Wanderer of the Wasteland
Zane Grey (1923)
Country of origin: USA
Available texts by the same author here
Chapter 7
Adam's heavy slumbers were punctuated by periods when he half awakened, drowsily aware of extreme heat, of discomfort and sluggish pain, and of vague sounds.Twilight had fallen when he fully awakened, stiff and sore, with a gnawing at his stomach and a parching of mouth and throat from thirst. He crawled out of the copse of arrow-weed, to the opening by which he had entered it, and, stealthily proceeding on to the road, he peered out and listened. No man in sight--no sound to alarm! Consciousness of immense relief brought bitterly home to him the fact that he was a fugitive. Taking to the road, he walked rapidly in the direction of the lights. He passed low, dark huts somewhat back from the road, and he heard strange voices, probably of Indians.
In about a quarter of an hour he came to the river basin, where the road dropped down somewhat into the outskirts of Yuma. Most of the lights were across the river on the Arizona side. He met both Mexicans and Indians who took no apparent notice of him, and this encouraged Adam to go on with them down to a ferryboat.
The boat was shoved off. Adam saw that it was fastened to the cable overhead by ropes and pulleys. The current worked it across the river. Adam got out with the rest of the passengers, and, leaving them, he walked down the bank a few rods. He found a little dock with a skiff moored to it, and here he lay flat and drank his fill. The water was full of sand, but cool and palatable. Then he washed his face and hands. The latter were swollen and stiff from the cactus thorns, rendering them clumsy.
Next in order for him was to find a place to eat, and he came at once upon an eating house where several rough-looking white men and some Mexicans were being served by a Chinaman.
When he ended this meal he had determined upon a course to take. He needed a gun, ammunition, canteen, burro, and outfit; and he hardly expected to be able to purchase them after dark, without exciting suspicion. All the same, he set out to look.
A short walk brought Adam to a wide street, dimly lighted by the flare of lamps from open doors of saloons and stores. He halted in a shadow on the corner. A stream of men was passing--rugged, unshaven, dusty-booted white men, and Mexicans with their peaked sombreros and embroidered jackets and tight braided trousers.
Presently Adam ventured forth and walked up the street. The town resembled Picacho in its noisiest hours, magnified many times. He felt a wildness he could not see or hear. It dragged at him. It somehow made him a part of the frontier life. He longed to escape from himself.
A glimpse of a tall man in black frock coat startled Adam. That coat reminded him of Collishaw. He sheered down a side street into the gloom. He saw wagons and heard the munch of horses in stalls. Evidently this place was a barnyard and might afford him a safe retreat for the night. The first wagon he examined contained straw. Climbing into it he lay down. For a long time he lay there, worrying over the risk he must run next day, until at length he fell asleep.
When day dawned, however, Adam had not such overpowering dread. The sun was rising in red splendour and the day promised to be hot. As it was early, but few people were to be encountered, and this fact lent Adam more courage. He had no difficulty in finding the place where he had eaten the night before. Adam ate as heartily as he could, not because he was hungry, but for the reason that he had an idea, he might have to travel far on this meal.
That done, he sallied forth to find a store where he could purchase the outfit he needed; and he approached the business section by a street that climbed to what was apparently the highest point in Yuma.
Adam entered a store, and almost forgot himself in the interest of the purchases he wanted to make. He needed a small mule, or burro, to pack his outfit, and while the storekeeper went out to get it for Adam several Mexicans entered. One of them recognised Adam. He cried out, "Santa Maria!" and ran out, followed by his amazed but less hurried comrades. It took Adam a moment to place the man in mind. Felix the Mexican that had drawn a knife on Arallanes.
Therefore Adam pondered. He must take risks to get away with this necessary outfit. The storekeeper, who had gone out through the back of the store, returned to say he could furnish a good burro ready to be packed at once. Adam made a deal with him for the whole outfit and began to count out the money. The storekeeper did not wait, and, gathering up an armful of Adam's purchases, he carried them out through the back door. This gave Adam opportunity to have a look from the front door into the street. There strode Felix, gesticulating wildly to the white man Adam had seen before, the black-coated tall Collishaw, significant and grim, with a white bandage over his face.
A shock pierced Adam's heart, and it was followed by a terrible icy compression, and then a bursting gush of blood, a flood of fire over all his body. Leaping like a deer, he bounded back through the store, out of the door, and across an open space full of implements, wagons, and obstacles he had to run around or jump over. He did not see the storekeeper. One vault took him over a high board fence into an alley, and through this he ran into a street. He headed for the river, running fleetly, blind to all around him but the ground flying under his feet and the end of the street. He gained that. The river, broad and swirling, lay beneath him. Plunging down the bank, he flew toward the dock. Upon reaching the dock, Adam espied a skiff, with oars in place, with bow pulled up on the sand. One powerful shove sent it, with him aboard, out into the stream. He bent the oars in his long, strong sweeps, and it took him only a few moments to cross. Not yet had any men appeared in pursuit or even to take notice of him. As he jumped out on the California shore of the river and began to run north, he found that he faced the lone black mountain peak which dominated the rise of the desert. The dust was ankle deep. It stifled him, choked him, and caked on his sweaty face and hands. He strode swiftly, oppressed by the dust and intolerant of the confining borders of yellow brush. The frequent bends in the road were at once a relief and a dread. They hid him, yet obstructed his own view. He seemed obsessed by a great, passionate energy to escape. When he looked back he thought of Collishaw, of sure pursuit; when he looked ahead he thought of the road, the dust, the brush into which he wanted to hide, the physical things to be overcome.
By and bye he climbed and passed out of the zone of brush. He was on the open gravel ridges, like the ridges of a washboard, up and down, and just as bare. Yet, as a whole, there was a distinct slope upward. He could not see the level of the desert, but the lone mountain peak, close at hand now, red and black and shining, towered bleakly over him.
Adam derived satisfaction from the fact that the hard gravel ridges did not take imprint of his boots. Assured now that escape was in his grasp, he began to put his mind upon other considerations of his flight. He was not such a fool as to underrate the danger of his venturing out upon the desert without food, and especially without water. Already he was thirsty. These thoughts, and counter ones, pressed hard upon him until he surmounted the long slope to the top of the desert mesa. Here he looked back.
First he saw clouds of dust puffing up from the brush-covered lowlands, and then, in an open space where the road crossed, he espied horsemen coming at a gallop. Again, and just as fiercely, did his veins seem to freeze, his blood to halt, and then to burst into flame.
"Collishaw--and his men!" gasped Adam, his jaw dropping. "They've trailed me!...They're after me--on horses!"
The apparent fact was terrific in its stunning force. Adam reeled; his sight blurred. It was a full moment before he could rally his forces. Then, gazing keenly, he saw that his pursuers were still miles away.
At first he ran fleetly, with endurance apparently unimpaired; but he meant to slow down and husband his strength as soon as he dared. Before him stretched a desert floor of fine, shining gravel, like marbles, absolutely bare of any vegetation for what seemed hundreds of yards; and then began to appear short bunches of low meagre brush called greasewood, and here and there isolated patches of ocatilla. These multiplied and enlarged in the distance until they looked as if they would afford cover enough to hide Adam from his pursuers. Hot, wet with sweat, strong, and panting, he ran another mile, to find the character of the desert changing.
Reaching the zone of plant life, he soon placed a thin but effective barrier of greasewood and ocatilla behind him. Then he slowed down to catch his breath. Before him extended a vast hazy expanse, growing darker with accumulated growths in the distance. To the right rose the chocolate mountain range, and it ran on to fade in the dim horizon. Behind him now stood the lone black peak, and to the left rose a low, faint wavering line of white, like billows of a sea. This puzzled him until at length he realised it was sand. Sand--and it, like the range, faded in the distant horizon.
Adam also made the discovery that as he looked back over his shoulder he was really looking down a long, gradual slope. Plainly he could see the edge of the desert where he had come up, and often, as he travelled along at a jog trot, he gazed around with fearful expectancy. He had imagined that his running had given rise to the breeze blowing in his face. But this was not so. A rather stiff wind was blowing straight at him. It retarded his progress, and little puffs of fine, invisible sand or dust irritated his eyes. Then the tears would flow and wash them clear again. With all his senses and feelings there mingled a growing preponderance of thought or realisation of the tremendous openness of the desert. He felt as though a door of the universe had opened to him, and all before him was boundless. He had no fear of it; indeed, there seemed a comfort in the sense of being lost in such a vastness; but there was something intangible working on his mind. The wind weighed upon him, the coppery sky weighed upon him, the white sun weighed upon him, and his feet began to take hold of the ground. How hot the top of his head and his face! All at once the sweat appeared less copious and his skin drier. With this came a strong thirst. The saliva of his mouth was pasty and scant. He swallowed hard and his throat tightened. A couple of pebbles that he put into his mouth mitigated these last sensations.
Intelligence gave him pause then, and he halted in his tracks. If death was relentlessly pursuing him, it was no less confronting him there to the fore, if he passed on out of reach of the river. Death from thirst was preferable to capture, but Adam was not ready to die. He who had loved life clung to it all the more fiercely now that the sin of Cain branded his soul. He still felt unlimited strength and believed that he could go far. But the sun was hotter than he had ever experienced it; the heat appeared to strike up from the earth as well as burn down from above; and it was having a strange effect upon him. He had sensed a difficulty in keeping to a straight line of travel, and at first had put it down to his instinct for zigzagging to his greasewood bush and that ocatilla plant to place them behind him. Moving on again, he turned towards the chocolate mountain and the river.
It seemed close. He saw the bare grey desert with its green growths slope gradually to the rugged base of the range. Somewhere between him and there ran the river. He strained his eyesight. How strangely and clearly the lines of one ridge merged into the lines of another. There must be distance between them. But it could not be seen. The range looked larger and farther away the more he studied it--the air more full of transparent haze, the red and russet and chocolate hues more quiveringly suggestive of illusion.
"Look here," panted Adam, as he halted once more. "I've been told about the desert. But I didn't pay particular attention and now I can't remember. I only know it's hot--and this won't do."
It was just then that Adam, gazing back down the grey desert, saw puffs of dust and horses.
Panic seized him. He ran directly away from his pursuers, bending low, looking neither to right nor to left, violent, furious, heedless, like an animal in flight. And with no sense of direction, with no use of reason, he ran on till he dropped.
Then his breast seemed to split and his heart to lift with terrific pressure, agonising and suffocating. He lay on the ground and gasped, with his mouth in the dust. Gradually the paroxysm subsided.
He arose to go on, hot, dry, aching, dizzy, but still strong in his stride.
"I've--got--away," he said, "and now--the river--the river."
Fear of Collishaw had been dulled. Adam could think of little besides the heat and his growing thirst, and this thing--the desert--that was so strange, so big, so menacing. It did not alarm him that his skin was no longer wet with sweat, but the fact struck him singularly.
The wind was blowing sand in his face, obstructing his sight. Suddenly his feet dragged in sand. Dimly then he made out low sand dunes with hollows between, and farther on larger dunes waving and billowing on to rise to what seemed mountains of sand. He saw them as through a veil of dust. Turning away, he plodded on, half blinded, fighting the blast of wind that was growing stronger. The air cleared somewhat. Sand dunes were all around him, and to his right, in the direction he thought was wrong, loomed the chocolate range. He went that way, and again the flying sand hid a clear view. A low, seeping, silken rustle filled the air, sometimes rising to a soft roar. He thought of what he had heard about sand-storms, but he knew this was not one. Unwittingly he had wandered into the region of the dunes, and the strong gusty wind swept up the fine sand in sheets and clouds. He must get out. It could not be far to the level desert again. He plodded on, and the way he chose, with its intermittent views of the mountains, at last appeared to be the wrong one. So he turned again. And as he turned, a stronger wind, now at his back, whipped up the sand till all was pale yellow around him, thick and opaque and moaning, through which the sun shone with strange magenta hue. He did not dare rest or wait. He had to plod on. And the way led through soft, uneven sand, always dragging at his feet.
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 favoured 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 realised, 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 laboured 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 realising 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 marvellous 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 splendour 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 recognised 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 colour 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 colour. 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 farther and farther 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 heat 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, unforgetable 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 marvellously 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 vapour 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.