LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 3

      III

       Table of Contents

      ONLY because of the great stubbornness which was a part of him, and because of the unswerving purpose which had grown to be a part of that stubbornness, did Sax Northrup battle on with the desert instead of turning back now. For fight was it to be at every step, with the ultimate outcome hidden upon the knees of the barren gods of the Southwestern Sahara.

      Already was he in a land into which men do not come, where perhaps before him ten white men had not ventured since the time of Fray Marcos close to four hundred years ago. Here was a region from which a man might bring back with him nothing but a tale of suffering; where often enough he might find nothing but a horrible death. And yet Northrup, seeking that which he sought, with his eyes open went on.

      But, thinking that he knew the desert, he came to learn that he had never known it. Alone in the silence he came to understand a little the majesty and power of God.

      Day after day, night after night, he saw these things made tangible in the sweep of the sandy floor, in the stern grandeur of the uplifted walls of rock. Through the fragment of eternal silence through which he fought his way he felt these things. He felt himself a small figure alone in a strange, hard world.

      Grandeur, majesty, sublimity—he knew them to be of the desert. But they were not the essence of it. Its supreme quality, seen at all times and not to be mistaken, was its savage fierceness. The desert is no hypocrite; its teeth are always bared, poisoned teeth in a snarl at the intruder, threatening no less its own offspring. It is the land of the iron fang.

      As he battled on, always was he in the heart of another battle which had outworn the youth of time. A struggle to the death, without quarter, and oh, the silence of it! Here about him was no created thing which the desert did not strive to kill. Here was no living thing upon all the terrible surface which did not strive to kill its brother creation.

      Life here had never gotten beyond its primary, elemental phase. It was, over and over, the frenzied seeking to inflict death in order that the conqueror might live; to live in order to kill; to deal death and to flee from death.

      The fierce brood of things struggling for existence even from the very womb of their terrible mother were without exception a brood armored and armed, the desert coyote a murderer with a coward's heart and a madman's cunning; the wildcat a machine for assassination; the gray wolf so much cold steel, tireless, swift, merciless, the spirit of slaughter cast into flesh and blood; the rattlesnake as deadly as death itself; even the harsh growth of vegetation, bound to earth by its iron roots so that it might not spring to attack or flee from its enemy, was armed with its thousand knife-thorns to tear at flesh and bite at bone.

      Everywhere Northrup sensed the silent, unending struggle, the preying of living things upon one another, the warring of the land which bore them against them all. And he came to know what it meant for a human being to enter this scene of natural warfare.

      Like the man and wife in Molière's comedy, fighting like cat and dog but ready to turn united against the interloper into their domestic realm, so these desert things seemed to combine with horrible power against the stranger in their realm, the Bahana who had dared set foot upon the changing sands. The sun tortured him, thirst came to madden him, spiked cacti tore at his bleeding hands, wind parched, sand blinded him, the rattlesnake and the poisoned spiders threatened when he slept or woke.

      As the still, hot days went on he came almost to believe himself in a veritable land of sorcery, of witchcraft, of black magic. It became to him the demesne of the unearthly, the home of illusion, a region bewitched and bewitching him who looked upon it, the one place in the world where the supernatural was a part of nature.

      He saw the sun changed into a monster bloodstone, the moon into a disk of white silver, the sober skies into a riot of colors, burning reds, rich purples, greens and golds. His eyes told him of a stretch of level lands which were to be crossed in two hours and he struggled across them for two days; told him of mountains five miles away which his brain, wise from past experience, knew were seventy miles from him.

      He walked toward misty veils of pale pink and deep rose; they melted away from him, withdrawing, showing him the barren places which had been softened only in the seeming. He saw things which did not exist, built out of nothingness as by the touch of a magician's wand, hovering in the air. What looked like a lake before him, cool waters stirring softly to a cool breeze, was nothingness, a bit of trickery of the air. To see trees, mountains where they were not, turned topsy-turvy, became a common-place.

      There was one day when, hoarding the little water in his canteen, hurrying on to the vague promise of a water-hole, he saw quick clouds gathering in the sky, black with the rain in them. Caught in a driving current high above, the clouds passed over him. Saturated, struck by a cooler current of air, they burst open like huge water-bags, spilling the rain. He saw it fall in a steep slant. It was raining up there in big drops. And yet no single drop of water came down to him. In the dry air through which it plunged hissing downward it disappeared, drunk up by the air itself as a drop of moisture is drunk up by a dry sand bank. Merely the natural thing here, yet looking like enchantment.

      Northrup was a man essentially given to strong, vigorous action rather than to fanciful musings. And yet here, with aught of action denied him beyond the monotonous driving of one boot after the other into loose sand, or up lava-strewn slopes, or about and through clumps of desert vegetation, for weeks his mind was the home of strange imaginings.

      He found himself wondering, at first lightly, but at times with a soberness which startled him when he recognized it, if there did exist supernatural forces of which man had no understanding. The thought came to him that such a force had drawn him, Sax Northrup, from the beaten thoroughfares of white men into this empty land. What had brought him here while the men whom he had known of his class and type were driving their motors over smooth roads, dining in comfortable cafés, sleeping upon soft beds and otherwise disporting themselves as befitted the city-bred? What indeed but the wild tale of a dying Indian down in Santa Fé?

      The thing which takes men by the hair and drags them to the hidden corners of the four quarters of the world is generally the same thing in whatever garb it chooses to wear—the lure of gold. It had brought him, him and Strang, here.

      Through many a day there stood between Northrup and death a scrap of paper and a hope that the paper did not lie. In the main it had told the truth thus far. If, later on, it lied to him, why, then he'd do what many another man has done on the desert, die for want of water.

      He had the way, before leaving any water-hole upon which he had come, of taking the paper out of his pocket, studying it thoughtfully, looking up from it across the bleak stretches, out toward a steep-walled mesa or the clear-cut ridges of distant mountains. And always his frowning eyes came back from the old story of sand, lava-rock, gorge, precipice and gray-green desert growth to the bit of paper in his hand.

      Already was it more precious to him than the gold which he hoped it might lead him to.

      "For if through some mischance I should lose this," he admitted to himself often enough, "why, then, I'd be a dead man in forty-eight, maybe in twenty-four hours!"

      A STRANGE map this, which Northrup carried rolled and thrust into an empty rifle-cartridge for safety. That he had made it himself did not in any way make it seem to him infallible.

      The Indian, dying in Santa Fé, had told him the way to follow and Northrup had made the rough map from the Indian's words. And he had known, from the time that he made his first step upon the long trail, that, trusting himself upon it, having only that to guide him deep into the secret heart of the land of little water, was as foolhardy a thing as he had ever done in all the years of a foolhardy existence. But

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