by H. F. Heard
A slight cloud of irritation, I know, crossed my mind. Was the old man just putting it on, putting me in my place, or was it really necessary? Well, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. He handed me a list of things he wanted bought—the usual stuff for a hiking trip—sleeping sacks, camp-cooking kit, some food purchases, etc.
“Meet me,” he said, “in the railway waiting hall at one forty-five,” and I trotted off obediently enough.
His bundle, when we met, was smaller than mine. I felt I had done the major labor. When we were in the train, which was largely empty, he unpacked and rearranged part of it. I remember that I caught sight of very heavy waterproof gloves.
“I thought,” I said, “we were going to the desert? It’s cold often at night, but this isn’t the season when we’ll have even a shower, or find a hole with any water in it.”
He looked up. “A shower?” he said. “A gusher, then, maybe?”
I felt the remark might be aimed at my talkativeness. It hurt me and I resolved I would ask the old man no questions, not even when we should arrive, wherever it might be.
We rumbled on. I read. Night came. We slept. He read too. Well, I could keep up silence quite as well as he. The next day also began to wear. I was then idly looking out over a landscape which now had become nothing but a huge-scale chart of geology. The train had paused—it was a pausing train, falling into meditations in places which seemed made for that and nothing else. This pause place was precisely like the last half-dozen. But Mr. Mycroft got up.
“We are getting out here,” he said.
True to my resolve not to ask questions, if he wished to be noncommittal, I looked out and down from the carriage window. A small shack was standing quite close to the line. Already my packages were being unloaded. Outside we stepped into a heat which made me for a moment cease to look and only feel. The huge landscape, with its unsealed perspectives, seemed much more like a close, suffocating room, than the air-conditioned train we had just left. This large black cylinder of civilization, within which we had been introduced into this inhuman desert world, now snorted, jerked itself violently out of its temporary torpor, gave a sad wail and drew off. We might have been marooned on the moon, at full-moon midday. I’d tried to give Mr. Mycroft the impression that I knew this country. But in fact I had never been actually dipped into the full desert before. I had just passed through it in the train, which is really like taking a short trip in a submarine—you peer out into another element but you are never actually in touch with it. And of course I had made a trip or two in favorable weather to one or two of the desert parks. Now, I felt I was far from home.
Mr. Mycroft was, however, in careful conversation with a man who had emerged from the shadow of the shack. As I, having pulled myself together, came up to him, he turned to me.
“Mr. Silchester, this is Mr. Kerson,” and, the introduction over, “Step one is taken, and, as far as I can judge, in the right direction. Now for step two.”
He, Kerson, and I, when I saw their drift, lugged our parcels in the heat and glare to the other side of the shack. There a car was waiting. By now the train had diminished to a black spot with a dark blur above it, both shrinking as you watched. How one used to hate soot and smoke and soot-stained iron. Yet now that I was surrounded by a world of hard clear color—an earth of fawn-yellow, framed by mountains of amethyst and lapis and shut in by a sky of unflawed sapphire—I looked longingly after the one rapidly shrinking stain on the whole vast landscape. Now nothing was left but the frail parallels of the tracks stretching away until they became a fine black thread—all that united us with anything human.
“Everything’s in,” said Mr. Mycroft’s voice; and, irritatedly ashamed that I hadn’t helped, and at my own misgivings toward the desert. I followed him into the car.
“Where are we going?” I could not help asking. For now I noticed that there was no road and we were pointed away from the railway line.
“Mr. Kerson is right,” Mr. Mycroft replied. “The surface is excellent and he tells me that it is so for many miles. We shall be running along the edges and floors of a chain of dried-up lakes.”
The heat was terrific, but after the first shock of it—like standing in front of an open oven—I found that I began to adapt. It was absolutely dry and that, I understand, keeps you going, though, I must say, after a while, I began to feel round the nose and lips rather like a lizard. I don’t know how far we drove; pretty fast going it was, on those flat floors of hard sand. At last I noticed the shadows rimming hills or mountains (you couldn’t judge their scale without a living thing to help the eye form a judgment) beginning to make big bays of blue cut out of the fawn-yellow. As we crossed the next rib of rougher ground, which separated these fossil lakes, I heard Kerson say to Mr. Mycroft, “Back of that tumble of stone to the left I’ve made a dump.”
We drove up to it. He switched off the engine, and a silence, which one guessed had hung above our little buzz of self-made sound, suddenly swooped. I suppose it wasn’t more than a few seconds, for neither Mr. Mycroft nor Kerson—a man who looked as desiccated as the desert itself—seemed to pause. They got out and I followed. It seemed a second step out and down—the first out of the train, and now out into something more distant and deeper. After a few steps Kerson turned sharp to the left and disappeared. So clear was the air in that place that he might have stepped right through the flat painted sheet of scenery which seemed to have no depth. When I came up I saw that there was quite a fair-sized ravine at one’s feet; but, though it was some fifty yards across, one had, till one stood on the brink, no idea that there was this gap in the earth. Under some huge boulders which crested the rim was a cave into which Kerson had gone. Inside were set out some stores and it looked as comfortable as a log cabin—more so, for it was cool and spacious. Our guide set about getting supper ready.
“Come with me, Mr. Silchester,” said Mr. Mycroft. “We’ll cover up the car and bring in the luggage.” I followed him out. While we carried out these details he said, “Kerson is one of my trade, gone eremite. The tracker, of course, is the prehistoric detective. This man has a small trading-post some fifty miles from here for serving the Indians—we’re not far from a big reservation. As soon as I had made my preliminary studies for this case—with which I need not bother you now—I knew that I would have to keep an eye on the desert. You could tell me, I soon learned, of Mr. Intil himself; but someone else I should need to tell me of his goal.”
“It’s a pretty large target.”
“But marvelously clear and empty.”
“Still, here a man could be lost for good and no one know.”
“Yes, he might be lost; but I’d take a large wager that though all this seems so vast and empty, some eye, though it might not see the moment of his perishing, would have noted him going to his doom. The Indians are natural watchers, onlookers. They won’t interfere, if they can help it. They won’t even tell what they have seen, unless there seems good reason. But one of them will have seen. Of his nature, he cannot help noticing. He doesn’t like strangers, still less trespassers. So he’ll generally leave them alone even when they have got themselves in extremis.”
“But has Kerson any news of our man?” I asked a little impatiently.
“I’d have hardly brought us out here, if he hadn’t.”
We had finished shifting our baggage and as we passed behind the boulders and picked our way into the cave, Mr. Mycroft spoke to Kerson, who was sitting on the smooth earth floor cooking with a pressure stove.
“Would you please repeat to us two your record of the stranger’s moves three days ago?”
Without turning from his work and in a flat drawl the trader recited, as though he were reading off a ship’s log, “Blue Feather saw man with two burros—he may have gotten ’em off that old prospector Sanderson. He used to be all over this once. Not been seen for quite a while now—perhaps he’s lying up somewhere. Being Scotch, off and on he takes a rest just on ‘Scotch.’ Blue Feathe
r watched burros and man ’way along this trail. They went on from here quite a bit. ’Course that outfit (if he can keep not too far from water and knows his trails) can go from here to Canada. We’ll be able to follow the start anyhow. Blue Feather says they’re clear a good way on from this.”
Mr. Mycroft made no comment, but started getting coffee ready on another stove. As I was, I supposed, meant to fit in, I unrolled our bedding and spread it on the broad sill or platform which ran on either side of the cave. When I turned, Kerson was forking out fried bacon and eggs onto battered tin plates and Mr. Mycroft had collected an equally weather-beaten fleet of mugs. The fact that the dinner service looked like the salvage from a refuse heap did not “put me off my victuals.” The smell was excellent and I was hungry in that rare air. What made me feel, if not distaste, at least a slight hesitation over this highly fragrant meal was its main setting. Through the cave’s mouth one saw—as it seemed, almost close enough to be touched—a mountain of solid amethyst. It looked as though it were made of one immense crystal, too smooth and steep ever to be climbed. The sun had sunk on the other side of it, but one felt that one ought to be able to see the level rays, dyed purple, pouring through the wall of rock, so glasslike it appeared to be. Above the knifelike edge of the summit-ridge the sky went up in bands of orange, lemon, green, to blue and purple-violet that was almost indigo. Right down into the green belt the embroidery of first-magnitude constellations was already visible, a stitching of gold. Somehow eating one’s fill—and I was ready for it—and that utterly serene emptiness didn’t seem to go together.
“The coffee’s ready,” I heard Mr. Mycroft say, however, and once I had started drinking and eating my queer scruple left me.
Yet when we had cleared up—Kerson had already rolled himself up; Mr. Mycroft was also laid out, only making some notes by an electric torch—I took one more look at our super-surroundings. The sky was now all indigo, but so dense with stars that it seemed hard to believe that there could be much space in that cosmic blizzard of suns. Overhead in a complete arch they had become a belt of luminous mist—one was looking up into the Galaxy, the disk and wheel of our own island universe. There seemed no air. The stars stood right on the edge of the mountain range one fronted, as clearly as they stood right up above one’s head. Every moment, like distant lighthouses, they blinked down behind this sharp western wall, while another watcher flashed up from behind the eastern range. Suddenly starting out of the dark a meteor made a perfect curve of light, left a faint glow for as long, and vanished.
“That’s one of our clues,” said Mr. Mycroft’s low voice at my shoulder. “Don’t think, Mr. Silchester, because we are after a man and two asses in this immense wilderness—‘All geology by day, all astronomy by night,’ as Mr. Priestley put it succinctly—that we have got things completely out of proportion. Literally, we too follow a star, so real that I’d rather follow it than hitch my wagon to it. Further, and, indeed, more to the point, what we are searching for and what we are attempting to prevent going wrong if we can prevent it, is something which links us with the nature of things. Go to bed, Mr. Silchester, and sleep well. The ‘eternal silences’ need not ‘affright’ us, for, if we choose, we can speak what they would say.”
What all that rhetoric meant I was at a loss to say. But I felt that the old man felt he had a goal worth getting at and saw his way to get there. And certainly I began to feel rapidly that nothing now could be better than sleep. I slipped into my sack and was gone before I could turn over.
The other two had already begun to get breakfast ready before I woke—woke with an appetite that saw no reason for not eating everything it was offered, however fine the view. Mr. Mycroft and Kerson had evidently already made their plans. They had assembled the baggage we were to take with us. So, when I had eaten heartily, I sat outside admiring the view which was, in the early morning light and cool, not so fine as the evening before but perhaps even more attractive. I began to feel that the desert and myself might get along. There was a light air moving; the sun was low enough to cast plenty of shadows which brought into relief all the scarps and colored rocks. The place was more a fantastic garden, hereabouts, than a desert. In the crannies of the colored and carved stones grew, I now noticed, queer little plants which almost seemed stone, carved into stout leaves and stalks. I thought, “It only needs an animal or two to make a perfect composition of its sort,” and at that moment out scampered a lithe gray creature rather like an elongated squirrel. With a quick scurry it was over a boulder and onto the ground again. I waited still, watching its easy movements. It was making for a small piece of crust I had thrown down a couple of yards away. It darted out and caught hold of the bread, then looked round, giving the food a relishing bite or two—and was knocked into a small bundle of bleeding fur. My left ear was singing as though it had been boxed. I swung round. Kerson was standing a few feet back, his automatic in his hand.
“You brute!” I exclaimed hotly. I was startled, and shocked, too, at this cool killing. I turned and bent over the poor little corpse, the bread still in its teeth.
“Don’t touch it,” said Mr. Mycroft’s voice; “otherwise its blood may be literally and mortally on your hands. We’re not so far from Tulare County, now sadly famous as the spot where tularemia was first noted, though it’s spread now for thousands of miles. If you have a small cut on your hand and the animal’s blood meets yours you’re in for it.”
I shrank back. In the desert, the sterile desert, still deadly infection dogging one!
Kerson added carelessly, “Don’t want those little brutes all over our stuff. Tularemia’s not so bad, for it’s only in the blood. But a ranger told me other day the gophers and ground squirrels have plague now through them. Get bitten by one of their fleas and you’re worse off than if a rattler bit you.”
I drew back even farther—already I could see with disgust a little procession of brown dots moving off the still gray fur.
“They won’t settle on you,” said Kerson offhandedly, “unless they have to. But if those fleas were all over the cave, like as not one would bite you casually like, and whatever his notion for doing so, you’d be a casualty.” He chuckled at his unpleasant pun. “No, if one kills ’em at sight and leaves ’em to dry, one’s fairly safe. The mischief would be if ever anthrax got among ’em. A ranger did tell me, not long back, he thought he’d seen a case of that among these damned rodents. But of course he just poured gasoline on the body and cremated it. He wasn’t going to risk a postmortem.”
We finished our final arrangements and went off in silence. I was upset and sat without speaking a word. We followed the edge of the next dried lake floor and could go at a fair pace, for always, like a neat stitching in the selvage of hard level sand, just before it broke into a fringe of pebbles and rocks, ran a precisely indented pattern. When we first sighted it, Mr. Mycroft and Kerson got down. I followed.
I heard Kerson say, “They’ll remain sometimes for years.” Mr. Mycroft replied, “In the Bactrian desert Aurel Stein, the explorer, visiting a site he’d gone to a few years before, saw a track of a man and dog going in front of him. It was his own years-old trail.”
“These are fresh, though; look at the edges. Bet Blue Feather meant this chap.”
We climbed into the car again and purred along while the tracks went uncoiling ahead of us. Round headland after headland we went, where once, I suppose, tree-crowned knolls had been reflected in still cool water—a painful thought to some pioneer. Then suddenly my reflections and perhaps, I thought, Mr. Mycroft’s hopes were cut short. The lake floor of hard sand ended—we had reached its upper shore.
“This is the last of the chain,” said Kerson. “It’s no use trailing like this any further. There isn’t any more sand, only rocks and scree.”
Mr. Mycroft didn’t seem much downcast. “We’ve been lucky, with your aid, to have made such a good start. I think we’ll reconnoiter a little further on foot and look round the countryside. If you will leave som
e of the provisions here I don’t think we’ll need anything else, and if you come back for us to this spot in the evening we will plan our walk to meet you at this spot.”
“O.K.” was the only answer, and in a few minutes even the sound of the car was lost as it rounded one of the rock promontories. We were sounding a new deep of solitude.
“Now for some real detection,” was, however, Mr. Mycroft’s reaction. “That breast-high scent is all right for those who want only a morning gallop but not for true hunting.” He went to where the eight little indentions and the two broader prints left the sand and passed up onto the shingle. Once or twice he cast his eye, turning his head on one side. “It’s fortunate,” he said, “that the sun isn’t yet very high. Look, you can just see in the shingle the hint of a trail.”
So, stooping and starting, we covered, I suppose, the best part of a mile. The lake, evidently, long before it dried up, had had a shallow end of pebble beach on which the waves broke on rough days, making a rough foreshore. It was exhausting going, for the sun was getting up, the surface was unpleasant walking, and we were at an altitude which already made me feel more out of condition than perhaps I actually was. All this made, perhaps I need hardly say, little, if any, impression on my companion. The trail was everything. He made two concessions only to climate and environment: strong leather boots and a light, big-brimmed hat.
“Why,” I asked, mainly to break the silence and gain a pause in our scurry forward, “why didn’t we bring the baggage?” Besides, then we would have had to have a burro, and being able to hold onto one then, seemed to me, would be a great relief.
“We won’t want our gear yet,” he said. “This is a trial cast.” After another half-dozen quizzes and scurries forward, he stopped. “The sun’s getting to be no use.”
