The November morning was keen and cold and Adam and Genie were on their
way to spend the day at Andreas Canyon. Adam carried a lunch, a gun,
and a book. Genie seemed so exuberant with wonderful spirits that she
could scarcely keep her little moccasined feet on the sand. Adam had an
unconscious joy in the sight of her.
A dim old Indian trail led up one of the slopes of Andreas Canyon, to
which Adam called Genie’s attention.
“We’ll climb this some day--when it comes time to take you away,” said
Adam. “It’s a hard climb, but the shortest way out. And you’ll get to
see the desert from the top of old Jacinto. That will be worth all the
climb.”
His words made Genie pensive. Of late the girl had become more and
more beyond Adam’s comprehension--wistful and sad and dreamy by turns,
now like a bird and again like a thundercloud, but mostly a dancing,
singing creature full of unutterable sweetness of life.
Beyond the oasis, some distance up the canyon, was a dense growth of
mesquite and other brush. It surrounded a sandy glade in which bubbled
forth a crystal spring of hot water. The bottom was clean white sand
that boiled up in the center like shining bubbles. Indians in times
past had laid stones around the pool. A small cottonwood tree on the
west side of the glade had begun to change the green color of the
leaves to amber and gold. All around the glade, like a wild, untrimmed
hedge, the green and brown mesquites stood up, hiding the gray desert,
insulating this cool, sandy, beautiful spot, hiding it away from the
stern hardness outside.
Genie had never been here. Quickly she lost her pensiveness and began
to sing like a lark. She kicked one moccasin one way and the other in
another direction. Straightway she was on the stones, with her bare,
slender, brown feet in the water.
“Ooooo! It’s hot!” she cried, ecstatically. “But, oh, it’s fine!” And
she dipped them back.
“Genie, you stay here and amuse yourself,” said Adam. “I’m going to
climb. Maybe I’ll be back soon--maybe not. You play and read, and eat
the lunch when you’re hungry.”
“All right, Wanny,” she replied, gayly. “But I should think you’d
rather stay with me.”
Adam had to be alone. He needed to be high above the desert, where he
could look down. Another crisis in his transformation was painfully
pending. The meeting with Dismukes had been of profound significance,
and its effect was going to be far-reaching.
He climbed up the zigzag, dim trail, rising till the canyon yawned
beneath him, and the green thicket where he had left Genie was but a
dot. Then the way led round the slope of the great foothill, where he
left the trail and climbed to the craggy summit. It was a round, bare
peak of jagged bronze rock, and from this height half a mile above the
desert the outlook was magnificent. Beyond and above him the gray walls
and fringed peaks of San Jacinto towered, sculptored and grand against
the azure blue.
Finding a comfortable seat with rest for his back, Adam faced the
illimitable gulf of color and distance below. Always a height such as
this, where, like a lonely eagle, he could command an unobstructed
view, had been a charm, a strange delight of his desert years. Not
wholly had love of climbing, or to see afar, or to feel alone, or to
travel in beauty, been accountable for this habit.
Adam’s first reward for this climb, before he had settled himself to
watch the desert, was sight of a condor. Only rarely did Adam see this
great and loneliest of lonely birds--king of the eagles and of the blue
heights. Never had Adam seen one close. A wild, slate-colored bird,
huge of build, with grisly neck and wonderful, clean-cut head, cruelty
beaked! Even as Adam looked the condor pitched off the crag and spread
his enormous wings.
A few flaps of those wide wings--then he sailed out over the gulf, and
around, rising as he circled. When he started he was below Adam; on
the first lap of that circle he rose even with Adam’s position; and
when he came round again he sailed over Adam, perhaps fifty feet. Adam
thrilled at the sight. The condor was peering down with gleaming, dark,
uncanny eyes. He saw Adam. His keen head and great, crooked beak moved
to and fro; the sun shone on his gray-flecked breast; every feather of
his immense wings seemed to show, to quiver in the air, and the tip
feathers were ragged and separate. He cut the air with a soft swish.
Around he sailed, widening his circle, rising higher, with never a
movement of his wings. That fact, assured by Adam’s sharp sight, was so
marvelous that it fascinated him. What power enabled the condor to rise
without propelling himself? No wind stirred down there under the peaks,
so he could not lift himself by its aid. He sailed aloft. He came down
on one slope of his circle, to rise up on the other, and always he went
higher. How easily! How gracefully! He was peering down for sight of
prey in which to sink cruel beak and talons. Once he crossed the sun
and Adam saw his shadow on the gleaming rocks below. Then his circles
widened across the deep canyon, high above the higher foothills, until
he approached the lofty peak. Higher still, and here the winds of the
heights caught him. How he breasted them, sailing on and up, soaring
toward the blue!
Adam watched the bird with strained eyes that hurt but never tired.
To watch him was one of the things Adam needed. On and ever upward
soared the condor. His range had changed with the height. His speed
had increased with the wind. His spirit had mounted as he climbed. The
craggy gray peak might have harbored his nest and his mate, but he gave
no sign. High over the lonely cold heights he soared. There, far above
his domain, he circled level for a while, then swooped down like a
falling star, miles across the sky, to sail, to soar, to rise again.
Away across the heavens he flew, wide winged and free, king of the
eagles and of the winds, lonely and grand in the blue. Never a movement
of his wings! Higher he sailed. Higher he soared till he was a fading
speck, till he was gone out of sight to his realm above.
“Gone!” sighed Adam. “He is gone. And for all I know he may be a spirit
of the wind. From his invisible abode in the heavens he can see the
sheep on the crags--he can see me here--he can see Genie below--he can
see the rabbit at his burrow.... Nature! Life! Oh, what use to think?
What use to torture myself over mystery I can never solve? I learn one
great truth only to find it involved in greater mystery.”
* * * * *
Adam had realized the need of shocks, else the desert influence would
insulate him forever in his physical life. The meeting with Dismukes
had been one.
Why had Dismukes been compelled to come back to the desert? What
was the lure of the silent places? How could men sacrifice friends,
people, home, love, civilization for the solitude and loneliness of the
wastelands? Where lay the infinite fascination in death and decay and
desolation? Who could solve the desert secret?
Like white, living flames, Adam’s thoughts leaped in his mind.
These wanderers of the wastelands, like Dismukes and himself, were
not laboring under fancy or blindness or ignorance or imagination
or delusion. They were certainly not actuated by a feeling for some
nameless thing. The desert was a fact. The spell it cast was a fact.
Also it began to dawn upon Adam that nothing in civilization, among
glittering cities and moving people, in palaces or hovels, in wealth
or poverty, in fame or ignominy, in any walk of worldly life, could
cast a spell of enchantment, could swell women’s hearts and claim men’s
souls like the desert. The secret then had to do with a powerful
effect of the desert--that was to say, of lonely and desolate and wild
places--upon the minds of human beings.
Adam remembered how Dismukes had loved to travel alone. If he had any
selfishness in his great heart, it had been to gloat over the lonely
places by himself. Even with Adam he seldom shared those moments of
watching and listening. Always, some part of every day, he would spend
alone on a ridge, on a height, or out on the sage, communing with this
strange affinity of the desert. Adam had known Dismukes, at the end of
a hard day’s travel, to walk a mile and climb to a ledge, there to do
nothing at all but watch and listen. It was habit. He did it without
thinking. When Adam confronted him with the fact he was surprised. On
Adam’s side, this strange faculty or obsession, whatever it was, seemed
very much more greatly marked. Dismukes had, or imagined he had, the
need to seek gold. Adam had little to do but wander over the waste ways
of the desert.
And now Adam, stirred to his depths by the culminating, fatal tragedy
of Dismukes’ life, and a passionate determination to understand it,
delved into his mind and memory as never before, to discover forgotten
lessons and larger growths. But not yet in his pondering did they
prove to him why every day of his desert life, and particularly in the
last few years, had he gone to this or that lonely spot for no reason
at all except that it gave him strange, vague happiness. Here was an
astounding fact. He could have seen the same beauty, color, grandeur,
right from his camp. The hours he had passed thus were innumerable.
What had he done, what had gone on in his mind, during all these
seemingly useless and wasted hours? Nothing! Merely nothing it seemed
to sit for hours, gazing out over the desolate, gray-green, barren
desert, to sit listening to the solitude, or the soft wind, or the
seep of sand, or perhaps the notes of a lonely bird. Nothing, because
most of all that time he did not have in his mind the significance of
his presence there. He really did not know he was there. This state
of apparent unconsciousness had never been known to Adam at all until
Magdalene Virey had given him intimation of it. He had felt the thing,
but had never thought about it. But during these three years that he
had lived near San Jacinto it had grown until he gained a strange and
fleeting power to exercise it voluntarily. Even this voluntary act
seemed unthinking.
Adam, now, however, forced it to be a thinking act. And after many
futile efforts he at last, for a lightning flash of an instant, seemed
to capture the state of mind again. He recognized it because of an
equally swift, vague joy that followed. Joy, he called it, for want
of a better name. It was not joy. But it was wildly sweet--no--not
so--but perhaps sweetly wild. That emotion, then, was the secret of
the idle hours--the secret of the doing nothing. If he could only
grasp the secret of the nothing! Looked at with profound thought, this
nothing resolved itself into exactly what it had seemed to his first
vague, wandering thought--merely listening, watching, smelling, feeling
the desert. That was all. But now the sense of it began to assume
tremendous importance. Adam believed himself to be not only on the
track of the secret of the desert’s influence, but also of life itself.
Adam realized that during these lonely hours he was one instant a
primitive man and the next a thinking, or civilized, man. The thinking
man he understood; all difficulty of the problem lay hid in this other
side of him. He could watch, he could feel without thinking. That
seemed to be the state of the mind of an animal. Only it was a higher
state--a state of intense, feeling, waiting, watching suspension! Adam
divined that it was the mental state of the undeveloped savage, and
that it brought fleeting moments of strange emotion.
Beyond all comprehension was the marvel of inscrutable nature. Somehow
it had developed man. But the instincts of the ages were born with
him when he was born. In blood, bone, tissue, heart, and brain! Wonder
beyond that was the wonder that man had ever become civilized at all!
Some infinite spirit was behind this.
In the illumination of his mind Adam saw much that had been mystery
to him. When he had hunted meat, why had the chase been thrilling,
exciting, pressing his heart hot against his side, sending his blood
in gusts over his body? What a joy to run and leap after the quarry!
Strange indeed had been his lust to kill beasts when, after killing,
he was sorry. Stranger than this was a fact keen in his memory--the
most vivid and intense feeling--come back from his starvation days when
he had a wild rapture in pursuit of birds, rats, snakes that he had
to kill with stones. Never, in all the years, had this rapture faded.
Relic of his cruel boyhood days, when, like all boys, he had killed for
the sake of killing, until some aspect of his bloody, quivering victim
awakened conscience! Conscience then must be the great factor in human
progress--the difference between savage and civilized man. Terribly
strange for Adam to look at his brawny hands and remember what they had
done to men! Over him, then, gushed the hot blood, over him quivered
the muscular intensity, over him waved the fierce passion which,
compared with that of his boyhood, was as the blaze of sun to a candle.
He had killed men in ruthless justice, in strife of self-defense, but
always afterward he had regretted. He had fought men in a terrible,
furious joy, with eyes tingeing red, with nerves impervious to pain,
with the salt taste of a fellow creature’s blood sweet on his snarling
lips, but always afterward he was full of wonder and shame.
Just under the skin of every man and every woman, perhaps stronger
in one than another, flowed red blood in which primitive instincts
still lived and would always live. That was the secret of the desert.
The lonely, desolate land, the naked sand and rock-ribbed hills, the
wilderness of silence and solitude stirred the instinctive memory of a
primitive day. Men watched and listened unthinkingly in the wastelands,
for what they knew not, but it was for the fleeting trancelike
transformation back to savage nature. There were many reasons for
which men became wanderers in the wastelands--love of gold; the need
to forget or to remember; passion and crime and wanderlust; the appeal
of beauty and sublimity--but what nailed them to the forbidding and
inhospitable desert was the instinct of the savage. That was the secret
of the spell of the desert. Men who had been confined to cities,
chained to dull and humdrum toils, stagnating in the noisy haunts, sore
and sick and deflated, standing for some impossible end, when let loose
in the gray, iron-walled barrens of the desert were caught by a subtle
and insidious enchantment that transfigured some, made beasts of most,
and mysteriously bound all. Travelers passing across could not escape
it, and they must always afterward remember the desert with a thrill
of strange pleasure and of vague regret. Women who had been caught by
circumstance and nailed to homes along the roads or edges of the desert
must feel that nameless charm, though they hated the glaring, desolate
void. Magdalene Virey, resigned to her doom in Death Valley, had
responded to the nature that was in her.
Through this thing Adam saw the almost inconceivable progress of
men upward. If progress had not been slow, nature would never have
evolved him. And it seemed well that something of the wild and the
primitive must forever remain instinctive in the human race. If the
primitive were eliminated from men there would be no more progress.
All the gladness of the senses lived in this law. The sweetness of
the ages came back in thoughtless watching. The glory of the sunrise,
the sadness of the sunset, the whisper of the wind and the murmur of
the stream, the music of birds and their beauty--the magic of these
came back from the dim, mystic dreamland of the primal day, from the
childhood of the race. Nature was every man’s mother. Nevertheless,
the wonder and the splendor of life was the age-long progress of man
toward unattainable perfection, the magnificent victory of humanity
over mastery by primal instincts. And the fact that this seemed true to
Adam made him wonder if the spirit of this marvelous life was not God.
* * * * *
The sun was westering when he descended the long, zigzag trail. He
walked slowly, tired from his mental strain. And when he got down the
sun was just tipping the ramparts above, flooding the canyon with
golden haze and ruddy rays. Adam thought that Genie, weary from long
waiting, would be asleep on the sand, or at least reading, and that he
could slip into the glade to surprise her. They played a game of this
sort, and to her had gone most of the victories.
Like a panther he slid through the grasping mesquite boughs, and
presently, coming to the denser brush, he stooped low to avoid making
a rustle. As he moved along, bending so that he touched the sand with
his hands, he came upon two fat beetles wagging and contesting over
possession of some little particle. Scooping up a handful of sand,
he buried them, and then, as they so ludicrously scrambled out, he
gathered them up, intending, if he could get behind Genie unobserved,
to drop them on her book or bare feet.
Thus it happened that he did not look ahead until after he had
straightened up inside the glade. All before him seemed golden gleams
and streaks of sunset rose. The air was thick with amber haze. Genie
stood naked, ankle-deep in the bubbling spring. Like an opal her
slender white body caught glimmer and sheen. Wondrously transparent
she looked, for the sunlight seemed to shine through her! The red-gold
tints of her hair burned like a woven cord of fire in bronze.
Glistening crystal drops of water fell from her outstretched hands and
her round arms gleamed where the white met the line of tan. The light
of the sun shone upon her pensive, beautiful face as she stood wholly
unaware of intrusion. Then she caught the sound of Adam’s stifled
gasp. She saw him. She burst into a scream of startled, wild laughter
that rang with a trill through the dell.
Adam, breaking the spell of that transfixed instant, rushed headlong
away.