The sun was well up now, and its beams warmed the man’s chilled, sore body. The desert was no longer gray, but a glowing yellow. Even the air was warm-hued, suffusing the landscape with a roseate loveliness that yet seemed less of life than of death.

Everywhere were the desert growths, travesties of vegetation, twisted, grotesque, ghostly gray and pale green in hues. A profound stillness, insistent, oppressive, was upon everything. The yellow sand, the glowing air, the cloudless dome of the sky, the far-off mountains, all seemed to soak up sound. The world lay hushed in fierce, tense quiet, as though waiting the appearance of some savage portent.

The camel did not hasten. Gard, walking beside it, had a feeling that the creature was very old. Its eyes were bright, its coat silky and fine, but deep under the hair’s soft luxuriance the man’s fingers felt the skin, wrinkled and folded over shrunken muscles.

But there was neither feebleness nor hesitation in the forward progress of the desert pilot. It moved forward with a sort of inexorableness, its padded feet making no sound on the hard sand, its gaze bent steadily ahead, its inscrutable visage 37wearing ever, a look of centuries-old scorn for all things made.

37

They passed a huge bull-snake sunning upon a rock, and here and there a silent bird flitted to or from its home in some thorn-guarded cholla. Once a coyote tossed lightly across their vision, a blown gray feather along the horizon, but no other signs of animal life stirred the death-like plain.

The sand grew warmer in the sun’s rays, till permeating heat radiated from it and hung over it everywhere, a palpable, shimmering mist of lavender and gold, between earth and air. By mid-forenoon the sun’s rays were oppressive, and they halted in the shadow of a giant suhuaro.

The camel, when the man released the leading-strap, lowered itself slowly to rest, doubling down its legs like the shutting of a jack-knife, and settling upon the sand with the curious, sighing grunt of old age.

Gard, in the meantime, set about the preparation of a meal. He shelled a handful of tree beans and crushed them between two stones, mixing them with water from his canteen into a sort of paste, which he ate. The suhuaro’s fruit was yet hanging upon its great branches, dried, somewhat, by the autumn sun and wind, but palatable and nutritious still. Gard found a long pole, once part of the frame of another giant cactus, and with this 

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