Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

  In about a quarter of an hour he came to the river basin, where the road dropped down somewhat into the outskirts of Yuma. Most of the lights were across the river on the Arizona side. He met both Mexicans and Indians who took no apparent notice of him, and this encouraged Adam to go on with them down to a ferryboat.

  The boat was shoved off. Adam saw that it was fastened to the cable overhead by ropes and pulleys. The current worked it across the river. Adam got out with the rest of the passengers, and, leaving them, he walked down the bank a few rods. He found a little dock with a skiff moored to it, and here he lay flat and drank his fill. The water was full of sand, but cool and palatable. Then he washed his face and hands. The latter were swollen and stiff from the cactus thorns, rendering them clumsy.

  Next in order for him was to find a place to eat, and he came at once upon an eating house where several rough-looking white men and some Mexicans were being served by a Chinaman.

  When he ended this meal he had determined upon a course to take. He needed a gun, ammunition, canteen, burro, and outfit; and he hardly expected to be able to purchase them after dark, without exciting suspicion. All the same, he set out to look.

  A short walk brought Adam to a wide street, dimly lighted by the flare of lamps from open doors of saloons and stores. He halted in a shadow on the corner. A stream of men was passing--rugged, unshaven, dusty-booted white men, and Mexicans with their peaked sombreros and embroidered jackets and tight braided trousers.

  Presently Adam ventured forth and walked up the street. The town resembled Picacho in its noisiest hours, magnified many times. He felt a wildness he could not see or hear. It dragged at him. It somehow made him a part of the frontier life. He longed to escape from himself.

  A glimpse of a tall man in black frock coat startled Adam. That coat reminded him of Collishaw. He sheered down a side street into the gloom. He saw wagons and heard the munch of horses in stalls. Evidently this place was a barnyard and might afford him a safe retreat for the night. The first wagon he examined contained straw. Climbing into it he lay down. For a long time he lay there, worrying over the risk he must run next day, until at length he fell asleep.

  When day dawned, however, Adam had not such overpowering dread. The sun was rising in red splendour and the day promised to be hot. As it was early, but few people were to be encountered, and this fact lent Adam more' courage. He had no difficulty in finding the place where he had eaten the night before. Adam ate as heartily as he could, not because he was hungry, but for the reason that he had an idea, he might haw to travel far on this meal.

  That done, he sallied forth to find a store where he could purchase the outfit he needed; and he approached the business section by a street that climbed to what was apparently the highest point in Yuma.

  Adam entered a store, and almost forgot himself in the interest of the purchases he wanted to make. He needed a small mule, or burro, to pack his outfit, and while the storekeeper went out to get it for Adam several Mexicans entered. One of them recognised Adam. He cried out, "Santa Maria!" and ran out, followed by his amazed but less hurried comrades. It took Adam a moment to place the man in mind. Felix I the Mexican that had drawn a knife on Arallanes.

  Therefore Adam pondered. He must take risks to get away with this necessary outfit. The storekeeper, who had gone out through the back of the store, returned to say he could furnish a good burro ready to be packed at once. Adam made a deal with him for the whole outfit and began to count out the money. The storekeeper did not wait, and, gathering up an armful of Adam's purchases, he carried them out through the back door. This gave Adam opportunity to have a look from the front door into the street. There strode Felix, gesticulating wildly to the white man Adam had seen before, the black-coated tall Collishaw, significant and grim, with a white bandage over his face.

  A shock pierced Adam's heart, and it was followed by a terrible icy compression, and then a bursting gush of blood, a flood of fire over all his body. Leaping like a deer, he bounded back through the store, out of the door, and across an open space full of implements, wagons, and obstacles he had to run around or jump over. He did not see the storekeeper. One vault took him over a high board fence into an alley, and through this he ran into a street. He headed for the river, running fleetly, blind to all around him but the ground flying under his feet and the end of the street. He gained that. The river, broad and swirling, lay beneath him. Plunging down the bank, he flew toward the dock. Upon reaching the dock, Adam espied a skiff, with oars in place, with bow pulled up on the sand. One powerful shove sent it, with him aboard, out into the stream. He bent the oars in his long, strong sweeps, and it took him only a few moments to cross. Not yet had any men appeared in pursuit or even to take notice of him. As he jumped out on the California shore of the river and began to run north, he found that he faced the lone black mountain peak which dominated the rise of the desert. The dust was ankle deep. It stifled him, choked him, and caked on his sweaty face and hands. He strode swiftly, oppressed by the dust and intolerant of the confining borders of yellow brush. The frequent bends in the road were at once a relief and a dread. They hid him, yet obstructed his own view. He seemed obsessed by a great, passionate energy to escape. When he looked back he thought of Collishaw, of sure pursuit; when he looked ahead he thought of the road, the dust, the brush into which he wanted to hide, the physical things to be overcome.

  By and bye he climbed and passed out of the zone of brush. He was on the open gravel ridges, like the ridges of a washboard, up and down, and just as bare. Vet, as a whole, there was a distinct slope upward. He could not see the level of the desert, but the lone mountain peak, close at hand now, red and black and shining, towered bleakly over him.

  Adam derived satisfaction from the fact that the hard gravel ridges did not take imprint of his boots. Assured now that escape was in his grasp, he began to put his mind upon other considerations of his flight. He was not such a fool as to underrate the danger of his venturing out upon the desert without food, and especially without water. Already he was thirsty. These thoughts, and counter ones, pressed hard upon him until he surmounted the long slope to the top of the desert mesa. Here he looked back.

  First he saw clouds of dust puffing up from the brush-covered lowlands, and then, in an open space where the road crossed, he espied horsemen coming at a gallop. Again, and just as fiercely, did his veins seem to freeze, his blood to halt, and then to burst into flame.

  "Collishaw--and his men!" gasped Adam, his jaw dropping. "They've trailed me!...They're after me--on horses!"

  The apparent fact was terrific in its stunning force. Adam reeled; his sight blurred. It was a full moment before he could rally his forces. Then, gazing keenly, he saw that his pursuers were still miles away.

  At first he ran fleetly, with endurance apparently unimpaired; but he meant to slow down and husband his strength as soon as he dared. Before him stretched a desert floor of fine, shining gravel, like marbles, absolutely bare of any vegetation for what seemed hundreds of yards; and then began to appear short bunches of low meagre brush called greasewood, and here and there isolated patches of ocatilla. These multiplied and enlarged in the distance until they looked as if they would afford cover enough to hide Adam from his pursuers. Hot, wet with sweat, strong, and panting, he ran another mile, to find the character of the desert changing.

  Reaching the zone of plant life, he soon placed a thin but effective barrier of greasewood and ocatilla behind him. Then he slowed down to catch his breath. Before him extended a vast hazy expanse, growing darker with accumulated growths in the distance. To the right rose the chocolate mountain range, and it ran on to fade in the dim horizon. Behind him now stood the lone black peak, and to the left rose a low, faint wavering line of white, like billows of a sea. This puzzled him until at length he realised it was sand. Sand--and it, like the range, faded in the distant horizon.

  Adam also made the discovery that as he looked back over his shoulder he was really looking down
a long, gradual slope. Plainly he could see the edge of the desert where he had come up, and often, as he travelled along at a jog trot, he gazed around with fearful expectancy. He had imagined that his running had given rise to the breeze blowing in his face. But this was not so. A rather stiff wind was blowing straight at him. It retarded his progress, and little puffs of fine, invisible sand or dust irritated his eyes. Then the tears would flow and wash them clear again. With all his senses and feelings there mingled a growing preponderance of thought or realisation of the tremendous openness of the desert. He felt as though a door of the universe had opened to him, and all before him was boundless. He had no fear of it; indeed, there seemed a comfort in the sense of being lost in such a vastness; but there was something intangible working on his mind. The wind weighed upon him, the coppery sky weighed upon him, the white sun weighed upon him, and his feet began to take hold of the ground. How hot the top of his head and his face! All at once the sweat appeared less copious and his skin drier. With this came a strong thirst. The saliva of his mouth was pasty and scant. He swallowed hard and his throat tightened. A couple of pebbles that he put into his mouth mitigated these last sensations.

  Intelligence gave him pause then, and he halted in his tracks. If death Was relentlessly pursuing him, it was no less confronting him there to the fore, if he passed on out of reach of the river. Death from thirst was preferable to capture, but Adam was not ready to die. He who had loved life clung to it all the more fiercely now that the sin of Cain branded his soul. He still felt unlimited strength and believed that he could go far. But the sun was hotter than he had ever experienced it; the heat appeared to strike up from the earth as well as burn down from above; and it was having a strange effect upon him. He had sensed a difficulty in keeping to a straight line of travel, and at first had put it down to his instinct for zigzagging to his grease-wood bush and that oratilla plant to place them behind him. Moving on again, he turned towards the chocolate mountain and the river.

  It seemed close. He saw the bare grey desert with its green growths slope gradually to the rugged base of the range. Somewhere between him and there ran the river. He strained his eyesight. How strangely and clearly the lines of one ridge merged into the lines of another There must be distance between them. But it could not be seen. The range looked larger and farther away the more he studied it--the air more full of transparent haze, the red and russet and chocolate hues more quiveringly suggestive of illusion.

  "Look here," panted Adam, as he halted once more. "I've been told about the desert. But I didn't pay particular attention and now I can't remember. I only know it's hot--and this won't do."

  It was just then that Adam, gazing back down the grey desert, saw puffs of dust and horses.

  Panic seized him. He ran directly away from his pursuers, bending low, looking neither to right nor to left, violent, furious, heedless, like an animal in flight. And with no sense of direction, with no use of reason, he ran on till he dropped.

  Then his breast seemed to split and his heart to lift with terrific pressure, agonising and suffocating. He lay on the ground and gasped, with his mouth in the dust. Gradually the paroxysm subsided.

  He arose to go on, hot, dry, aching, dizzy, but still strong in his stride.

  "I've--got--away," he said, "and now--the river--the river."

  Fear of Collishaw had been dulled. Adam could think of little besides the heat and his growing thirst, and this thing--the desert--that was so strange, so big, so menacing. It did not alarm him that his skin was no longer wet with sweat, but the fact struck him singularly.

  The wind was blowing sand in his face, obstructing his sight. Suddenly his feet dragged in sand. Dimly then he made out low sand dunes with hollows between, and farther on larger dunes waving and billowing on to rise to what seemed mountains of sand. He saw them as through a veil of dust. Turning away, he plodded on, half blinded, fighting the blast of wind that was growing stronger. The air cleared somewhat. Sand dunes were all around him, and to his right, in the direction he thought was wrong, loomed the chocolate range. He went that way, and again the flying sand hid a clear view. A low, seeping, silken rustle filled the air, sometimes rising to a soft roar. He thought of what he had heard about sand-storms, but he knew this was not one. Unwittingly he had wandered into the region of the dunes, and the strong gusty wind swept up the fine sand in sheets and clouds. He must get out. It could not be far to the level desert again. He plodded on, and the way he chose, with its intermittent views of the mountains, at last appeared to be the wrong one. So he turned again. And as he turned, a stronger wind, now at his back, whipped up the sand till all was pale yellow around him, thick and opaque and moaning, through which the sun shone with strange magenta hue. He did not dare rest or wait. He had to plod on. And the way led through soft, uneven sand, always dragging at his feet.

  After a while Adam discovered that when he trudged down into the hollows between dunes he became enveloped in flying sand that forced him to cover mouth and eyes with his scarf and go choking on, but when he climbed up over a dune the air became clearer and he could breathe easier. Thus instinctively he favoured the ascents, and thus he lost himself in a world of curved and sculptured sand dunes, grey and yellow through the flying mists, or steely silver under the gleaming sunlight. The wind lulled, letting the sand settle, and then he saw he was lost as upon a trackless ocean, with no landmarks in sight. On all sides heaved beautiful white mounds of sand, ribbed and waved and laced with exquisitely delicate knife-edged curves. And these crests changed like the crests of waves, only, instead of flying spray, these were curled and shadowed veils of sand blowing from the scalloped crowns. Then again the wind, swooping down, whipped and swept the sand in low thick sheets on and on over the dunes, until thin rising clouds obscured the sky.

  Adam climbed on, growing weaker. As the heat had wrought strangely upon his blood, so the sand had dragged strength from his legs. His situation was grave, but, though he felt the dread and pity of it, a certain violence of opposition had left him. That was in his will. He feared more the instinctive reaction--the physical resistance that was growing in him. Merryvale had told him how men lost on the desert could die of thirst in one day. But Adam had scarcely credited that; certainly he did not believe it applicable to himself. He realised, however, that unless he somehow changed the present condition sun and sand would overwhelm him. So when from a high knoll of sand he saw down into a large depression, miles across, where clumps of mesquites showed black against the silver, he descended toward them and eventually reached them, ready indeed to drop into the shade.

  Here under a thick-foliaged mesquite he covered his, face with a handkerchief, his head with his coat, and settled himself to rest and wait. It was a wise move. At once he felt by contrast what the fierce sun had been. Gradually the splitting headache subsided to a sensation that seemed to Adam like a gentle boiling of blood in his brain. He could hear it. His dry skin became a little moist; the intolerable burn left it: his heart and pulse ceased such laboured throbbing; and after a time his condition was limited to less pain, a difficulty in breathing, and thirst. These were bearable.

  From time to time Adam removed the coverings to look about him. The sun was westering. When it sank the wind would cease to blow and then he could find a way out of this wilderness of sand dunes. Leaning back against a low branch of the tree, he stretched out, and such was his exhaustion and the restfulness of the posture that he fell asleep.

  When he awoke he felt better, though half smothered. He had rested. His body was full of dull aches, but no more pain. His mouth did not appear so dry or his tongue so swollen; nevertheless, the thirst remained, giving his throat a sensation of puckering, such as he remembered he used to have after eating green persimmons.

  Then Adam, suddenly realising what covered his head, threw off the coat and handkerchief. And his eyes were startled by such a sight as they had never beheld--a marvellous unreality of silver sheen and black shadow, a starry tracery of l
abyrinthine streams on a medium as weird and beautiful and intangible as a dream.

  "0 God! am I alive or dead?" he whispered in awe. And his voice proved to him that he and his burden had not slipped into the oblivion of the beyond.

  Night hal fallen. The moon had arisen. The stars shone lustrously. The sky burned a deep rich blue. And all this unreal beauty that had mocked him was only the sculptured world of sand translating the magnificence and splendour of the heavens.

  More than all else, Adam grew sensitive to the oppressiveness of the silence. His first steps were painful, a staggering, halting gait, that exercise at length worked into some semblance of his old stride. The cold desert air invigorated him, and it it had not been for the discomfort of thirst he would have been doing well under the circumstances.

  A sense of direction that had nothing to do with his intelligence prompted him to face east. He obeyed it. And he walked for what seemed hours over a moon-blanched sea of sand, to climb at last a high dune from which he saw the dark, level floor of the desert, and far across the shadowy space a black range of mountains. He thought he recognised the rugged contour, and when, sweeping his gaze southward, he saw the lone mountain looming like a dark sentinel over the desert gateway, then he was sure of his direction. Over there to the east lay the river. And he had long hours of the cool night to travel.

  From this vantage point Adam looked back over the silver sea of sand dunes; and such was the sight of it that even in his precarious condition he was stirred to his depths. The huge oblong silver moon hung low over that vast heaving stretch of desert. It was a wasteland, shimmering with its belts and plains of moonlit sand, blank and mysterious in its shadows, an abode of loneliness. An inexplicable sadness pervaded Adam's soul. This wasteland and he seemed identical. How strange to feel that he did not want to leave it! Life could not be sustained in this sepulchre of the desert. But it was not life that his soul yearned for then--only peace. And peace dwelt there in that solitude of the sands.