by Zane Grey
Then followed a black and horrible interval in which he seemed hauled across a pale shingle of naked earth, peopled with spectres, a wandering, lost man, still alive but half dead, leashed to the spirits of burros he had driven to their death. Uphill, always uphill they pulled him, with his feet clogged by the clutching sands. A grey dawn broke, and his entrance into the light resembled climbing out of sombre depths to the open world. Another drab wall of iron rock seemed to loom over him. The valley of the white shadows of death had been crossed. A green patch of mesquites and cottonwoods gleamed cool and dark out of the grey sands. The burros ran, with bobbing packs, straight to the water they had scented. Staggering on after them, Adam managed to remove their burdens; and that took the remnant of his strength. Yielding to a dead darkness of sense, he fell under the trees.
When he came to the day had far advanced and the sun, sloping to the west, was sinking behind the Panamints. Adam stumbled up, his muscles numb, as if contracted and robbed of their elasticity. His thirst told the story of that day’s heat, which had parched him, even while he lay asleep in the shade. Hunger did not trouble him. Either he was weak from exertion or had suffered from breathing poisoned air or had lost something of his equilibrium. Whatever was wrong, it surely behoved him to get out of the lower part of the valley, up above sea level to a place where he could regain his strength. To that end he hunted for his burros. They were close by, and he soon packed them, though with much less than his usual dexterity. Then he started, following the course of the running water.
This Furnace Creek ran down out of a deep-mouthed canyon, with yellow walls of gravel. The water looked like vinegar, and it was hot and had a bad taste. Yet it would sustain life of man and beasts. Adam followed the lines of mesquites that marked its course up the gradually ascending floor of the canyon. He soon felt a loosening of the weight upon his lungs, and lessening of air pressure. Twilight caught him a couple of miles up the canyon where a wide, long thicket of weeds and grass and mesquites marked the turning of Furnace Creek into the drab hills, and where springs and little streams trickled down from the arroyos.
Up one of these arroyos, in the midst of some gnarled mesquites, Adam made camp. Darkness soon set in, and he ate by the light of a camp fire. After he had partaken of food he discovered that he was hungry. Also, his eyelids drooped heavily. Despite these healthy reactions and a deeper interest in his surroundings, Adam knew he was not entirely well. He endeavoured to sit up awhile, and tried to think. There were intervals when a deadlock occurred between thoughts. The old pleasure, the old watchful listening, the old intimate sense of loneliness, had gone from him. His mind did not seem to be on physical things at hand, or on the present moment. And when he actually discovered that all the time he looked down toward Death Valley he exclaimed, aghast: “I’m not here; I’m down there!”
Gloomy and depressed, he rolled in his blankets. And he slept twelve hours. Next day he felt better in body, but no different in mind. He set to work making a comfortable camp in spite of the fact that he did not seem to want to stay there. Hard work and plenty of food improved his condition. His strength of limb soon rallied to rest and nourishment. But the strange state of mind persisted, and began to encroach upon every moment. It took effort of will to attend to any action. Dismukes must be in this locality somewhere, according to the little map, but, though Adam remembered this, and reflected how it accounted for his own presence there, he could not dwell seriously upon the fact. Dismukes seemed relegated to the vague future. There was an impondering present imperative something that haunted Adam, yet eluded his grasp. At night he walked under the stars and could not shake off the spell; and next day, when in an idle hour he found himself walking again and again down the gravel-bedded canyon toward Death Valley, then he divined that what he had attributed to absentmindedness was a far more serious aberration.
The discovery brought about a shock that quickened his mental processes. What ailed him? He was well and strong again. What was wrong with his mind? Where had gone the old dreaming content, the self-sufficient communion with all visible forms of nature, and the half-conscious affinity with all the invisible spirit of the wilderness? How strangely he had been warped out of his orbit! Something nameless and dreadful and calling had come between him and his consciousness. Why did he face the west, at dawn, in the solemn white-hot noon, at the red sunset hour, and in the silent lonely watches of the night? Why did not the stars of the east lure his dreamy gaze as those in the west? He made the astounding discovery that there were moments, and moments increasing in number, when he did not feel alone. Some one walked in his shadow at noontide. At twilight a spirit seemed in keeping with his wandering westward steps. The world and natural objects and old habits seemed far off. He found himself whispering vagrant fancies, the substance of which, once realised, was baffling and disheartening. And at last he divined that a longing to return to Death Valley consumed him.
“Ah! So that’s it!” he muttered, in consternation.
“But why?”
It came to Adam then — the secret of the mystery. Death Valley called him. All that it was, all that it contained, all he had lived there, sent out insidious and enchanting voices of terrible silent power. The long shadow of that valley of purple shadows still enveloped him. Death, desolation, and decay; the appalling nudity of the racked bowels of the earth; the abode of solitude and silence, where shrieked the furies of the midnight winds; the grave of Magdalene Virey — these haunted Adam and lured him back with resistless and insupportable claim.
“Death Valley again — for me. I shall go mad,” soliloquised Adam.
At last his mind was slowly being unhinged by the forces of the desert. Some places of the earth were too strong, too inhuman, too old, and too wasted for any man. Adam realised his peril, and that the worst of his case consisted in an indifference which he did not want to combat. Unless something happened — a great, intervening, destructive agent to counteract the all enfolding, trancelike spell of Death Valley — Adam would return to the valley of avalanches and there he would go mad.
And the very instant he resigned himself, a cry pierced his dull ear. Sharply he sat up. The hour was near the middle of the forenoon. The day was hot and still. Adam’s pulses slowly quieted down. He had been mistaken. The water babbled by his camp, bees flew over with droning hum. Then as he relaxed he was again startled by a cry, faint and far off. It appeared to come from up the canyon, round the low yellow corner of wall. He listened intently, but the sound was not repeated. Was not the desert full of silent voices? About this cry there was a tangible reality that stirred Adam out of his dreams, his glooms.
Adam went on, and climbed up the gravel bank on the left side, to a bare slope, and from that to the top of a ridge. His sluggish blood quickened. The old exploring instinct awoke. He had heard a distant cry. What next? There was something in the air.
Then Adam gazed around him to a distance. Adam shuddered and thrilled at the beetling, rugged, broken walls that marked the gateway where so often he had stood with Magdalene Virey to watch the transformations of shadowed dawn and sunset in Death Valley.
He descended to a level, and strode on, looking everywhere, halting now and then to listen, every moment gaining some hold on his old self. He went on and on, slow and sure, missing not a rod of ground, as if the very stones might speak to him. He welcomed his growing intensity of sensation, because it meant that he had either received a premonition or had reverted to his old self, or perhaps both.
Adam plodded along this wide gravel wash, with the high bronze saw-toothed peaks of the Funerals on the left, and some yellow-clay dunes showing their tips over the bank on the right. At length he came to a place that suggested a possible sloping of these coloured clay dunes down into a basin or canyon. Climbing up the bank, he took a few steps across the narrow top, there to be halted as if he had been struck.
He had been confronted by a tremendous amphitheatre, a yellow gulf, a labyrinthine maze so astounding that
he discredited his sight.
Before him and on each side the earth was as bare as the bareness of rock — a mystic region of steps and slopes and slants, of channels and dunes and mounds, of cone-shaped and fan-shaped ridges, all of denuded crinkly clay with tiny tracery of erosion as graceful as the veins of a leaf, all merging their marvellous hues in a mosaic of golden amber, of cream yellow, of mauve, of bronze cinnamon. How bleak and ghastly, yet how beautiful in their stark purity of denudation! Endless was the number of smooth, scalloped, and ribbed surfaces, all curving with exquisite line and grace down into the dry channels under the dunes. At the base of the lower circle of the amphitheatre the golds and yellows and russets were strongest, but along the wide wing, moving away toward the abyss below were more vividly wonderful hues — a dark, beautiful mouse colour on the left contrasting with a strange pearly cream on the other. These were striking bands of colour sweeping the eye away as far as they extended, and jealously drawing it back again. Between these great corners of the curve, climbed ridges of grey and heliotrope to meet streaks of green — the mineral green of copper, like the colour of the sea in sunlight — and snowy traceries of white that were narrow veins of outcropping borax. High up above the rim of the amphitheatre along the battlements of the mountain, stood out a zigzag belt of rusty red, from which the iron stain had run downward to tinge the lower hues. Above all this wondrous colouration upheaved the bare breast of the mountain, growing darker with earthy browns until the bold ramparts of the peak, grey like rock, gleamed pale against the leaden-blue sky. Low down through the opening of the amphitheatre gleamed a void, a distant bottom of the bowl, dim and purple and ghastly, with shining white streaks like silver streams — and this was Death Valley.
And then Adam, with breast oppressed by feelings too deep for utterance, retracted his far-seeing gaze, once more to look over the whole amazing spectacle, from the crinkly buff clay under his feet to the dim white bottom of the valley. And at this keen instant he again heard a cry. Human it was, or else he had lost his mind, and all which he saw here was disordered imagination.
Turning back, he ran in the direction whence he believed the sound had come, passing by some rods the point where he had climbed out of the wash. And at the apex of the great curve, toward which tended all the multitude of wrinkles of the denuded slopes, he found a trail coming up out of the amphitheatre and leading down into the wash. The dust bore unmistakable signs of fresh moccasin tracks, of hobnailed boots, and of traces where water had been spilled. The boot impressions led down and the moccasin tracks up; and, as these latter were the fresher, Adam, after a pause of astonishment and a keen glance all around, began to follow them.
The trail led across the wash and turned west toward where the walls commenced to take on the dignity of a canyon. Bunches of sage and greasewood began to dot the sand, and beyond showed the thickets of mesquite. Some prospector was packing water from the creek up the canyon and down into that amphitheatre. Suddenly Adam thought of Dismukes. He examined the next hobnailed boot track he descried in the dust with minute care. The foot that had made it did not belong to Dismukes. Adam hurried on.
He came upon a spot where the man he was trailing — surely an Indian — had fallen in the sand. A dark splotch, sticky and wet, had never been made by spilled water. Adam recognised blood when he touched it, but if he had not known it by the feel, he surely would have by the smell. Probably at that instant Adam became fully himself again. He was on the track of events, he sensed some human being in trouble and the encroaching spell of Death Valley lost its power.
The trail led into the mesquites, to a wet glade rank with sedge and dank with the damp odour of soapy water.
A few more hurried strides brought Adam upon the body of an Indian, lying face down at the edge of the trickling little stream. His lank matted hair was bloody. A ragged, torn, and stained shirt bore further evidence of violence. Adam turned him over, seeing at a glance that he had been terribly beaten about the head with a blunt instrument. He was gasping. Swiftly Adam scooped up water in his hat. He had heard that kind of a gasp before. Lifting the Indian’s head, Adam poured water into the open mouth. Then he bathed the bloodstained face.
The Indian was of the tribe that had packed supplies for the Vireys. He was apparently fatally hurt. It was evident that he wanted to speak. And from the incoherent mixture of language which these Indians used in conversation with white men Adam gathered significant details of gold, of robbers, of something being driven round and round, grinding stone like maize.
“Arrastra!” queried Adam.
The Indian nodded, and made a weak motion of his hand toward the trail that led to the yellow wilderness of clay, and then further gestures, which, with a few more gutturally whispered words, gave Adam the impression that a man of huge bulk, wide of shoulder, was working the old Spanish treadmill — arrastra — grinding for gold. Then the Indian uttered, with a last flash of spirit, the warning he could not speak, and, falling back, he gasped and faded into unconsciousness.
Adam stood up, thinking hard, muttering aloud some of his thoughts.
“Arrastra!...That was the way of Dismukes — to grind for gold...He’s here — somewhere — down in that yellow hole...Robbers have jumped his claim — probably are holding him — torturing him to tell of hidden gold...and they beat this poor Indian to death.”
There was necessity for quick thought and quick action. The Indian was not dead, but he soon would be. Adam could do nothing for him. It was imperative to decide whether to wait here for the return of the water carrier or at once follow the trail to the yellow clay slopes. Adam wore a gun, but it held only two unused shells, and there was no more ammunition in his pack. The Indian had no weapon. Perhaps the water carrier would be armed. If Dismukes were dead, there need be no rash hurry to avenge him; if he lived as prisoner a little time more or less would not greatly matter. Adam speedily decided to wait a reasonable time for the man who packed water, and, if he came, to kill him and then hurry up the trail. There was, in this way, less danger of being discovered, and, besides, one of the robbers dispatched would render the band just so much weaker. Adam especially favoured this course because of the possibility of getting a weapon.
“And more,” muttered Adam, “if he happens to be a tall man I can pretend to be him — packing water back.”
Therefore Adam screened himself behind a thick clump of mesquite near the trail and waited in ambush like a panther ready to spring.
As he crouched there, keen eyes up the canyon, ears like those of a listening deer, there flashed into Adam’s mind one of Magdalene Virey’s unforgettable remarks. “The power of the desert over me lies somewhere in my strange faculty of forgetting self. I watch, I hear, I feel, I smell, but I don’t think. Just a gleam — a fleeting moment — then the state of consciousness or lack of consciousness is gone! But in that moment lies the secret lure of the desert. Its power over men!”
Swiftly as it had come the memory passed, and Adam became for fleeting moments at a time the embodiment of Magdalene Virey’s philosophy, all unconscious when thought was absent from feeling. The hour was approaching midday and the wind began to rustle the mesquites and seep the sand. Adam smelled a dry dust somewhat tangy, and tasted the bitterness of it as he licked his lips. Flies had began to buzz around the dead Indian. Instinctively Adam gazed aloft, and, yes, there far above him circled a vulture, and above that another, sweeping down from the invisible depths of blue, magically ringing a flight around the heavens, with never a movement of wings. They sailed round and round, always down. Where did they come from? What power poised them so surely in the air?
Adam waited. All at once his whole body vibrated with the leap of his heart. A tall, hulking man hove in sight, balancing a bar across his shoulder, from each end of which hung a large bucket. These buckets swung to and fro with the fellow’s steps. Like a lazy man, he advanced leisurely. Adam saw a little puff of smoke lift from the red, indistinct patch that was this water carrier’s
face. He had cigarette or pipe. As he approached nearer and nearer, Adam received steadily growing and changing impressions of the man he was about to kill, until they fixed in the image of a long, loosely jointed body, a soiled shirt open at the neck, bare brown arms, and cruel red face. Just outside the mesquites the robber halted to peer at the spot where the Indian had fallen, and then ahead as if he expected to see a body lying in the trail.
“Ho! Ho! if thet durned Injin I beat didn’t crawl way down hyar! An’ his brains oozin’ out!” he ejaculated, hoarsely, as he strode between the scratching mesquites, swinging the crossbar and buckets sidewise. “Takes a hell of a lot to kill some critters!”
Like a released spring Adam shot up. His big hands flashed to cut off a startled yell.
“Not so much!” he called, grimly, and next instant his giant frame strung to the expenditure of mighty effort.
At noon the wind was blowing a gusty gale and the sun shone a deep, weird, magenta colour through the pall of yellow dust. The sky was not visible. Down on the ridges and in the washes dust sheets were whipped up at intervals. Clouds of flying sand rustled through the air, and sometimes the wind had force enough to carry grains of gravel. These intermittent blasts resembled the midnight furnace winds, except for the strange fact that they were not so hot, so withering. Every few minutes the canyon would be obscured in sweeping, curling streaks and sheets of dust. Then, as the gale roared away, the dust settled and the air again cleared. But high up, the dull, yellow pall hung, apparently motionless, with that weird sun, like a red-orange moon seen through haze, growing darker.
The fury of the elements seemed to favour Adam. Heat and gale and obscurity could tend only to relax the vigilance of men. Adam counted upon surprising the gang. To his regret, he had found no weapon on the robber he had overcome. Wearing the man’s slouch sombrero pulled down, and carrying the water buckets suspended from the bar across his shoulders, Adam believed that in the thick of the duststorm he might approach near the gang, perhaps get right among them.
