Then the silence! He was dumb, he was awed, he bowed his head,
he trembled, he marveled at the desert silence. It was the one
thing always present. Even when the wind roared there seemed to
be silence. But at night, in this lava world of ashes and canker,
he waited for this terrible strangeness of nature to come to him
with the secret. He seemed at once a little child and a strong man,
and something very old. What tortured him was the incomprehensibility
that the vaster the space the greater the silence! At one moment
Gale felt there was only death here, and that was the secret; at
another he heard the slow beat of a mighty heart.
He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He
did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different
man. And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow,
sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert,
as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the
whole scale of a man's values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him.
More of desert experience, Gale believe, would be too much for intellect.
The desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over
a strange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to the savage?
Yaqui was the answer to that. When Gale acknowledged this he always
remembered his present strange manner of thought. The past, the
old order of mind, seemed as remote as this desert world was from
the haunts of civilized men.
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