him through the crack in the rocks and now he had been here upward of six months. He did not expect for a sign of emotion now. Too long had she had the opportunity of looking forward to the end to be greatly perturbed by it now that it was at hand.
It came with a little shock to him one day that So Wuhti was all human, after all. Out of a still silence by the ruined tower she had moved to him quickly, her crooked claw of a hand suddenly fastening about his forearm.
"You're a good man, Bahana," she said, her eyes unusually bright upon his. "Many days ago you were ready to go. You wait that So Wuhti does not die alone like the coyote. Askwali! I thank you. Haruing Wuhti will bring you many good things. I will tell her."
With all of her madness she was not without wisdom. She set her chamber in order that night; Northrup had the suspicion that in honor of the occasion she even went so far as to bathe. Then, when the first stars were coming out she made a trembling way to the cliff-tops, Northrup helping her up the short ladder.
In the faint light here Northrup saw how she had arranged her hair, and the thing came to him with something of a shock. She had done it up into two whorls, one at each ear, the imitation of the squash blossom which with the Zuni people tells the time when a maiden has ripened into the first blush of womanhood. So Wuhti was ready for the coming of Haruing Wuhti, for the time when again she would be beautiful—a young mana.
When at last the great fire, which at her command he had kindled, had burnt down, Northrup went slowly back into the stone chamber which had so long been So Wuhti's and which was never again to know her presence. As he looked at her blankets laid in order, folded by hands into which the chill had already crept, when he saw the broken jugs and crocks set in their neat row, a sudden moisture came into his eyes. So Wuhti had been good to him and she was dead. So Wuhti was gone and he was lonely!
In the coolness of the night, having only the stars to guide him, his canteen freshly filled, he pushed on, out into the desert.
Chapter 3
III
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
