The valley takes its toll. Most white men cannot live there long. The vigorous Scotchman had been at the ranch eight years and thought he could remain, but no one else had ever stayed such a length of time, and he had difficulty in finding anybody to keep him company for more than a few months. He told us that no white woman can stand it at all in summer. As Charlotte and I were almost prostrated even in early March, we are willing to accept the statement. Nothing that anyone can tell us of the evil effects of living in the valley is beyond our imaginations. At times the thermometer goes up to 130 degrees, but there is something worse than the heat. The Worrier claimed that 130 degrees was not uncommon in Silver Lake, and that he spent his summers there without suffering as people do in the valley. The mercury never rose above 98 degrees while we were at the ranch, a temperature by no means unknown in eastern summers, yet our feeling of lassitude increased daily, combined with a faintness and giddiness that we could hardly combat. The blazing light had much to do with it, and we were below sea-level. A learned, scientific man has since told us that so small a drop in elevation could not be noticeable. Those old-timers who went insane on the hot sands knew that it was noticeable. You feel that if you were to go out into that blazing silence you could easily go insane, or succumb to the deadly inertia which paralyzed Charlotte and me. Too easily you could lie down in the thin, delusive shade of some little bush and forget. Even beneath the willow trees beside the flowing water we could scarcely move, our minds were dazed so we could neither read nor think. We understood "Old Johnnie's" feeling about the valley. Something hostile lives there.
The ghastly, shining swamp and the pools of poisonous water are horrible to the imagination because of their unnaturalness in the midst of such choking thirst. Only the perverted brain of a demon could have invented such a monstrosity. Water is in your thoughts all the time. From morning until night you are thirsty in the dry heat, and you look out over the shimmering miles and know that, though there is water here and there, if you leave the irrigation-ditch you cannot quench your thirst. You cling to the narrow green line where the mountain-water flows down. The feeling grows on you that you are visiting some sinister world which can be no part of your beloved earth.
And then night comes. A miracle happens and you know this is the same outdoors you love, only its trappings are put off, it is stripped of obscuring verdure, naked, and you find it more terrible than you thought it could be and more beautiful than you thought it could be. The rising and the setting of that cruel sun are great splendors, that dark night sky is bigger and deeper than in kinder countries. The stars are very near, floating in a sea so deep it reaches to infinity; they are twice as big as ordinary stars, they look like silver balls. The sky is a deep, dark blue. The whole valley is blue in the night and luminous like a sapphire. The going-down of the sun is a pageant; its uprising is a triumph. You feel as though you ought to clash cymbals, you feel as though you ought to dance and sing when the sun looks over the mountains. You have been remiss in worship all your life because you have not learned to dance and sing in honor of the rising sun. The sun-god was worshiped on the desert for there the sun is a cruel, great god. His glory consumes the earth, but he is so absorbed in rejoicing in his glory that he does not know it.
One night we camped a little way up the canyon behind the ranch in the vain hope of finding a cooler spot. The canyon entered the mountain beside a precipitous, jagged cliff made of crumbling yellow rock, so steep that we could scarcely climb its sides. We attempted it late in the afternoon in the hope of getting a view of the whole valley at sunset, but its knife-edge ridges were so sharp and crumbling and our endurance so slight after the burning day that we could not reach a satisfactory summit. Being shut up in a canyon was no part of our plan and we made the Worrier help us lug our beds quite a way from camp to the top of a little hill overlooking at least part of the valley.
"Why don't you take them to the top of that there peak?" he inquired sarcastically, pointing at one of the steel-blue crests of the Funeral Range. We could not help it if he scoffed, we had to see the drama of the coming of night. Panting from these exertions added to our fruitless effort to climb the cliff, we brought up a canteen and the few things we needed and bade him go back and sleep happily under the wagon.
We ourselves had very little sleep on the hilltop for the drama was too stupendous. Slowly the mountains turned blue, and then bluer. Their beautiful skyline was drawn with a pencil that left a golden, luminous mark. Pale blue crept into the valley, indigo lay in pools among the foothills. The whole night was a succession of studies in blue like the blue nights some artists paint, but every shade of blue that an artist could mix on his palette was there. Layers of different blues lay one above another, and changed, and mingled. The enormous stars came out and hung in the sky like great lamps. The sapphire valley glistened beneath them. The lamps swung slowly toward the west and then were gradually extinguished. The sapphire turned into a moonstone, palely glimmering, and then into an opal full of flashing fires. The cruel, great god was coming. He came, and we were two tongue-tied fools longing to celebrate him and only standing mute and bewildered.
We always felt that longing and that bewilderment during the evenings and nights and mornings in the White Heart. They overwhelmed us and hurt us. We were like prisoners shut in by the walls of ourselves, unable to break through and be one with such beauty. We could not rest in it as we had rested for long minutes by the red promontory where we first saw the valley; there was too much beauty. We clutched at each changing, evanescent moment, spectators watching through tiny loopholes in the walls a pageant which passed too quickly and was too big for our understanding.
The White Heart exceeds the imagination every way. It is too terrible and too splendid. It asserts itself tremendously; the green patch of the ranch lying on the baked sand beside the shining swamp seems more ephemeral and unimportant than any of man's efforts to tame the desert; it is an unreality, a dream, and the dwellers on it are shadows in a dream. The majesty of the valley completely overshadows the row of tall palms against the background of the snowy Panamints, and the little oasis of alfalfa-fields, willow-trees, and white ranch-buildings blessed with shade. They might vanish like a mirage and never be missed. The magnificent procession of the nights and days passes over the white terror, more magnificent than other nights and days precisely because of the glowing of that terrible sand and those terrible mountains, perfect for its own sake, and utterly indifferent whether or not eyes and hearts can endure it.