Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

Like white, living flames, Adam's thoughts leaped in his mind.

  These wanderers of the wastelands, like Dismukes and himself, were not labouring 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 civilisation, 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 mind 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's 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, colour, 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 I Merely nothing it seemed to sit for hours, gazing out over the desolate, grey-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 recognised 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 realised that during those lonely hours he was one instant a primitive man and the next a thinking, or civilised, 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 I Wonder beyond that was the wonder that man had ever become civilised at all I 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 civilised 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-defence, but always afterward he had regretted. He had fought men in a terrible, furious joy, with eyes tinging 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 grey, 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. Travellers 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 splendour of life was the age-long p
rogress 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 marvellous 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.

  Chapter XXVI

  Gaining the open, Adam strode swiftly down the trail to where the canyon spread wide and ended in the boulder-strewn desert.

  The world in which he moved seemed transfigured, radiant with the last glow of dying day, with a glory of golden gleam. His heart pounded and his blood flooded to and fro, swelling his veins. Life on the earth for him had been shot through and through with celestial fire. His feet were planted on the warm sands and his hands reached to touch the grey old boulders. He needed these to assure himself that he had not been turned into the soft, cool wind or the slanting amber rays so thickly glistening with particles of dust, or the great, soaring king of the eagles. Adam crushed a bunch of odorous sage to his face, smelled it, breathed it, tasted it; and the bitter sweetness thrilled his senses. It was real. It was a part of the vast and glowing desert, of the wonderful earth, of the infinite universe that he yearned to incorporate into his being. The last glorious rays of the setting sun shone upon him and magnified his stature in a long, purple shadow. How the last warmth seemed to kiss his cheek as it sank behind the rim of the range! The huge boulders were warm and alive under his hands. He pricked his fingers upon the cholla thorns just to see the ruddy drops of his life's current; and there was strange joy in the sting which proved him flesh and blood and nerve. He stood alone, as he had many thousands of times on the grey old desert, his feet on the sand, his knees in the sage; but the being alone then was inexpressibly different It was as if he had, like the tarantula wasp, been born from a cocoon stage in a dark, dead cell, into a beautiful world of light, of freedom, of colour, of beauty, of all that was life. He felt the glory of his beating heart, his throbbing pulse, his sight and all his sense. He turned his face to the cool, sweet sage-scented breeze, and then he lifted it to the afterglow of sunset. Ah! the new, strange joy of life--the incalculable force of the natural man!

  The luminous desert stretched before him, valley and mountain, and beyond them was other range and other valley, leading to the sea, and across its heaving bosom were other lands; and above him was the vast, deep-blue sky with its pale evening star, and beyond them began the infinite.

  Adam felt himself a part of it all. His ecstasy was that he lived. Nature could not deny him. He stood there, young and strong and vital.

  Then he heard Genie calling him. With a start he turned to answer. She was running down the trail. How swift, how lithe, how light! The desert had given her the freedom, the grace, the suppleness of its wild denizens. Like a fawn she bounded over the stones, and her hair caught the last gleams of glowing sunlight. When she neared Adam she checked her flying steps, pattering to a halt, one brown hand over her breast.

  "Wheooo!" she burst out, panting. "I--couldn't--find--you. Why'd--you come--so far?"

  The something that had come between Adam's sight and the desert now surrounded Genie. Immeasurably she was transformed, and the change seemed a mystery.

  "We must hurry back. It'll soon be dark. Come," he replied.

  With step as free and swift as his she kept pace with him. "Wanny, you stole up on me--tried to scare me--while I was bathing," she said, with arch reproach.

  "Genie, it was an accident," he returned, hurriedly, and how strangely the blood tingled in his face! "I meant to scare you--yes. But I--I never thought--I never dreamed...Genie, I give you my word...Please say you believe me!"

  "Why, Wanny," she said, in surprise, "of course I believe you! It's nothing to mind about. I didn't mind."

  "Thank you. I--I'm glad you take it that way," replied Adam. "I'm sorry I was so--so stupid."

  "How funny you are!" she exclaimed, and her gay laugh pealed out. "What's there to be sorry about?...You see, I forgot it was getting late...Ooooo how good the water felt! I just couldn't get enough...You did scare me just a little. I heard you--and was scared before I looked...Wanny, I guess I was imagining things--dreaming, you call it. I was all wet, and looking at myself in the sunlight. I'd never seen myself like that. I'd read of mermaids with shining scales of gold, and nymphs of the woods catching falling blossoms. And I guess I thought I was them--and everything."

  Then Adam scorned the old husk of worldliness that had incased his mind in his boyhood, and clung round it still. This child of nature had taught him many a thought-provoking lesson, and here was another, somehow elevating and on a level with his mental progress of the day. Genie had never lived in the world, nor had she been taught many of its customs. She was like a shy, wild young fawn; she was a dreaming, exuberant girl. Genie had been taught to write and study and read, and was far from being ignorant; but she had not understood the meaning of Adam's apology. What struck Adam so deeply and confounded him again was the fact that her innocent and sweet smile now, as she gazed up at him, was little different from the one upon her face when she saw him staring at her nude. She had been surprised at his concern and had laughed at his contrition. And that low, rippling laugh, so full of vital and natural life, seemed to blow, as the desert wind blew worn and withered leaves, all of Adam's recalled sophistications back into the past whence they had come.

  Adam and Genie walked hand in hand down the long boulder-strewn slope to the valley floor, where the cholla shone paling silver in gathering twilight, and the delicate crucifixion tree deceived the eye. The lonely November twilight deepened into night. The stars shone bright. The cool wind blew. The sage rustled.

  Sleep did not soon woo Adam's eyelids this night, with the consequence that he awoke a little later than his usual hour. The rose of the dawn had bloomed.

  Then Adam, on his knees, by the brown running stream, in the midst of his ablutions, halted to stare at the sunrise. Had it ever before been so strangely beautiful? During his sleep the earth had revolved, and, lo! here was the sun again. Wonderful and perennial truth! Not only had it revolved, but it had gone on its mysterious journey, hurtling through space at inconceivable rapidity. While he slept! Again he had awakened. A thousand years ago he had awakened just like this, so it seemed, to the sunrise, to the loneliness of lonely
places, to the beauty of nature, to the joy of life. He sensed some past state, which, when he thought about it, faded back illusively and was gone. But he knew he had lived somewhere before this. All of life was in him. The marvellous spirit he felt now would never die.

  There dawned upon Adam a sudden consciousness of Genie's beauty. She was the last realised and the most beautiful creation of the desert around him.

  It came to him as a great surprise. She, too, knelt at the stream, splashing the cool water, bathing her face, wetting the dark, gold-tinted locks and brushing them back. Curiously and absorbingly Adam gazed at her, with eyes from which some blinding shutter had fallen. Yes, she was beautiful. It seemed a simple fact that he had overlooked, yet it was amazing. It distracted him.

  "Wanny, you're all eyes," cried Genie, gaily. "What's the matter with me? Why do you look so?"

  "Genie, you're growing up," he replied, soberly.

  "Well, you'd have known that before if you'd seen me sewing," she said.

  "How old are you?" he asked.

  "Guess I'm nearly seventeen," she said, and the words brought back the dreams.

  "Why, you're a young lady!" ejaculated Adam. "And--and----" He had been about to add that she was beautiful, but he held his tongue.

  "I guess that, too...Hold out your arm."

  Adam complied, and was further amazed to see, as she walked under his outstretched arm, that the glossy, wavy crown of her head almost touched it. She was as tall and slim and graceful as an arrow-weed.

  "There! I'll have you know you're a mighty big man," she said. "And if you weren't so big I'd come clear up to your shoulder."

  "Genie, don't you want to leave this desert?" he queried, bluntly.

  "Oh no," she replied, instantly. "I love it. And--and--please don't make me think of towns, of lots of people. I want to run wild like a road runner. I'd be perfectly happy if I didn't have to spend half the day mending these old clothes...Wanny, if they get any worse they'll fall off me--and then I'll have to run around like you saw me yesterday!...Oh, but for the thorns, that 'd be grand!" Her light, rippling laugh rang out, sweet and gay.