nation is expanding on all sides; and it is traversed in its whole breadth by the Rocky Mountains.  An English family, after being ruined in St Louis, and reduced to their last hundred pounds, are persuaded by a Scottish miner to accompany him across this desert to New Mexico.  ’They are a wonderful people,’ says the story-teller, ’these same Scotch.  They are but a small nation, yet their influence is felt everywhere upon the globe.  Go where you will, you will find them in positions of trust and importance—­always prospering, yet, in the midst of prosperity, still remembering, with strong feelings of attachment, the land of their birth.  They manage the marts of London, the commerce of India, the fur-trade of America, and the mines of Mexico.  Over all the American wilderness you will meet them, side by side with the backwoods-pioneer himself, and even pushing him from his own ground.  From the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Sea, they have impressed with their Gaelic names rock, river, and mountain; and many an Indian tribe owns a Scotchman for its chief.’

The adventurers join a caravan, which is attacked by Indians, and the family of the destined Robinson find themselves alone in the wilderness, 800 miles from the American frontier on the east, 1000 miles from any civilised settlement on either the north or south, and 200 miles from the farthest advanced lines of New Mexico in the desert.  They are, in short, lost; but in due time they are found again by other explorers.  These strangers are standing on the edge of a cliff several hundred feet sheer down.  ’Away below—­far below where we were—­lay a lovely valley, smiling in all the luxuriance of bright vegetation.  It was of nearly an oval shape, bounded upon all sides by a frowning precipice, that rose around it like a wall.  Its length could not have been less than ten miles, and its greatest breadth about half of its length.  We were at its upper end, and of course viewed it lengthwise.  Along the face of the precipice there were trees hanging out horizontally, and some of them even growing with their tops downward.  These trees were cedars and pines; and we could perceive also the knotted limbs of huge cacti protruding from the crevices of the rocks.  We could see the wild mezcal, or maguey-plant, growing against the cliff—­its scarlet leaves contrasting finely with the dark foliage of the cedars and cacti.  Some of these plants stood out on the very brow of the overhanging precipice, and their long curving blades gave a singular character to the