And now, the cities, embryonic, were there, but would they stay? Built like the parabled city upon sand—sand without water!—would they not crumble and melt away, even as the mirage had faded? He forced himself to translate his conviction into material reasons. The desert was convincing. With its past defying history, its future appealed to the imagination as unchanging, eternal. Even now, those houses down yonder, in their ugly concreteness, were less real than the idea of the desert surrounding the little patch of civilization. Brandon’s words, from his monograph on desert soils, recurred to him. “The desert is a condition, not a fact.” To him, the desert was a fact.
Eduardo was conscious that he was thinking with the surface of his mind. He was withholding the belief in the negative sense which told him that he would never see that river subdued to service. A skeptic, Innes had called him! He made himself argue it out as a matter of temperament; his father’s had been optimistic, fervid; his was detached and analytical. The general had been militant; he was a dreamer. To him, this was a drama of form and color, a picture, a panorama—Parrish, Hardin, each in his place.
Had he but the dynamic energy which had swept his father through his vivid, versatile life! Once, under the spell of the general’s magnetism, he had been able to force that zeal, that enthusiasm, to recharge his own weakened batteries; but later, while flinging, perhaps, a track across a waste of sands, and a squaw’s bright skirt against a cloud-free sky, or a buck’s striped breast rising from a clump of creosote, would make his work a grind again. He had misplaced himself. What else, then, should he be doing?
Often, and now, looking down on that chocolate-colored land, it would come to him that his was the yearning, the wistfulness of the painter. Those purple mountains flushing to rosy points against a clear blue sky, that rushing water, what did it rouse in him? A sense of militancy, as with Rickard and Hardin, MacLean, all of them? It pricked instead, an irritation, a feeling of incompleteness. He wanted something; could a man be homesick for what he never had?
It was not the valley scheme alone, which made of his mind a battle-ground. Did he not meet life so, with a ready hand and a lagging spirit? That girl down there! Had he the blood of his father in his veins, would he not take her of the steady boyish gaze, match her sweetness with just loving? What was it that told him it would never be? Why did he keep guard over lips and eyes? She looked at others with the same level, straightforward frankness she gave to him; the game was, perhaps, yet to him who ran! If it were going to be, there would be a spring of joy within his heart. It was not going to be. He had asked before, and it had answered.
Whose was the answer, that came to him, sometimes at call, often unbidden? Intangible as moonlight, real as the voice of a friend? Can you see a voice? No substance to a voice? Let it come to again, let it tell him of that river; should he see it, the vision of his father, of the others, he, Eduardo?
Standing in the wash of clear sunlight, his arms outstretched to the land his father’s vision had peopled, he sent out his call that he should see that dream fulfilled, the river conquered. Give him back his belief! Give him back the courage that would make him one with the folk down there!
Out of that land of silence came, as a wave of darkness, a mist shutting out the sun, separating him from his fellows, the answer. No need to question that! Had it ever erred? Slowly, as a dream-walker, he went down the tower steps, and mingled with men again.
A week later, he was standing on the same platform. The sky was still fleckless; the painted flat mountains made sharp points into the vivid blue of the sky. The heat was holding off. The desert was spelling out her siren lure. But her lover had retreated to his gipsy bed; her brown lean breast was no longer pillowing him.
In the gorge west of the town, the water was now confined. The recession of the waters disclosed the ravaged Palo Verde, its shattered vineyard set in a square of eucalyptus trees, young giants of three years’ planting. Northward, Estrada caught the gleam of sunshine on broad barley-fields; he saw the glistening foliage of the orange orchards, Busby’s and the others. Between him and the eastern range spread miles of sweet-smelling alfalfa. Young willow growth checker-boarded the country, marking the canal system. All that in a few years; the miracle of irrigation. He had seen virgin desert, as this had been when his father had crossed with Bliss and Hardin; six years before, when he had first seen it, it was still desert, such as he was flinging a track across, of creosote-bush, and tough mesquit roots, and here and there, the arrow-weed. Who could tell of the next six years? Perhaps, the rest would be vanquished, and the river yet a meek water-carrier? But he knew!