Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) (29 page)

"Magdalene Virey," protested Adam, "I can't follow you...But to say you are a lost woman--that I won't listen to."

"I was a lost woman," interrupted Mrs. Virey, her voice rising out of the strong, sweet melody. "I had my pride and I defied the husband whose heart I broke and whose life I ruined. I scorned the punishment, the exile he meted out to me. That was because I was thoroughbred. But all the same I was lost. Lost to happiness, to hope, to effort, to repentance, to spiritual uplift. Death Valley will be my tomb, but there will be resurrection for me...It is you, Wansfell, you have been my salvation...You have the power. It has come from your strife and agony on the desert. It is beyond riches, beyond honour. It is the divine in you that seeks and finds the divine in unfortunates who cross your wandering trail."

Adam, rendered mute, could only offer his hand; and in silence he led her down the slope.

That afternoon, near the close of the hot hours, Adam lay in the shade of the brush shelter he had erected near the Virey shack. He was absorbed in watching a tribe of red ants, and his posture was so unusual that it gave pause to Virey, who had come down from the slope. The man approached and curiously gazed at Adam, to see what he was doing.

"Looking for grains of gold?" inquired Virey, with sarcasm. "I'll lend you my magnifying glass."

"I'm watching these red ants," replied Adam, without looking up.

Virey bent over and, having seen, he slowly straightened up.

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" he ejaculated, and this time without sarcasm.

"Virey, I'm no sluggard," returned Adam. "It's you who are that. I'm a worker."

"Wansfell, I was not meaning you," said Virey. "There are things I hate you for, but laziness is certainly not included in them...I never worked in my life. I had money left me. It was a curse. I thought I could buy everything. I bought a wife--the big-eyed woman to whom you devote your services--and your attentions...And I bought for myself the sweetness of the deadly nightshade flower--a statue of marble, chiselled in the beautiful curves of mocking love--a woman of chain lightning and hate...If I had lived by industry, as live those red ants you're watching, I might not now have one foot in my grave in Death Valley."

Thus there were rare instances when Virey appeared a man with the human virtues of regret, of comprehension, of intolerance, but never a word issued from his lips that was not tinged with bitterness. Had the divinity in him been blasted forever? Or was it a submerged spark that could quicken only to a touch of the woman lost to him? Adam wondered. Sometimes a feeling of pity for Virey stole over him, but it never lasted long. Adam had more respect for these red ants than for some men, despite the alleged divinity. He abhorred the drones of life. The desert taught how useless were the idlers--how nature ruthlessly cut them off.

The red ants had a hill some few paces from the shelter where Adam lay. One train of ants, empty handed, as it were, travelled rapidly from the ant hill toward the camp litter; and another train staggered under tremendous burdens in the other direction. At first Adam thought these last were carrying bits of bread, then he thought they were carrying grains of gravel, and then he discovered, by moving closer to watch, that they were carrying round black-and-white globules, several times as large as their own bodies. Presently he concluded that these round objects were ant eggs which the tribe was moving from one hill to another. It was exceedingly interesting to watch them. He recognised them as the species of desert ant that could bite almost as fiercely as a scorpion. Their labour was prodigious. The great difficulty appeared to be in keeping the eggs in their jaws, These burdens were continually falling out and rolling away. Some ants tried many times and in many ways to grasp the hard little globules. Then, when this was accomplished, came the work compared with which the labour of man seemed insignificant. After getting a start the loaded ants, made fair progress over smooth, hard ground, but when they ran into a crust of earth or a pebble or a chip they began the toil of a giant. The ant never essayed to go round the obstacle. He surmounted it.. He pushed and lifted and heaved, and sometimes backed over, dragging his precious burden behind him. Others would meet a little pitfall and, instead of circling it to get to the ant hill, they would roll down, over and over, with their eggs, until they reached the bottom. Then it was uphill work on the other side, indefatigable, ceaseless, patient, wonderful.

Adam presently had to forego his little sentiment about the toil of the ants over their eggs. The black-and-white globules were seeds of maize. On the night before, Adam's burro Jinny had persisted around camp until he gave her the last of some maize left in one of his packs. Jinny had spilled generous quantities of the maize in the sand, and the ants were carrying home the seeds.

How powerful they were! How endowed with tireless endurance and a persistence beyond human understanding! The thing that struck Adam so singularly was that these ants did not recognise defeat. They could not give up. Failure was a state unknown to their instincts. And so they performed marvellous feats. What was the spirit that actuated them? The mighty life of nature was infinitely strong in them. It was the same as the tenacity of the lichen that lived on the desert rocks, or the eyesight of the condor that could see its prey from the invisible heights of the sky, or the age-long destructive movements of the mountain tops wearing down to the valleys.

When Adam got up from his pleasant task and meditation he was surprised to find Mrs. Virey standing near with eyes intent on him. Then it became incumbent upon him to show her tie toils of the red ants. She watched them attentively for a while.

"Wonderful little creatures!" she exclaimed. "So this watching is one of the secrets of your desert knowledge, Wansfell, I can't compare these ants to men. They are far superior. They have order, purpose. They are passionless, perfect organisations to carry on their lives. They will work and live--the descendants of this very tribe of ants--long after the race of men has disappeared off the face of the earth...But wonderful as they are, and interesting as are their labours, I'd prefer to watch you chop wood, or, better, to climb the slope with your giant stride."

That night, sometime late, Adam was awakened by a gale that swooped up through the gateway from the valley. I t blew away the cool mountain air which had settled down from the heights. It was a warmer wind than any Adam had ever before experienced at night. It worried him. Forerunner, it must be, of the midnight furnace winds that had added to the fame of Death Valley! It brought a strange, low, hollow roar, unlike any other sound in nature. It was a voice. Adam harkened to the warning. On the morrow he would again talk to Virey. Soon it might be too late to save Magdalene Virey. She had obstructed his will. She would not leave without her husband. She had bidden Adam stay there in Death Valley to serve her, but she seemed to have placed her husband beyond Adam's reach. The ferocity in Adam had never found itself in relation to Virey. Adam had persuaded and argued with the persistence of the toiling ant, but to work his way with Virey seemed to demand the swoop of the desert hawk.

This strange warm wind, on its first occurrence during Adam's stay in the valley, rose to a gale and then gradually subsided until it moaned away mournfully. Its advent had robbed Adam of sleep; its going seemed to leave a deader silence, fraught with the meaning of its visit.

Adam could sleep no more. This silence belied the blinking of the stars. It disproved the solidarity of the universe. Nothing lived, except his soul, that seemingly had departed from his body in a dream, and now with his vague thoughts and vaguer feelings wandered over the wastelands, a phantom in the night. Silence of utter solitude--most intense, dead, dreaming, waiting, sepulchre-like, awful! Where was the rustle of the wings of the bats? The air moved soundlessly, and it seemed to have the substance of shadows. A dead solitude--a terrible silence! A man and the earth! The wide spaces, the wild places of the earth as it was in the beginning! Here could be the last lesson to a thinking man--the last development of a man into savage or god.'

There! Was that a throb of his heart or a ring in his ear? Crack of a stone, faint, far away, high on the heights, a lonely sound making real the lonely night. It relieved Adam. The tension of him relaxed. And he listened, hopefully, longing to hear another break in the silence that would be so insupportable.

As he listened, the desert moon, oval in shape, orange hued and weird, sailed over the black brow of the mountain and illumined the valley in a radiance that did not seem of land or sea. The darkness of midnight gave way to orange shadows, mustering and shading, stranger than the fantastic shapes of dreams.

Another ring of rock on rock, and sharp rattle, and roll on roll, assured Adam that the weathering gods of the mountain were not daunted by the silence and the loneliness of Death Valley. They were working as ever. Their task was to level the mountain down to the level of the sea. The stern, immutable purpose seemed to vibrate in the ringing cracks and in the hollow reports. These sounds in their evenness and perfect rhythm and lonely tone established once more in Adam's disturbed consciousness the nature of the place. Death Valley! The rolling of rocks dispelled phantasms.

Then came a low, grating roar. The avalanche of endless broken rocks had slipped an inch. It left an ominous silence. Adam stirred restlessly in his blankets. There was a woman in the lee of that tremendous sliding slope a woman of delicate frame, of magnificent spirit, of a heart of living flame. Every hour she slept or lay wide-eyed in the path of that impending cataclysm was one of exceeding peril. Adam chafed under the invisible bonds of her will. Because she chose to lie there, fearless, beyond the mind of man to comprehend, was that any reason why he should let her perish? Adam vowed that he would end this dread situation before another nightfall. Yet when he thought of Magdalene Virey his heart contracted. Only through the fierce spirit of the desert could he defy her and beat down the jailer who chained her there. But that fierce spirit of his seemed obstructed by hers, an aloof thing, greater than ferocity, beyond physical life.

And so Adam lay sleepless, listening to the lonely fall of sliding rocks, the rattle and clash, and then the hollow settling. Then he listened to the silence.

It was broken by a different note, louder, harsher--the rattle and bang of a stone displaced and falling from a momentum other than its own. It did not settle. Heavy and large, it cracked down to thud into the sand and bump out through the brush. Scarcely had it quieted when another was set in motion, and it brought a low, sliding crash of many small rocks. Adam sat up, turning his ear toward the slope. Another large stone banged down to the sands. Adam heard the whiz of it, evidently hurtling through the air between his camp and the Vireys'. If that stone had struck their shack!

Adam got up and, pulling on his boots, walked out a little way from the camp. What an opaque orange gloom! Nevertheless, it had radiance. He could see almost as well as when the full moon soared in silver effulgence. More cracking and rolling of little rocks, and then the dislodgment of a heavy one, convinced Adam that a burro was climbing the slope or a panther had come down to prowl around camp. At any rate the displacement of stones jarred unnaturally on Adam's sensitive ear.

Hurrying across to the Virey shack, he approached the side farther from the slope and called through the brush wall, "Mrs. Virey!"

"Yes. What do you want, Wansfell?" she replied, instantly. She had been wide awake.

"Have you heard the sliding rocks?"

"Indeed I have! All through that strange roar of wind--and later."

"You and Virey better get up and take your blankets out a ways, where you will not be in danger. I think there's a burro or a panther up on the slope. You know how loose the stones are--how at the slightest touch they come sliding and rolling. I'll go up and scare the beast away."

"Wansfell, you're wrong," came the reply, with that old mockery which always hurt Adam. "You should not insult a burro--not to speak of a panther."

"What?" queried Adam, blankly.

"It is another kind of an animal."

But for that subtle mockery of voice Adam would have been persuaded the woman was out of her head, or at least answering him in her sleep.

"Mrs. Virey, please----"

"Wansfell, it's a sneaking coyote," she called, piercingly, and then she actually uttered a low laugh.

Adam was absolutely dumbfounded. "Coyote!" he ejaculated.

"Yes. It's my husband. It's Virey. He found out the rolling rocks frightened me at night. So he climbs up there and rolls them...Sees how close he can come to hitting the shack!...Oh, he's done that often!"

An instant Adam leaned there with his head bent to the brush wall, as if turned to stone. Then like a man stung he leaped up and bounded round the shack toward the slope.

In the orange radiance on that strange, moon-blanched slope he dimly saw a moving object. It stood upright. Indeed, no burro or panther! Adam drew a deep and mighty breath for the yell that must jar the very stones from their sockets.

"HYAR!" he yelled in stentorian roar. Like thunder the great sound pealed up the slope. "COME DOWN OR I'LL WRING YOUR NECK!"

Only the clapping, rolling, immeasurable echoes answered him. The last hollow clap and roll died away leaving the silence deader than before.

Adam spent the remainder of that night pacing to and fro in the orange-hued shadows, fighting the fierce, grim violence that at last had burst its barrier. Adam could have wrung the life out of this Virey with less compunction than he would have in stamping on the head of a venomous reptile. Yet it was as if a spirit kept in the shadow of his form, as he strode the bare shingle gazing up at the solemn black mountains and at the wan stars.