Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  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 favored 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 realized, 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 labored 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 realizing 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 marvelous unreality of silver sheen and black shadow, a starry tracery of labyrinthine streams on a medium as weird and beautiful and intangible as a dream.

  “O 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 had 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 splendor 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 had it 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 recognized 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.

  Grey dawn found Adam many miles closer to the mountain range. Yet it was still far and his former dread returned. On every side what interminable distances!

  A deepening rose color over the eastern horizon appeared to be reflected upon the mountain peaks, and this glow crept down the dark slopes. Grey dawn changed to radiant morning with an ethereal softness of color. When the blazing disc of the sun shone over the ramparts of the east all that desert world underwent a wondrous transfiguration. The lord of day had arisen, and this was his empire. Red was the hue of his authority, emblazoned in long vivid rays over the ranges and the wastelands. Then the great orb of fire cleared the horizon, and the desert seemed aflame.

  One moment Adam gave to the marvel and glory of the sunrise, and then he looked no more. That brief moment ended in a consciousness of the gravity of his flight. For the first touch of sun on face and hands burned hot, as if it suddenly aggravated a former burn that the night had soothed.

  “Got to reach—river soon,” he muttered, thickly, “or never will.”

  He walked on while the sun climbed.

  Desert vegetation increased. Adam toiled on, breathing hard, careless now of the reaching thorns and heedless of the rougher ground.

  He was perfectly conscious of a subtle changing of his spirit, but because it seemed a drifting further and further from thought he could not comprehend it. Courage diminished as fear augmented. More and more his will and intelligence gave way to sensorial perceptions. More and more he felt the urge to hurry, and, though reason warned against the folly of this, it was not strong enough to compel him to resist. He did hurry more and stumbled along. Like breath of a furnace the heat rose from the rocky, sandy soil; and from above there seemed to bear down the weight of the leaden fire.

  His skin became as dry as dust and began to shrivel. It did not blister. The pain now came from burn of the flesh underneath. He felt that his blood was drying up. A stinging sensation as of puncture by a thousand thorns throbbed in his face and neck. The heat burned through his clothes, and the soles of his boots were coals of fire. Doggedly he strove forward. A whistle accompanied his panting breaths. Most intolerable of all was thirst—the bitter, astringent taste in the scant saliva that became pasty and dry, the pain in his swelling tongue, the parched constriction in his throat.

  At last he reached the base of a low rocky ridge which for long had beckoned to him and mocked him. It obstructed sight of the slope to the mountain range. Surely between that ridge and the slope ran the river. The hope spurred him upward.

  As he climbed he gazed up into the coppery sky, but his hot and tired eyes could not endure the great white blaze that was the sun. Halfway up he halted to rest, and from here he had measureless view of the desert. Then his dull brain revived to a final shock. For he seemed to see a thousand miles of green-grey barrenness, of lifting he
at veils like transparent smoke, of wastes of waved sand, and of ranges of upheaved rock. How terribly it confronted him! Pitiless mockery of false distances on all sides A sun-blasted world not meant for man!

  Then Adam ascended to the summit of the ridge. A glaring void seemed flung at him. His chocolate-hued mountain range was not far away. From this height he could see all the grey-green level of desert between him and the range. He stared. Again there seemed flung in his face a hot glare of space. There was no river.

  “Where, where’s—the river?” gasped Adam, mistrusting his eyesight.

  But the wonderful Rio Colorado, the strange, red river beloved by desert wanderers, did not flow before him—or to either side—or behind. It must have turned to flow on the other slope of this insurmountable range.

  “God has—forsaken me!” cried Adam, in despair, and he fell upon the rocks.

  But these rocks, hot as red-hot plates of iron, permitted of no contact, even in a moment of horror. Adam was burned to stagger up, to plunge and run and fall down the slope, out upon the level, to the madness that awaited him.

  He must rush on to the river—to drink and drink—to bathe in the cool water that flowed down from the snow-fed lakes of the north. Thoughts about water possessed his mind—pleasant, comforting, hurrying him onward. Memory of the great river made pictures in his mind, and there flowed the broad red waters, sullen and eddying and silent. All the streams and rivers and lakes Adam had known crowded their images across his inward eye, and this recall of the past was sweet. He remembered the brook near his old home—the clear green water full of bright minnows and gold-sided sunfish; how it used to flow swiftly under the willow banks where violets hid by mossy stones, and how it tarried in deep dark pools under shelving banks, green and verdant and sweet smelling; how the ferns used to bend over in graceful tribute and the lilies float white and gold, with great green-backed frogs asleep upon the broad leaves. The watering trough on the way to school, many and many a time, in the happy days gone by, had he drunk there and splashed his brother Guerd. Guerd, who hated water and had to be made to wash, when they were little boys! The old well on Madden’s farm with its round cobblestoned walls where the moss and lichen grew, and where the oaken bucket, wet and dark and green, use to come up bumping and spilling, brimful of clear cold water—how vividly he remembered that his father had called it granite water, and the best, because it flowed through the cold subterranean caverns of granite rock. Then there was the spring in the orchard, sweet, soft water that his mother used to send him after, and as he trudged home, burdened by the huge bucket, he would spill some upon his bare feet.

  Yes, as Adam staggered on, aimlessly now, he was haunted more and more by memories of water. That dear, unfor-getable time of boyhood when he used to love the water, to swim like a duck and bask like a turtle—it seemed far back in the past, across some terrible interval of pain, vague now, yet hateful. Where was he—and where was Guerd? Something like a blade pierced his heart.

  Suddenly Adam was startled out of this pleasant reminiscence by something blue and bright that danced low down along the desert floor. A lake! He halted with an inarticulate cry. There was a lake of blue water, glistening, exquisitely clear, with borders of green. He could not help but rush forward. The lake shimmered, thinned, shadowed, and vanished. Adam halted and, rubbing his eyes, peered hard ahead and all around. Behind him shone a strip of blue, streaked up and down by desert plants, and it seemed to be another lake, larger, bluer, clearer, with a delicate vibrating quiver, as if exquisitely rippled by a gentle breeze. Green shores were marvelously reflected in the blue. Adam gaped at this. Had he waded through a lake? He had crossed the barren flat of greasewood to reach the spot upon which he now stood. Almost he was forced to run back. But this must be a deceit of the desert or a madness of his sight. He bent low, and the lake of blue seemed to lift and quiver upon a thin darkling line of vapor or transparent shadow. Adam took two strides back—and the thing vanished! Desert magic! A deception of nature! A horrible illusion to a lost man growing crazed by thirst!

  “Mirage!” whispered Adam, hoarsely. “Blue water! Ha-ha! … Damned lie—it shan’t fool me!”

  But as clear perception failed these mirages of the desert did deceive him. All objects took on a hazy hue, tinged by the red of blood in his eyes, and they danced in the heat-veiled air. Shadows, glares, cactus, and brush stood as immovable as the rocks of ages. Only the illusive and ethereal mirages gleamed as if by magic and shimmered and moved in that midday trance of the sun-blasted desert.

  The time came when Adam plunged toward every mirage that floated so blue and serene and mystical in the deceiving atmosphere, until hope and despair and magnified sight finally brought on a mental state bordering on the madness sure to come.

  Then, as he staggered toward this green-bordered pond and that crystal-blue lake, already drinking and laving in his mind, he began to hear the beautiful sounds of falling rain, of gurgling brooks, of lapping waves, of roaring rapids, of gentle river currents, of water—water—water sweetly tinkling and babbling, of wind-laden murmur of a mountain stream. And he began to wander in a circle.

  Chapter

  VIII

  Consciousness returned to Adam. He was lying under an ironwood tree, over branches of which a canvas had been stretched, evidently to shade him from the sun. The day appeared to be far spent.

  His head seemed to have been relieved of a hot metal band; his tongue was no longer bursting in his mouth; the boil of his blood had subsided. His skin felt moist.

  Then he heard the rough voice of a man talking to animals, apparently burros. Movement of body was difficult and somewhat painful; however, he managed to sit up and look around. Hide-covered boxes and packsaddles, with duffel and utensils of a prospector, were littered about, and conspicuous among the articles near him were three large canvas-covered canteens, still wet. Upon the smoldering embers of a campfire steamed a black iron pot. A little beyond the first stood a very short, broad man, back turned; and he was evidently feeding choice morsels of some kind to five eager and jealous burros.

  “Spoiled—every darn one of you!” he was saying, and the kindness of his voice belied its roughness. “Why, I used to have burros that could lick labels off tin cans an’ call it a square meal!”

  Then he turned and espied Adam watching him.

  “Hullo! You’ve come to,” he said, with interest.

  Adam’s gaze encountered an extraordinary-looking man. He could not have been taller than five and a half feet, and the enormous breadth of him made him appear as wide as he was long. He was not fat. His immense bulk was sheer brawn, betokening remarkable strength. His dusty, ragged clothes were patched like a crazy quilt. He had an immense head, a shock of shaggy hair beginning to show streaks of grey, and a broad face tanned dark as an Indian’s, the lower half of which was covered with a scant grizzled beard. His eyes, big, dark, rolling, resembled those of an ox. His expression seemed to be one of set tranquillity—the impres-siveness of bronze.

  Adam’s voice was a husky whisper: “Where am—I? Who are you?”

  “Young man, my name’s Dismukes,” came the reply, “an’ you’re ninety miles from anywhere—an’ alive, which’s more than I ’d bet on yesterday.”

  The words brought Adam a shock of memory. Out there the desert smoked, sweltering in the spent heat of the setting sun. Slowly Adam lay back upon the blanket and bundle that had been placed under him for a bed. The man sat down on one of the hide-covered boxes, fastening his great eyes upon Adam.

  “Am I—all right?” whispered Adam.

  “Yes, but it was a close shave,” replied the other.

  “You said—something about yesterday. Tell me.”

  Dismukes fumbled in his patched vest and, fetching forth a stumpy pipe, he proceeded to fill it. It was noticeable that he had to use his little finger to press down the tobacco into the bowl, as the other fingers of his enormous hands were too large. Adam had never before seen such scarred cal
lused hands.

  “It was day before yesterday I run across you,” began Dis-mukes, after a comfortable pull at his pipe. “My burro Jinny has the best eyes of the pack outfit. When I seen her ears go up I got to lookin’ hard, an’ presently spied you staggerin’ in a circle. I ’d seen men do that before. Sometimes you’d run, an’ again you’d wag along, an’ then you’d fall an’ crawl. I caught you an’ had to tie you with my rope. You were out of your head. An’ you looked hard—all dried up—tongue black an’ hangin’ out. I thought you were done for. I poured a canteen of water over your head an’ then packed you over here where there’s wood an’ water. You couldn’t make a sound, but all the same I knew you were ravin’ fur water. I fed you water a spoonful at a time, an’ every little while I emptied a canteen over you. Was up all night with you that night. You recovered awful slow. Yesterday I ’d not have gambled much on your chances. But today you came round. I got you to swallow some soft grub, an’ I guess you’ll soon be pretty good. You’ll be weak, though. You’re awful thin. I’m curious about how much you weighed. You look as if you might have been a husky lad.”

  “I was,” whispered Adam. “Hundred and eighty-five—or ninety.”

  “So I thought. You’ll not go over one hundred an’ twenty now. You’ve lost about seventy pounds … Oh, it’s a fact! You see, the body is ’most all water, an’ on this desert in summer a man just dries up an’ blows away.”

  “Seventy—pounds!” exclaimed Adam, incredulously. But when he glanced at his shrunken hands he believed the incomprehensible fact. “I must be skin—and bones.”

  “Mostly bones. But they’re long, heavy bones, an’ if you ever get any flesh on them you’ll be a darned big man. I’m glad they’re not goin’ to bleach white on the desert, where I’ve seen so many these last ten years.”

  “You saved my life?” suddenly queried Adam.