bats, whirling past his ears into the air. He passed between walls of
carven and painted figures, which were still sharp and bright in detail.
He went through a first room, as long as a cricket-pitch, into another,
which was pleasant with the sound of water. A pool had been cut in the
rock in the midst of this great room; water spouted into it from the
tongues of grotesque heads. At the end of the room there were stairs
leading up to an altar made of a piece of black obsidian chipped to a
point. At the back of this altar there were rooms filled with the murmur
of pigeons. These rooms must once have been the priests’ dwellings. They
were now dovecotes for the blue rock-pigeons which flew out, on his
approach. He clambered out after them on to a terrace cut upon the rock
of the mountain for two hundred yards by a people who had no explosives
save the will of their rulers. There was no green thing in sight,
nothing but rocks and sand. The rocks were of every savagery of
splinter, of savage colours, bright blue, yellow, red and black, all
spiked and toppled and tumbled, and only brought into order upon this
terrace by the unknown priests of dead gods.
He took what he could of the eggs of the rock-pigeons, then shaped his
course and went on into the wilderness, until his way was barred by a
cliff across his path, eight hundred feet high and more. He walked along
it for over a mile, but found no scaling place. At the end of his walk
the cliff bowed over so as to make a shelter or cave. Here in some
remote time some forgotten tribe had built up a house for themselves by
piling a wall of stones without mortar, between the hollow and the
light. The path of these men still led to their entrance, a hole in the
wall, just big enough for a small man to crawl through. Sard did not
dare to try to enter by that door for fear of snakes. There was a
sheltered place among the rocks where he lay down to rest. He fell into
a deep sleep, and slept until the cold woke him. He felt something
pressed against his chest which had not been there before. It was some
snake which had crawled there for the warmth. Very cautiously he moved
his stiff arms, until he could fling it from him, and leap up in the one
motion. He leaped clear of it, and then leaped clear of the place.
It was then about four in the morning and intensely cold. The snake was
perhaps too sluggish to attack. He was too miserable with cold to stay
longer there. He ate a little of his food, and went on along the face of
the cliff, until he found a place of fallen rocks where it was possible
to climb.
It seemed to him that he had gone for hours out of his way trying to
find a path, and that already he was weaker than he had been from want
of proper food and rest. He knew now how easy it would be for him to die
up there in the Sierra; why, he might wander for days trying to find
food or drink, the way out or the way back. He knew now that he might
have been wiser to risk the silver escorts, and follow the railway
across the desert.
All that day he wandered on among the mountains, far to the west of his
proper course. The crags of a great snowy peak were like a wall upon his
right hand, they seemed to edge him off to the west at every point. He
would walk for a mile and then think, “Now I can get across to the
eastward,” but always when he had scrambled up the screes, he would come
to some cliff which he could not climb. He saw no living thing in all
this day, except two little birds running among the rocks, and the
eagles quartering in the heaven.
At last as he wandered, he saw above him a gash or chimney in the cliff.
He scrambled to its very foot and looked up it. There was a percolation
of water down the side, which he tasted and found sweet. The rock was
very rotten, but he saw that it was a way up this cliff. As it was a
possible means of getting back to his course, he set himself to climb
it. It took him an hour to reach the top, and as he scrambled up to
safety above it, the thongs of his ollas broke, and both jars dropped to
the bottom of the chimney and smashed to pieces there.
He found himself on a great heave of rocky mountain which went on to a
pine forest. Beyond the pine forest the main crags of the Sierra rose,
covered with snow. They were blindingly bright in front of him, rocks as
blue as steel and ice as white as death, a wall between him and the sea,
which he would have to climb.
At about sunset, when he was entered into the pine forest, he smelled
suddenly a smell of smoke. It was the smoke of burning pine-cones or
pine-needles. He judged that it came from a little fire, because he so
easily lost the scent. He turned towards it, thinking that even the most
savage of mountain Indians would be less terrible than that loneliness.
Sometimes he lost the scent, then he cast about like a dog, until he
picked it up again. Presently he was almost certain that he heard a
moan. It seemed the fitting speech for such a place. He went towards it,
and soon heard the moaning pass into something much more savage, a
cursing and a calling down of vengeance. After a minute of violence, it
died again into grief and mourning and lamentation.
He went towards the noise and came round some great rocks on to a scene
which he remembered until he died. There was an open space there with
the tracks of men and horses on the sandy floor of the pine forest.
Someone had kindled a little fire there, and the ground was littered
with bits of tamales. Beyond the fire, swinging so that his feet were
sometimes covered by gusts of the smoke, a dead man hung from a pine
branch. At the foot of the tree, crouched and moaning, was a woman. She
was rocking to and fro with her grief. From time to time she stretched
her arms abroad and cursed and screamed in a kind of rhythm or poetry of
hate. Then the grief again became too strong for her, and she moaned and
lamented. One of the dead man’s slippers had fallen into the fire and
lay half burnt there. There was a paper pinned upon his chest, with the
word “Traitor” drawn on it with a burnt stick. The paper was a coarse
paper bag which had once contained chewing tobacco. The man was quite
dead; he must have been hanging there since noon. Both he and the woman
were Pardos. From the tracks near the fire it was plain that about
twenty had been at the hanging. It was the act of justice of some gang.
It was a shock to Sard to find man as harsh as that desolation.
The man was of middle stature, very broad and powerfully built, with a
big, broad, rugged face and grizzled curly hair. His arms, which had
been bound in front of him, were knotted with muscle. Sard cut him down
and laid him on the ground and cut loose his hands. He saw that the man
had been shot after being hung. He did what he could to compose the
body, and asked the woman if there was nobody near at hand who could
help to give him burial. The woman did not answer, she was possessed
with her grief and continued to rock to and fro, crooning, moaning, and
sometimes bursting out into cursing. He asked if there were any place to
which he could take her. He motioned that she should go home, and
offered to take her thither. At first she did not understand. At last it
seemed to enter her head that he was trying to take her from the body or
to take the body from her. She rose up, foaming at the mouth, snatched a
knife from her belt, and stabbed at him; then stood snarling and cursing
at him, while sobs shook her and tears ran down her face. He did not
like to leave her there in that wilderness, but she was not in any mood
to let him help her or even to know that he wished to help. He asked if
he could carry the body for her to the settlement. He was standing at
some little distance from her, speaking slowly and distinctly, so that
she might understand what he was saying. At the end of his speech he was
almost certain that somebody laughed. Glancing sharply to one side, he
was almost certain that somebody slipped behind one of the big pine
trees.
“Who’s there?” he called. He leaped to one side and caught sight of
somebody behind a tree. He saw that behind this person, at some little
distance, were two women. They seemed to be negresses. Their faces were
covered, and they seemed to be the slaves of this hiding man.
“What are you doing here?” the man said. He spoke the English of an
Occidental who had lived for some years in an American port.
“Trying to reach the coast,” Sard answered.
“Well, you want to be getting on. There’s nothing here that concerns
you,” the man answered. “You’d best pull out for the coast.”
“Which is the way to the coast?” Sard asked. “Is there no trail that
will take me there?”
“Trail? Hell!” said the man, “find your trail yourself. Beat it.”
“I want to beat it,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if I can get across the
Sierra, going eastwards from this?”
“No,” said the man, “you can’t. You must go south-eastwards from here,
keeping along the line of those peaks there, and after about ten miles
you’ll find a gap that they call the pass of Hermita. That’s the only
pass in all that range.”
“Can I reach the coast from that pass?” Sard asked.
“You’ll find out what you reach when you get there,” the man said. “Now
beat it just like hell, or you’ll reach nothing this side Jordan.”
Sard glanced for just one second or half-second at the two veiled women.
They had not stirred during the talk, but in the half-second of his
glance he saw one of them start, and in the same half-second he knew
that he was in danger and leaped to one side. It was all over in
half-a-second, but in that half-second the man had fired from behind his
tree. Sard heard the revolver bullet go past him. He dodged to a tree,
then away to another tree, then to a third. The man dodged after him,
firing whenever he saw a target. The shots came very near: Sard turned
and ran.
He went on running for a quarter of a mile, till he was over the brow of
the hill. Here he turned at right angles to his track, and ran along the
rocky hillside into a glen which had once been wooded with pines, but
had been burnt out half a century before. Spikes of charcoal, twelve or
fifteen feet high, rose from the ground all over the hillside, like an
army of witches. He dodged through this wood and went through it
diagonally, keeping uphill. When he reached a bend in the hill, he lay
down for breath. He could see no trace of man nor any trace of life,
nothing but wilderness, rocks, burnt sand and burnt pikes of trees, the
sun looking at it all with indifference, bringing no life to it, and the
wind from the icefields floating over it, bringing death.
Sard looked away to the south-east, where the man had said that there
was a pass. He could not be sure, and yet it seemed to him that at about
that place the hills did seem to fall down into a kind of saddle, as if
there might be a pass. Elsewhere he could see nothing but a line of
crags, neither sign nor prospect of a pass.
“I may as well die there as in another place,” he said. “Why should the
man have lied, when he meant to kill me the next instant? But my only
chance to get across that pass is to go now as fast as I can put foot to
earth, before he can get there first with his gang to head me off.”
Tired as he was, he set out for that gap or saddle in the Sierra. He
went cautiously, taking care not to expose himself upon skylines.
Presently the sun went down. He went stumbling on, in the night, keeping
his direction by the stars. At about midnight he could go no further. He
reckoned that he must have done ten miles. “In the morning,” he thought,
“as soon as it is light, I shall see this pass.” There was a brook of
water coming down the mountain where he stopped. He was guided to it by
its flashing and its tinkle. He came to it and found it slightly
brackish but drinkable. He drank a very little, and bathed, cold as it
was. In a little flat space near the water he found a patch of grass. It
was little better than hay, but there were some green blades pushing
among the dead, and he ate some for his only supper.
Then he slept and dreamed that he was in the lazarette of the
_Pathfinder_, surrounded by food, barrels of prime mess beef, barrels of
prime mess pork, tanks of new ship’s biscuits, hot out of the oven,
casks of split peas, cases of raisins, jams, preserved meats, cheese,
butter and pickles. In his dream the steward of the _Pathfinder_ came to
his elbow and said, “I’ve put your coffee in the chart-house, Mr.
Harker, and I’ve cooked you a few of those rock-cakes that you like.”
Then he woke and found himself in the desolation, in the grey of the
dawn, with a few blades of grass for his only sustenance. But there in
the stream below him was a little clump of plants, bearing still the
pods of the seeds of the season before. They were not pods, they were
ears, and it was a sort of grain. Most of the grains had been shed
abroad, but out of the whole clump he harvested one handful, which he
ate almost grain by grain with the husks. They were tasteless but left a
slightly bitter after-taste. Hungry as he was, he saved a few with some
of the grass for his dinner. It was perhaps five in the morning when he
gathered the grain, and only six when he set out to find the pass.
He had not gone very far into the wilderness of rock in which he was
before he realised that he was not likely to find any pass. For
centuries the great crags of the Sierra had scaled their husks on to
these slopes in the heats of the summers. It was a world of tumbled
stones, blocks, crags and pinnacles, many of them polished into strange
forms by the dancing of the sand about them. He was at that point at
which the peaks seemed to come down into a gap or saddle, but he was
shut from it by cliffs of a hundred feet, too steep for him to scale.
When he had first set out in the morning, he had feared lest his enemies
should be waiting for him there, but when he saw the rocks, he knew that
no man would be there except himself. Yet he felt sure that there must
be some way through the mountains there.
He wandered on, trying to find some point in the cliff which he could
scale. With boots nailed in the soles, he might have tried these crags,
but he was wearing only the cut-down Bluchers which had been given to
him before he left the coast. In these it was quite impossible for him
to climb. They slipped aside from under him. This was the first day in
which hunger became a torment to him. It had been present in him ever
since the first day, but now it possessed him. At about midday he came
to a little lake where there was a dead tree growing out of the water.
Out of the tree came a piercing and terrible crying from a hawk that
seemed to be warning him away. Terrible as the noise was, it was still
companionship in that silence. It was something to see and to hear a
living thing. The hawk had no fear of him. He walked to within twenty
yards of the tree and the hawk looked at him and cried. Presently it
rose and circled round and sank away upon the wind, leaving Sard utterly
alone. He drank of the water of the lake and pushed on up the hillside
to a point where the cliff seemed scaleable. Here as he went he heard
noises that made him think that multitudes of men were at work in the
mountains near him. There were noises of footsteps and of voices, noises
of tools beating upon metals, explosions and the rumblings of machines.
It was now midday, and even at that season the sun had power to loosen
stones from the cliff-face. Little stones were falling all round him
with little rustling patters like stealthy footsteps. Sometimes a bigger
stone would fall, bound for a few feet, and dislodge some other stone.
Sometimes little trails of earth and stone came slithering down. Higher
up on the great crags boulders fell at intervals, thundering like guns
and sending echoes. It was like the laughter of demons.
He reached the summit of the crag and saw beyond him another steep
ascent leading to another wall of rock. This ascent was paved with
rotten stone, into which his feet sank over the ankles at each step. It
was rock made rotten by frost and sun, and it broke like clay under his
feet. The sun burned upon his back as he walked, and wind from the
icefields blew sand into his face. He persevered until he reached the
cliff beyond, only to find that there was no climbing it. It rose up
sheer and the point seemed to overhang. When he tried to scale part of
it, the foothold and the hand-hold gave way beneath him. It was stone
that had ceased to be stone.
In the heat of the day he learnt that there was no pass there across the
mountains. The man had misled him, to bring him into a desert from which
there could be no escape. There was hardly any sign of life in all that
wilderness, except a few evil-looking shrubs about a foot high, so armed
with spines that they seemed all teeth. He had read somewhere that all
things in the desert are deadly. These shrubs, the hawk, the asp basking
in the sun, and the scorpion beneath the rock, were the only dwellers in
that waste.
He made up his mind that there was nothing for it but to go back over
his tracks and start again at the pine trees. Evil as the men there
were, he felt himself drawn towards them, not from companionship nor
from a longing for his kind, but by the thought of the bits of tamale
and beans which had littered the ground about the hung man. He plodded
back across the field of rotten rock, scrambled down again to the lake,
and was amazed to find how little that distance was in returning which
had seemed so vast in the going. He bathed and drank out of the lake,
found some shelter among the rocks from the wind and the sun, made sure
that there were neither snakes nor scorpions there nor any nest of
hornets. He repeated the sailor’s proverb, “He who has water and sleep
has no cause to grumble.”
He slept until the sun went down. He was wakened by the crying of the
hawk. Rousing up from his lair, he saw the bird perched on the tree with
his wings spread, crying what seemed to be a curse upon all that
desolation. Hope suddenly came into Sard, for perhaps there was a nest
with eggs within the tree. He had been too tired to think of it before,
but now the very thought gave him life. He shook with excitement. He
went out and swarmed up the tree, found a nest, and though the hawks
beat at him and struck him with wings and talons, he took the two eggs,
each bigger than a duck’s egg and of a mottled reddish colour. In the
nest was half of a large lizard which the hawk had brought thither. At
other times he would have shrunk from such meat, but now he judged that
if it would nourish the hawk, it would nourish him. He ate it with the
eggs and wished that it had been ten times its size. Having sucked the
eggs, he broke and licked the eggshells. He found that he was not
thinking of the wilderness. His thoughts were almost continually in a
little English country town, at a grocer’s shop, where there were boxes
of eggs at the door. He kept thinking of those boxes of hundreds of eggs
together, perhaps a thousand eggs in one shop, and of rounds of cheese,
weighing a stone apiece. But the eggs were what stirred him most.
Thinking of these eggs, he stumbled and scrambled back over the eleven
miles of rock to the pinewood. From his childhood he had been accustomed
to take bearings wherever he went, and he had little difficulty in
finding his way. In the moonlight he saw the tree with the cut rope
still dangling from the bough. Under the tree was the body of the dead
man, which had been roughly buried where Sard had laid him. His feet
stuck up out of the earth, one bare and one slippered foot. Sard did not
think of him, but of the bits of tamale that had been scattered there
the day before. To his intense joy they were there still; altogether
there were enough bits of tamale and bean pulp to outweigh a ship’s
biscuit. Hungry as he was, he determined to save half of his find for
the next day. He thought, “I depend on a bandit’s hanging for to-day’s
food: to-morrow I need not expect to be so lucky: ‘it is not always
May’: still, ‘God will provide.’”
He followed the tracks of the bandits till he heard a wolf howling, with
a dog answering him howl for howl. Presently, as he went on, he heard
horses squealing at each other: he smelt horses. Next he heard a man
singing in a shrill falsetto, with many shakes, to the twangle of a
guitar.
Following the noise in the moonlight, he came to a flat pan or gully
through which a brook, that had made the gully, still passed on its way
to the sea. The hills came closely about the pan, giving it shelter from
all gales: this (with the water supply) had made it desirable to the
Indians in old time.
The Indians had long since gone from it. It was now peopled by the
outlaws who had done the hanging in the pine-barren: their tracks led
into it; their voices sounded from the midst of it. Sard made out a line
of huts stretching irregularly across the pan on the line of a track or
trail. The falsetto singer was in the midst of the pan, dancing as he
sang. Men were sitting about at the doors of their huts, talking, or at
least uttering remarks.
“Such, indeed, is life.”
“Between Sunday and Monday there is ever midnight.”
“She, being a woman, is, as one may say, a woman.”
“The gringos, the accursed: is there anything more accursed?”
“Good wine, good water and good sausage: truly three good things.”
Sard heard these things uttered with all the dignity of a Solomon
pronouncing judgments. Dogs were nosing about among the huts, picking
bits of tamale. Sard felt that it would be wiser to move boldly down to
the village than to stay skulking in the brush till a dog nosed him. He
walked boldly down into the gully and passed at the back of the first
huts straight into a lover with his lass. Both cursed him under their
breath, but were too much interested in themselves to heed him. He
muttered an apology as he escaped. A few huts further along the line he
came to a corner where an old ruined adobe wall jutting from an occupied
hut made shelter for him. He settled into the shelter, meaning to wait
till the men were quiet, when he hoped to be able to find food or a
pass, perhaps both. He knew that he was in the presence of men who would
cut his throat if they found him, yet he listened to what was going on
with enjoyment.
Two or three men were sitting on the other side of the adobe hut; they
were engaged chiefly in silence, which they sometimes broke with speech,
but more often by spitting. The wind blowing from them brought Sard
wafts of cigarette smoke.
“Was that someone passing at the back of the house?” one asked.
“No,” another said. “It was some dog.”
“To me,” another said, “the noise was as of a pig.”
“A pig or a dog,” the second replied; “when I said that it was a dog, I
meant that it was not a Christian.”
They talked for a while about different kinds of Christians, of which
there seemed to be four sorts: themselves, the ricos, the rojos, and the
gringos. There seemed to be something not quite-quite, something not of
the sincerest milk of the word, about the last three sorts. They talked
about pigs when they had finished with the Christians.
“Never will I be as the gringos,” one said, “who will eat of pig, even
though it be nourished upon their grandmothers.”
“My uncle, who lived not here,” the second said, “being indeed from
Havana, a city of Cuba, sold certain pigs to certain sailors who were
gringos. These pigs these gringos greedily ate; their eyes shone, my
uncle said. Yet were those pigs, pigs that had eaten many Christians.”
“Lo, now,” the third said, “it is not pigs who eat Christians, but
witches, the accursed ones, who take the shape of pigs that they may
eat: this also only gringos do.”
“Yet are the gringos fools,” the first answered. “There is Anselmo, who
spoke with one but yesterday. Hola, Anselmo, come tell us of the gringo
with whom you spoke upon these mountains. Hither, Anselmo. Listen, you,
all of you, that you may die with laughter at what Anselmo tells.”
There was a pause while Anselmo came to the group: there were greetings
of “How so?”; then the first speaker spoke again.
“Anselmo,” he said, “these have not heard of your meeting with the
gringo upon these mountains. Tell them, then.”
“Ah,” Anselmo answered in the voice of him who had shot at Sard the day
before. “It is thus; if you will see. I was in the mountains, in the
pine-barren, where lately a justice of the people was achieved. I,
sauntering there, considering many things, since it is my nature to
consider, beheld suddenly a gringo, beastly even beyond the nature of
such. For a moment I thought, ‘Lo, now, a prospector.’ Then I saw from
certain signs that he was neither this nor that, but an Americano, a
Tejano, an Inglés, what matter? This one (I also saw) was lost, as such
always are if ever they leave a marked road.