He was losing the battle, losing his hold on tangible things,
losing his power to stand up under this ponderous, merciless weight
of desert space and silence.
He acknowledged it in a kind of despair, and the shadows of the
night seemed whirling fiends. Lost! Lost! Lost! What are you
waiting for? Rain!. . . Lost! Lost! Lost in the desert! So the
shadows seemed to scream in voiceless mockery.
At the moment he was alone on the promontory. The night was far
spent. A ghastly moon haunted the black volcanic spurs. The winds
blew silently. Was he alone? No, he did not seem to be alone.
The Yaqui was there. Suddenly a strange, cold sensation crept over
Gale. It was new. He felt a presence. Turning, he expected to
see the Indian, but instead, a slight shadow, pale, almost white,
stood there, not close nor yet distant. It seemed to brighten.
Then he saw a woman who resembled a girl he had seemed to know long
ago. She was white-faced, golden-haired, and her lips were sweet,
and her eyes were turning black. Nell! He had forgotten her.
Over him flooded a torrent of memory. There was tragic woe in this
sweet face. Nell was holding out her arms--she was crying aloud
to him across the sand and the cactus and the lava. She was in
trouble, and he had been forgetting.
That night he climbed the lava to the topmost cone, and never
slipped on a ragged crust nor touched a choya thorn. A voice
called to him. He saw Nell's eyes in the stars, in the velvet
blue of sky, in the blackness of the engulfing shadows.
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