The long-deferred hour at last arrived in which Adam, on a ruddy-gold
dawn in early April, drove his burros out into the lonesome desert
toward the Amargosa. He did not look back. Tecopah would not soon
forget Wansfell! That was his grim thought.
The long, drab reaches of desert, the undulating bronze slopes waving
up to the dark mountains, called to him in a language that he felt. If
Adam Larey--or Wansfell, wanderer of the wasteland, as he had come to
believe himself--had any home, it was out in the vast open, under the
great white flare of sunlight and the star-studded canopy of night.
This was a still morning in April, and the lurid sun, bursting above
the black escarpment to the east, promised a rising temperature. Day
by day the heat had been increasing, and now, at sunrise, the smoky
heat veils were waving up from the desert floor. For Adam the most
torrid weather had no terrors, and the warmth of a morning like this
felt pleasant on his cheek. He had been confined to one place, without
action, for so long that now, as he began to feel the slow sweat burn
pleasantly on his body, there came a loosening of his muscles, a
relaxing of tension, a marshaling, as it were, of his great forces of
strength and endurance. The gray slopes beyond did not daunt him. His
stride was that of a mountaineer, and his burros had to trot to keep
ahead of him.
And as Adam’s body gradually responded to this readjustment to the
desert and its hard demands, so his mind seemed to slough off, layer
by layer, the morbid, fierce, and ruthless moods that like lichens
had fastened upon it. The dry, sweet desert air seemed to permeate
his brain and clear it of miasmas and shadows. He was free. He was
alone. He was self-sufficient. The desert called. From far beyond
that upheaved black and forbidding range, the Funeral Mountains,
something strange, new, thrilling awaited his coming. The strife of the
desert had awakened in him a craving to find the unattainable. He had
surmounted all physical obstacles. He would conquer Death Valley; he
would see it in all its ghastliness; he would absorb all its mysteries;
he would defy to the limit of endurance its most fatal menaces to life.
In the afternoon Adam rounded a corner of a league-long sloping
mesa and gazed down into the valley of the Amargosa. It looked the
bitterness, the poison, and the acid suggested by its Spanish name. The
narrow meandering stream gleamed like silver in the sunlight. Mesquite
and other brush spotted its gravelly slopes and sandy banks. Adam
headed down into the valley. The sun was already westering, and soon,
as he descended, it hung over the ragged peaks. He reached the creek.
The burros drank, but not with relish. Adam gazed at the water of the
Amargosa with interest. It was not palatable, yet it would save life.
Adam set about the camp tasks long grown second nature with him, and
which were always congenial and pleasant. He built a fire of dead
mesquite. Then he scoured his oven with sand, and greased it. He had
a heavy pan which did duty as a gold-pan, a dish-pan, and a wash-pan.
This he half filled with flour, and, adding water, began to mix the
two. He had gotten the dough to about the proper consistency when a
rustling in the brush attracted his attention. He thought he caught a
glimpse of a rabbit. Such opportunity for fresh meat was rare on the
desert. Hastily wiping his hands, he caught up his gun and stole out
into the aisle between the mesquites. As luck would have it, he did
espy a young cottontail, and was fortunate enough to make a good shot.
Returning to camp, he made sudden discovery of a catastrophe.
Jennie had come out of her nap, if, indeed, she had not been shamming
sleep, and she had her nose in the dish-pan. She was eating the dough.
“Hyar, you camp robber!” yelled Adam, making for her.
Jennie jerked up her head. The dough stuck to her nose and the pan
stuck to the dough. She eluded Adam, for she was a quick and nimble
burro. The pan fell off, but the ball of dough adhered to her mouth
and nose, and as she ran around camp in a circle it was certain that
she worked her jaws, eating dough as fast as she could. Manifestly for
Jennie, here was opportunity of a lifetime. When finally Adam did catch
her the dough was mostly eaten. He gave her a cuff and a kick which she
accepted meekly, and, drooping her ears, she apparently fell asleep
again.
While Adam was at his simple meal the sun set, filling the valley with
red haze and tipping with gold the peaks in the distance. The heat
had gone with the sun. He walked to and fro in the lonely twilight.
Jennie had given up hope of any more opportunity to pilfer, and had
gone to grazing somewhere down the stream. There was absolutely no
sound. An infinite silence enfolded the solitude. It was such solitude
as only men of Adam’s life could bear. To him it was both a blessing
and a curse. But to-night he had an all-pervading and all-satisfying
power. He seemed to be growing at one with the desert and its elements.
After a while the twilight shadows shaded into the blackness of night,
and the stars blazed. Adam had been conscious all day of the gradual
relaxing of strain, and now in the lonely solitude there fell away from
him the feelings and thoughts engendered at Tecopah.
“Loneliness and silence and time!” he soliloquized, as he paced his
sandy beat. “These will cure any trouble--any disease of mind--any
agony of soul. Ah! I know. I never forget. But how different now to
remember!... That must be the secret of the power of the desert over
men. It is the abode of solitude and silence. It is like the beginning
of creation. It is like an eternity of time.”
By the slow healing of the long-raw wound in his heart Adam had come
to think of time’s relation to change. Memory was still as poignant as
ever. But a change had begun in him--a change he divined only after
long months of strife. Dismukes brought a regurgitation of the old
pain; yet it was not quite the same. Eight years! How impossible to
realize that, until confronted by physical proofs of the passing of
time! Adam saw no clear and serene haven for his wandering spirit, but
there seemed to be a nameless and divine promise in the future. His
steps had not taken hold of hell. He had been driven down the naked
shingles of the desert, through the storms of sand, under the infernal
heat and bitter cold, like a man scourged naked, with screaming furies
to whip the air at his ears. And, lo! time had begun to ease his
burden, soften the pain, dim the past, change his soul.
The moment was one of uplift. “I have my task,” he cried, looking high
to the stars. “Oh, stars--so serene and pitiless and inspiring--teach
me to perform that task as you perform yours!”
He would go on as he had begun, fighting the desert and its barrenness,
its blasting heat, its evil influences, wandering over these wastelands
that must be his home; and he would stake the physical prowess of
him to yet harder, fiercer tasks of toil, driving his spirit to an
intenser, whiter flame. If the desert could develop invincible energy
of strength in a man, he would earn it. If there were a divinity
in man, infinitely beyond the beasts of the desert and the apes of
the past, a something in mysterious affinity with that mighty being
he sensed out there in the darkness, then he would learn it with a
magnified and all-embracing consciousness.
Adam went to his bed on the warm sands complete in two characters--a
sensing, watching, listening man like the savage in harmony with the
nature of the elements around him, and a feeling, absorbed, and
meditating priest who had begun to divine the secrets beyond the
dark-shadowed, starlit desert waste.
* * * * *
Adam’s first sight of Death Valley came at an early morning hour, as he
turned a last curve in the yawning canyon he had descended.
He stood in awe.
“Oh, desolation!” he cried. And it seemed that, as the shock of the
ghastliness beneath him passed, he remembered with flashing vividness
all that had come to him in his long desert wanderings, which seemed
now to cumulate its terrible silence, desolation, death, and decay in
this forbidding valley.
He remembered the origin of that name--Death Valley. In 1849, when
the California gold frenzy had the world in its grip, seventy Mormon
gold seekers had wandered into this red-walled, white-floored valley,
where sixty-eight of them perished. The two that escaped gave this
narrow sink so many hundred feet below sea level the name Death Valley!
Many and many another emigrant and prospector and wanderer, by his
death from horrible thirst and blasting heat and poison-dusted wind
and destroying avalanche and blood-freezing cold, had added to the
significance of that name and its dreadful fame. On one side the valley
was shadowed by the ragged Funeral range; on the other by the red and
gloomy Panamints. Furnace Creek, the hot stream that came down from the
burning slopes; and Ash Meadow, the valley floor, gray and dead, like
the bed of a Dead Sea; and the Devil’s Chair, a huge seat worn by the
elements in the red mountain wall, where the death king of the valley
watched over his fiends--these names were vivid in Adam’s mind along
with others given by prospectors in uncouth or eloquent speech. “She’s
a hummer in July,” said one; and another, “Salty lid of hell”; and
still another, “Valley of the white shadow of death.”
Death Valley was more than sixty miles long and from seven to twelve
wide. No two prospectors had ever agreed on these dimensions, although
all had been in perfect harmony as to its hellish qualities. Death
was the guardian of the valley and the specter that patrolled its
beat. Mineral wealth was the irresistible allurement which dared men
to defy its terrors. Gold! Dismukes himself had claimed there were
ledges of gold quartz, and Dismukes was practical and accurate. Many
fabulous stories of gold hung on the lips of wandering prospectors.
The forbidding red rocks held jewels in their hard confines--garnets,
opals, turquoises; there were cliffs of marble and walls of onyx. The
valley floor was a white crust where for miles and miles there was
nothing but salt and borax. Beds of soda, of gypsum, of niter, of
sulphur, abounded in the vaster fields of other minerals. It was a
valley where nature had been prodigal of her treasures and terrible
in her hold upon them. But few springs and streams flowed down into
this scoriac sink, and of these all were heavily impregnated with
minerals, all unpalatable, many sour and sulphuric, some hot, a few of
them deadly poison. In the summer months the heat sometimes went to
one hundred and forty-five degrees. The furnace winds of midnight were
withering to flesh and blood. And sometimes the air carried invisible
death in shape of poison gas or dust. In winter, sudden changes of
temperature, whirling icy winds down upon a prospector who had gone to
sleep in warmth, would freeze him to death. Avalanches rolled down the
ragged slopes and cloudbursts carried destruction.
Adam got his bearings, according to the map made by Dismukes, and set
out from the mouth of the canyon to cross the valley. A long sandy
slope dotted by dwarfed mesquites extended down to the bare, crinkly
floor of the valley, from which the descent to a lower level was
scarcely perceptible. When Adam’s burros early in the day manifested
uneasiness and weariness there was indeed rough going. The sand had
given way to a hard crust of salt or borax, and little dimples and
cones made it difficult to place a foot on a level. Some places the
crust was fairly hard; in others it cracked and crunched under foot.
The color was a mixture of a dirty white and yellow. Far ahead Adam
could see a dazzling white plain that resembled frost on a frozen river.
Adam proceeded cautiously behind the burros. They did not like the
travel, and, wary little beasts that they were, they stepped gingerly
in places, as if trying their weight before trusting it upon the
treacherous-looking crust. Adam felt the beat of the sun upon him,
and the reflection of heat from the valley floor. He had been less
oppressed upon hotter days than this. The sensations he began to have
here were similar to those he had experienced in the Salton Sink,
where he had gone below sea level. The oppression seemed to be a blood
pressure, as if the density of the air closed tighter and heavier
around his body.
At last the burros halted. Adam looked up from the careful task of
placing his feet to see that he had reached a perfectly smooth bed of
salt, glistening as if it were powdered ice. This was the margin of
the place that from afar had looked like a frozen stream. Stepping
down upon it, Adam found that it trembled and heaved with his weight,
but upheld him. There was absolutely no sign to tell whether the next
yard of surface would hold him or not. Still, from what he had gone
over he believed he could trust the rest. As he turned to retrace his
steps he saw his tracks just as plainly in the salt as if they had been
imprinted in snow. He led Jennie out, and found that, though her hoofs
sank a little, she could make it by stepping quickly. She understood as
well as he, and when released went on of her own accord, anxious to get
the serious job over. Adam had to drive the other burro. The substance
grew softer as Adam progressed, and in the middle of that glistening
stream it became wet and sticky. The burros labored through this lowest
level of the valley, which fortunately was narrow.
On the other side of it extended a wide flat of salt and mud, very
rough, upheaved as if it had boiled and baked to a crust, then cracked
and sunk in places. Full of holes and pitfalls, and rising in hummocks
gnarled and whorled like huge sea shells, it was an exceedingly
toilsome and dangerous place to travel. The crust continually crumpled
under the hoofs of the burros, and gave forth hollow sounds, as if a
bottomless cavern ran under the valley floor. As Adam neared the other
side he encountered thin streams of water that resembled acid. It was
necessary to find narrow places in these and leap across. Beyond these
ruts in the crust began an almost imperceptible rise of the valley
floor, which in the course of a couple of miles led out of the broken,
choppy sea of salt to a sand-and-gravel level. How relieved Adam was
to reach that! He had been more concerned for the safety of the burros
than for his own.
It was now hot enough for Adam to imagine something of what a
formidable place this valley would be in July or August. On all sides
the mountains stood up dim and obscure and distant in a strange haze.
Low down, the heat veils lifted in ripples, and any object at a
distance seemed illusive. The last hour taxed Adam’s endurance, though
he could have gone perhaps as far again across the lavalike crust. When
he reached the slope that led up to the base of the red mountains he
halted the burros for a rest. The drink he took then was significant,
for it was the fullest he had taken in years. He was hot and wet; his
eyes smarted and his feet burned.
When Adam had rested he consulted the map, and found that he must
travel up the slope and to the west to gain the black buttress of rock
that was his objective point. And considering how dim it looked through
the haze, he concluded he had better be starting. One moment, however,
he gave to a look at the Funeral range which he had come through, and
which now loomed above the valley, a magnificent and awe-inspiring
upheaval of the earth. The lower and nearer heights were marked on
Dismukes’ map as the Calico Mountains, and indeed their many colors
justified the name. Beyond and above them towered the Funerals,
spiked and peaked, ragged as the edge of a saw, piercing the blue sky,
a gloomy and black-zigzagged and drab-belted range of desolation and
grandeur. Adam’s gaze slowly shifted westward to the gulf, a hazy void,
a vast valley with streaked and ridged and canyoned slopes inclosing
the abyss into which veils of rain seemed dropping. Broken clouds had
appeared in the west, pierced by gold and red rays, somewhat dulled by
the haze. Adam was amazed to realize the day was far spent. That scene
up the valley of death was confounding. He gazed spellbound, and every
second saw more and different aspects. How immense, unreal, weird!
He got up from the stone seat that had almost burned through his
clothes, and bent his steps westward, driving the wearying burros
ahead of him. Three miles toward the black buttressed corner he wanted
to gain before dark--so his experienced desert eyes calculated the
distance. But this was Death Valley. No traveler of the desert had ever
correctly measured distance in this valley of shadows and hazes and
illusions. He was making three miles an hour. Yet at the end of an hour
he seemed just as far away as ever. Another hour was full of deceits
and misjudgments. But at the end of the third he reached the black
wall, and the line that had seemed a corner was the mouth of a canyon.
Adam halted, as if at the gateway of the unknown. The sun was setting
behind the mountains that now overhung him, massive and mighty, a
sheer, insurmountable world of rock which seemed to reach to the ruddy
sky. Wonderful shadows were falling, purple and blue low down, rosy and
gold above; and the canyon smoked with sunset haze.
The map of Dismukes marked the canyon, and a spring of water just
beyond its threshold, and also the shack where the strange man and
woman lived under the long slant of weathered rock. Adam decided not to
try to find the location that night, so he made dry camp.
Darkness found him weary and oppressed. The day had seemed short, but
the distance long. Tired and sleepy as he was, when he lay down in his
bed he felt a striking dissimilarity of this place to any other he
had known on the desert. How profound the silence! Had any sound ever
pervaded it? All was gloom and shadow below, with black walls rising to
star-fretted sky as blue as indigo. The valley seemed to be alive. It
breathed, yet invisibly and silently. Indeed, there was a mighty being
awake out there in the black void. Adam could not believe any man and
woman lived up this canyon. Dismukes had dreamed. Had not Adam heard
from many prospectors how no white woman could live in Death Valley? He
had been there only a day, yet he felt that he could understand why it
must be fatal to women. But it was not so because of heat and poison
wind and cataclysms of nature, for women could endure those as well as
men. But no woman could stand the alterations of terror and sublimity,
of beauty and horror. That which was feminine in Adam shuddered at a
solitude that seemed fitting to a burned-out world. He was the last of
his race, at the end of its existence, the strongest finally brought to
his doom, and to-morrow the earth would be sterile--thus Adam’s weary
thoughts passed into dreams.
He awakened somewhat later than usual. Over the Funeral range the sun
was rising, a coalescing globule of molten fire, enormous and red,
surrounded by a sky-broad yellow flare. This sunrise seemed strangely
closer to the earth and to him than any sunrise he had ever watched.
The valley was clear, still, empty, a void that made all objects
therein look small and far away. After breakfast Adam set out to find
his burros.
This high-walled opening did not appear to be a canyon, but a space
made by two mountain slopes running down to a wash where water flowed
at some seasons. Beyond the corners there opened what seemed to be a
gradually widening and sloping field, gray with rocks and sand and
stunted brush, through the center of which straggled a line of gnarled
mesquites, following the course of the wash. Adam found his burros
here, Jennie asleep as usual, and Jack contentedly grazing.
The cracking of a rock rolling down a rough slope thrilled Adam. He
remembered what Dismukes had said about the perilous location of the
shack where the man and woman lived under the shadow of a weathering
mountain. Adam turned to look across the space in the direction whence
the sound had come.
There loomed a mighty mountain slope, absolutely destitute of plants,
a gray, drab million-faceted ascent of rocks. Adam strode toward it,
gradually getting higher and nearer through the rock-strewn field. It
had looked so close as to seem magnified. But it was a goodly distance.
Presently he espied a rude shack. He halted. That could not be what he
was searching for. Still, it must be. Adam had not expected the place
to be so close to Death Valley. It was not a quarter of a mile distant
from the valley and not a hundred feet higher than the lowest sink
hole, which was to say that this crude, small structure lay in Death
Valley and below sea level.
Adam walked on, growing more curious and doubtful. Surely this hut
had been built and abandoned by some prospector. Yet any prospector
could have built a better abode than this. None but a fool or a knave
would have selected that perilous location. The ground began to slope
a little and become bare of brush, and was dotted here and there with
huge bowlders that looked as if they had rolled down there recently.
No sign of smoke, no sign of life, no sign of labor--absence of these
strengthened Adam’s doubt of people living there. Suddenly he espied
the deep track of a man’s foot in the sand. Adam knelt to study it.
“Made yesterday,” he said.
He rose with certainty. Dismukes had been accurate as to direction,
though his distances had been faulty. Adam gazed beyond the shack, to
right, and then left. He espied a patch of green mesquites and hummocks
of grass. There was the water Dismukes had marked. Then Adam looked up.
A broad belt of huge bowlders lay beyond the shack, the edge of the
talus, the beginning of the base of a mountain-side, wearing down,
weathering away, cracking into millions of pieces, every one of which
had both smooth and sharp surfaces. This belt was steep and fan
shaped, spreading at the bottom. As it sloped up it grew steeper,
and the rocks grew smaller. It had the flow of a glacier. It was an
avalanche, perhaps sliding inch by inch and foot by foot, all the
time. The curved base of the fan extended for a couple of miles, in
the distance growing rounded and symmetrical in its lines. It led up
to a stupendous mountain abutment, dull red in color, and so seamed
and cracked and fissured that it had the crisscross appearance of a
rock of net, or numberless stones of myriad shapes pieced together by
some colossal hand, and now split and broken, ready to fall. Yet this
rugged, bold, uneven surface of mountain wall shone in the sunlight.
It looked as if it had been a solid mass of granite shattered by some
cataclysm of nature. Above this perpendicular splintered ruin heaved
up another slope of broken rocks, hanging there as if by magic, every
one of the endless heaps of stones leaning ready to roll. Frost and
heat had disintegrated this red mountain. What history of age was
written there! How sinister that dull hue of red! No beauty shone
here, though the sun gleamed on the millions of facets. The mountain
of unstable rock towered dark and terrible and forbidding even in the
broad light of day. What held that seamed and lined and sundered mass
of rock together! For what was it waiting? Only time, and the law of
the desert! Even as Adam gazed a weathered fragment loosened from the
heights, rolled off the upper wall, pitched clear into the air, and
cracked ringingly below, to bound and hurtle down the lower slope,
clapping less and less until it ceased with a little hollow report.
That was the story of the mountain. By atom and by mass it was in
motion, working down to a level. Bowlders twice as large as the shack,
weighing thousands of tons, had rolled down and far out on the field.
Any moment another might topple off the rampart and come hurtling down
to find the shack in its path. Some day the whole slope of loose rock,
standing almost on end, would slide down in avalanche.
“Well,” muttered Adam, darkly, “any man who made a woman live there was
either crazy or meant her to have an awful death.”
Adam strode on to the shack. It might afford shelter from sun, but not
from rain or dust. Packsaddles and boxes were stacked on one side;
empty cans lay scattered everywhere; a pile of mesquite, recently cut,
stood in front of the aperture that evidently was a door; and on the
sand lay blackened stones and blackened utensils, near the remains of a
still smoldering fire.
“Hello, inside,” called Adam, as he halted at the door. No sound
answered. He stooped to look in, and saw bare sand floor, a rude, low
table made of box boards, flat stones for seats, utensils and dishes,
shelves littered with cans and bags. A flimsy partition of poles and
canvas, with a door, separated this room from another and larger one.
Adam saw a narrow bed of blankets raised on poles, an old valise on the
sandy floor, woman’s garments hanging on the brush walls. He called
again, louder this time. He saw a flash of something gray through the
torn canvas, then heard a low cry--a woman’s voice. Adam raised his
head and stepped back.
“Elliot!... You’ve come back!” came the voice, quick, low, and
tremulous, betokening relief from dread.
“No. It’s a stranger,” replied Adam.
“Oh!” The hurried exclamation was followed by soft footfalls. A woman
in gray appeared in the doorway--a woman whose proportions were noble,
but frail. She had a white face and large, deep eyes, strained and sad.
“Oh--who are you?”
“Ma’am, my name’s Wansfell. I’m a friend of Dismukes, the prospector
who was here. I’m crossing Death Valley and I thought I’d call on you.”
“Dismukes? The little miner, huge, like a frog?” she queried, quickly,
with dilating eyes. “I remember. He was kind, but-- And you’re his
friend?”
“Yes, at your service, ma’am.”
“Thank--God!” she cried, brokenly, and she leaned back against the
door. “I’m in trouble. I’ve been alone--all--all night. My husband left
yesterday. He took only a canteen. He said he’d be back for supper....
But--he didn’t come. Oh, something has happened to him.”
“Many things happen in the desert,” said Adam. “I’ll find your husband.
I saw his tracks out here in the sand.”
“Oh, can you find him?”
“Ma’am, I can track a rabbit to its burrow. Don’t worry any more. I
will track your husband and find him.”
The woman suddenly seemed to be struck with Adam’s tone, or the
appearance of him. It was as if she had not particularly noticed him
at first. “Once he got lost--was gone two days. Another time he was
overcome by heat--or something in the air.”
“You’ve been alone before?” queried Adam, quick to read the pain of the
past in her voice.
“Alone?... Many--many lonely nights,” she said. “He’s left
me--alone--often--purposely--for me to torture my soul here in the
blackness.... And those rolling rocks--cracking in the dead of
night--and----” Then the flash of her died out, as if she had realized
she was revealing a shameful secret to a stranger.
“Ma’am, is your husband just right in his mind?” asked Adam.
She hesitated, giving Adam the impression that she wished to have him
think her husband irrational, but could not truthfully say so.
“Men do strange things in the desert,” said Adam. “May I ask, ma’am,
have you food and water?”
“Yes. We’ve plenty. But Elliot makes me cook--and I never learned how.
So we’ve fared poorly. But he eats little and I less!”
“Will you tell me how he came to build your hut here where, sooner or
later, it’ll be crushed by rolling stones?”
A tragic shadow darkened in the large, dark-blue eyes that Adam now
realized were singularly beautiful.
“I--He-- This place was near the water. He cut the brush here--he
didn’t see--wouldn’t believe the danger,” she faltered. She was telling
a lie, and did not do it well. The fine, sensitive, delicate lips,
curved and soft, sad with pain, had not been fashioned for falsehood.
“Perhaps I can make him see,” replied Adam. “I’ll go find him. Probably
he’s lost. The heat is not strong enough to be dangerous. And he’s not
been gone long. Don’t worry. My camp is just below. I’ll fetch him back
to-day--or to-morrow at farthest.”
She murmured some incoherent thanks. Adam was again aware of her
penetrating glance, staring, wondering even in her trouble. He strode
away with bowed head, searching the sand for the man’s tracks.
Presently he struck them and saw that they led down toward the valley.
To follow such a plain trail was child’s play for Adam’s desert sight,
that had received its early training in the preservation of his life.
He who had trailed lizards to their holes, and snakes to their rocks,
to find them and eat or die--he was as keen as a wolf on the scent.
This man’s trail led straight down to the open valley, out along the
western bulge of slope, to a dry water hole.
From there the footprints led down to the parapet of a wide bench,
under which the white crust began its level monotony toward the other
side of the valley. Different here was it from the place miles below
where Adam had crossed. It was lower--the bottom of the bowl. Adam
found difficulty in breathing, and had sensations like intermittent
rushes of blood to his head. The leaden air weighed down, and, though
his keen scent could not detect any odor, he knew there was impurity of
some kind on the slow wind. It reminded him that this was Death Valley.
He considered a moment. If the man’s tracks went on across the valley,
Adam would return to camp for a canteen, then take up the trail again.
But the tracks led off westward once more, straggling and aimless.
Adam’s stride made three of one of these steps. He did not care about
the heat. That faint hint of gas, however, caused him concern. For
miles he followed the straggling tracks, westward to a heave of valley
slope that, according to the map of Dismukes, separated Death Valley
from its mate adjoining--Lost Valley. On the left of this ridge the
tracks wandered up the slope to the base of the mountain and followed
it in wide scallops. The footmarks now showed the dragging of boots,
and little by little they appeared fresher in the sand. This wanderer
had not rested during the night.
The tracks grew deeper, more dragging, wavering from side to side. Here
the man had fallen. Adam saw the imprints of his hands and a smooth
furrow where evidently he had dragged a canteen across the sand. Then
came the telltale signs of where he had again fallen and had begun to
crawl.
“Looks like the old story,” muttered Adam. “I’ll just about find him
dying or dead.... Better so--for that woman who called him husband!...
I wonder--I wonder.”
Adam’s year of wandering had led him far from the haunts of men,
along the lonely desert trails and roads where only a few solitary
humans like himself dared the elements, or herded in sordid and hard
camps; but, nevertheless, by some virtue growing out of his strife and
adversity, he had come to sense something nameless, to feel the mighty
beat of the heart of the desert, to hear a mourning music over the
silent wastes--a still, sad music of humanity. It was there, even in
the gray wastelands.
He strode on with contracted eyes, peering through the hot sunlight. At
last he espied a moving object. A huge land turtle toiling along! No,
it was a man crawling on hands and knees.