Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) (22 page)

Adam halted, as if at the gateway of the unknown. The sun was setting behind the mountains that now overhung him, massive, and mighty, a sheer, insurmountable world of rock which seemed to reach to the ruddy sky. Wonderful shadows were falling, purple and blue low down, rosy and gold above; and the canyon smoked with sunset haze.

The map of Dismukes marked the canyon, and a spring of water just beyond its threshold, and also the shack where the strange man and woman lived under the long slant of weathered rock. Adam decided not to try to find the location that night, so he made dry camp.

Darkness found him weary and oppressed. The day had seemed short, but the distance long. Tired and sleepy as he was, when he lay down in his bed he felt a striking dissimilarity of this place to any other he had known on the desert. How profound the silence! Had any sound ever pervaded it? All was gloom and shadow below, with black walls rising to star-fretted sky as blue as indigo. The valley seemed to be alive. It breathed, yet invisibly and silently. Indeed, there was a mighty being awake out there in the black void. Adam could not believe any man and woman lived up this canyon. Dismukes had dreamed. Had not Adam heard from many prospectors how no white woman could live in Death Valley? He had been there only a day, yet he felt that he could understand why it must be fatal to women. But it was not so because of heat and poison wind and cataclysms of nature, for women could endure those as well as men. But no woman could stand the alternations of terror and sublimity, of beauty and horror. That which was feminine in Adam shuddered at a solitude that seemed fitting to a burned-out world. He was the last of his race, at the end of its existence, the strongest finally brought to his doom, and to-morrow the earth would be sterile--thus Adam's weary thoughts passed into dreams.

He awakened somewhat later than usual. Over the Funeral range the sun was rising, a coalescing globule of molten fire, enormous and red, surrounded by a sky-broad yellow flare. This sunrise seemed strangely closer to the earth and to him than any sunrise he had ever watched. The valley was clear, still, empty, a void that made all objects therein look small and far away. After breakfast Adam set out to find his burros.

This high-walled opening did not appear to be a canyon, but a space made by two mountain slopes running down to a wash where water flowed at some seasons. Beyond the corners there opened what seemed to be a gradually widening and sloping field, grey with rocks and sand and stunted brush, through the centre of which straggled a line of gnarled mesquites, following the course of the wash. Adam found his burros here, Jinny asleep as usual, and Jack contentedly grazing.

The cracking of a rock rolling down a rough slope thrilled Adam. He remembered what Dismukes had said about the perilous location of the shack where the man and woman lived under the shadow of a weathering mountain. Adam turned to look across the space in the direction whence the sound had come.

There loomed a mighty mountain slope, absolutely destitute of plants, a grey, drab million-faceted ascent of rocks. Adam strode toward it, gradually getting higher and nearer through the rock-strewn field. It looked so close as to seem magnified. But it was a goodly distance. Presently he espied a rude shack. He halted. That could not be what he was searching for. Still, it must be. Adam had not expected the place to be so close to Death Valley. It was not a quarter of a mile distant from the valley and not a hundred feet higher than the lowest sink hole, which was to say that this crude, small structure lay in Death Valley and below sea level.

Adam walked on, growing more curious and doubtful. Surely this hut had been built and abandoned by some prospector. Yet any prospector could have built a better abode than this. None but a fool or a knave would have selected that perilous location. The ground began to slope a little and become bare of brush, and was dotted here and there with huge boulders that looked as if they had rolled down there recently. No sign of smoke, no sign of life, no sign of labour--absence of these strengthened Adam's doubt of people living there. Suddenly he espied the deep track of a man's foot in the sand. Adam knelt to study it. "Made yesterday," he said.

He rose with certainty. Dismukes had been accurate as to direction, though his distances had been faulty. Adam gazed beyond the shack, to right, and then left. He espied a patch of green mesquites and hummocks of grass. There was the water Dismukes had marked. Then Adam looked up.

A broad belt of huge boulders lay beyond the shack, the edge of the talus, the beginning of the base of a mountainside, wearing down, weathering away, cracking into millions of pieces, every one of which had both smooth and sharp surfaces. This belt was steep and fan shaped, spreading at the bottom. As it sloped up it grew steeper, and the rocks grew smaller. It had the flow of a glacier. It was an avalanche, perhaps sliding inch by inch and foot by foot, all the time. The curved base of the fan extended for a couple of miles, in the distance growing rounded and symmetrical in its lines. It led up to a stupendous mountain abutment, dull red in colour, and so seamed and cracked and fissured that it had the crisscross appearance of a rock of net, or numberless stones of myriad shapes pieced together by some colossal hand, and now split and broken, ready to fall. Yet this rugged, bold, uneven surface of mountain wall shone in the sunlight. It looked as if it had been a solid mass of granite shattered by some cataclysm of nature. Above this perpendicular splintered ruin heaved up another slope of broken rocks, hanging there as if by magic, every one of the endless heaps of stones leaning ready to roll. Frost and heat had disintegrated this red mountain. What history of age was written there! How sinister that dull hue of red! No beauty shone here, though the sun gleamed on the millions of facets. The mountain of unstable rock towered dark and terrible and forbidding even in the broad light of day. What held that seamed and lined and sundered mass of rock together! For what was it waiting? Only time, and the law of the desert! Even as Adam gazed a weathered fragment loosened from the heights, rolled off the upper wall, pitched clear into the air, and cracked ringingly below, to bound and hurtle down the lower slope, clapping less and less until it ceased with a little hollow report. That was the story of the mountain. By atom and by mass it was in motion, working down to a level. Boulders twice as large as the shack, weighing thousands of tons, had rolled down and far out on the field. Any moment another might topple off the rampart and come hurtling down to find the shack in its path. Some day the whole slope of loose rock, standing almost on end, would slide down in avalanche.

"Well," muttered Adam, darkly, "any man who made a woman live there was either crazy or meant her to have an awful death."

Adam strode on to the shack. It might afford shelter from sun, but not from rain or dust. Packsaddles and boxes were stacked on one side; empty cans lay scattered everywhere; a pile of mesquite, recently cut, stood in front of the aperture that evidently was a door; and on the sand lay blackened stones and blackened utensils, near the remains of a still smouldering fire.

"Hello, inside," called Adam, as he halted at the door. No sound answered. He stooped to look in, and saw bare sand floor, a rude, low table made of box boards, flat stones for seats, utensils and dishes, shelves littered with cans and bags. A flimsy partition of poles and canvas, with a door, separated this room from another and larger one. Adam saw a narrow bed of blankets raised on poles, an old valise on the sandy floor, woman's garments hanging on the brush walls. He called again, louder this time. He saw a flash of something grey through the torn canvas, then heard a low cry--a woman's voice. Adam raised his head and stepped back.

"Elliot! You've come back!" came the voice, quick, low, and tremulous, betokening relief from dread.

"No. It's a stranger," replied Adam.

"Oh!" The hurried exclamation was followed by soft footfalls. A woman in grey appeared in the doorway--a woman whose proportions were noble, but frail. She had a white face and large, deep eyes, strained and sad. "Oh--who are you?"

"Ma'am, my name's Wansfell. I'm a friend of Dismukes, the prospector who was here. I'm crossing Death Valley and I thought I'd call on you."

"Dismukes? The little miner, huge, like a frog?" she queried, quickly, with dilating eyes. "I remember. He was kind, but--And you're his friend?"

"Yes, at your service, ma'am."

"Thank--God!" she cried, brokenly, and she leaned back against the door. "I'm in trouble. I've been alone--all--all night. My husband left yesterday. He took only a canteen. He said he'd be back for supper...But--he didn't come. Oh, something has happened to him."

"Many things happen in the desert," said Adam. "I'll find your husband. I saw his tracks out here in the sand."

"Oh, can you find him?"

"Ma'am, I can track a rabbit to its burrow. Don't worry any more. I will track your husband and find him."

The woman suddenly seemed to be struck with Adam's tone, or the appearance of him. It was as if she had not particularly noticed him at first. "Once he got lost--was gone two days. Another time he was overcome by heat--or something in the air."

"You've been alone before?" queried Adam, quick to read the pain of the past in her voice.

"Alone? Many--many lonely nights," she said. "He's left me--alone often--purposely--for me to torture my soul here in the blackness...And those rolling rocks--cracking in the dead of night--and--" Then the flash of her died out, as if she had realised she was revealing a shameful secret to a stranger.

"Ma'am, is your husband just right in his mind?" asked Adam.

She hesitated, giving Adam the impression that she wished to have him think her husband irrational, but could not truthfully say so.

"Men do strange things in the desert," said Adam. "May I ask, ma'am, have you food and water?"

"Yes. We've plenty. But Elliot makes me cook--and I never learned how. So we've fared poorly. But he eats little and I less!"

"Will you tell me how he came to build your hut here where, sooner or later, it'll be crushed by rolling stones?"

A tragic shadow darkened in the large, dark-blue eyes that Adam now realised were singularly beautiful.

"I--He--This place was near the water. He cut the brush here--he didn't see--wouldn't believe the danger," she faltered. She was telling a lie, and did not do it well. The fine, sensitive, delicate lips, curved and soft, sad with pain, had not been fashioned for falsehood.

"Perhaps I can make him see," replied Adam. "I'll go find him. Probably he's lost. The heat is not strong enough to be dangerous. And he's not been gone long. Don't worry. My camp is just below. I'll fetch him back to-day--or to-morrow at farthest."

She murmured some incoherent thanks. Adam was again aware of her penetrating glance, staring, wondering even in her trouble. He strode away with bowed head, searching the sand for the man's tracks. Presently he struck them and saw that they led down toward the valley.

To follow such a plain trail was child's play for Adam's desert sight, that had received its early training in the preservation of his life. He who had trailed lizards to their holes, and snakes to their rocks, to find them and eat or die--he was as keen as a wolf on the scent. This man's trail led straight down to the open valley, out along the western bulge of slope, to a dry water hole.

From there the footprints led down to the parapet of a wide bench, under which the white crust began its level monotony toward the other side of the valley. Different here was it from the place miles below where Adam had crossed. It was lower--the bottom of the bowl. Adam found difficulty in breathing, and had sensations like intermittent rushes of blood to his head. The leaden air weighed down, and, though his keen scent could not detect any odour, he knew there was impurity of some kind on the slow wind. It reminded him that this was Death Valley. He considered a moment. If the man's tracks went on across the valley, Adam would return to camp for a canteen, then take up the trail again. But the tracks led off westward once more, straggling and aimless. Adam's stride made three of one of these steps. He did not care about the heat. That faint hint of gas, however, caused him concern. For miles he followed the straggling tracks, westward to a heave of valley slope that, according to the map of Dismukes, separated Death Valley from its mate adjoining--Lost Valley. On the left of this ridge the tracks wandered up the slope to the base of the mountain and followed it in wide scallops. The footmarks now showed the dragging of boots, and little by little they appeared fresher in the sand. This wanderer had not rested during the night.

The tracks grew deeper, more dragging, wavering from side to side. Here the man had fallen. Adam saw the imprints of his hands and a smooth furrow where evidently he had dragged a canteen across the sand. Then came the tell-tale signs of where he had again fallen and had begun to crawl.

"Looks like the old story," muttered Adam. "I'll just about find him dying or dead...Better so--for that woman who called him husband!...I wonder--I wonder."

Adam's years of wandering had led him far from the haunts of men, along the lonely desert trails and roads where only a few solitary humans like himself dared the elements, or herded in sordid and hard camps; but, nevertheless, by some virtue growing out of his strife and adversity, he had come to sense something nameless, to feel the mighty beat of the heart of the desert, to hear a mourning music over the silent wastes--a still, sad music of humanity. It was there, even in the grey wastelands.