The conclusion we came to was to husband all the resources we could command. It sounded grandiloquent—our resources! What were they? Some patches of jerked deer’s meat, our fryingpan and pot, the remnant of our improvised tent and our knapsacks, almost empty except for the instruments, a few necessary implements, the ammunition, still sufficient, and our guns. Our clothing was desperately worn. Literally, we were in rags, but a primitive kind of treatment in water, from time to time, had freed this dejected apparel of at least a large percentage—I really think a preponderant percentage—of its dirt. The question of water remained urgent.
In about a day or so we came upon the outlines of the desert plain—scrappy expanses of sand and pebbles—mostly angular, and we noted the dust occasionally sweeping heavenward in yellow clouds but still we thought we also saw the dark farther zone of trees. Our horizon was now more limited; we had descended some fifteen hundred feet, and the advantage of an elevated circumspection was denied us. The professor determined the sand to be a pulverulent shattered and crumbling limestone, and although absorbent and apparently deeply bedded he believed we could, almost anywhere, upon digging find water. This was encouraging, and the trip over this tawny and sometimes dazzling waste seemed less formidable. The light became peculiarly tantalizing and objectionable, and we were thankful enough for the goggles. After deliberation we made up the canvas of our little tent, which we still retained, into bags (we had pack thread and sailors’ needles) and expected to use them as water carriers. Then we trapped a few moles, though recourse to this unpalatable flesh would only be considered in an extremity, and then, not without foreboding, we started over the pallid desert.
We soon came upon traces of the great storm which we had watched from the Deer Fels. These were unmistakable. Deep gouges had been made in the sand by the volleying and cutting winds, but the most extraordinary vestiges of its violence were the conical hills of sand, raised over the surface in huge mammilary erections. These were distributed with a very striking evenness, except at spots, where it would seem the moving hills in their translation had closed upon one another, and, demolished in the collisions, left formless congeries of tossed and sprawling heaps, which might have a length of a mile or more, and were from half to three quarters of a mile in width. They were disagreeable obstacles, and ploughing through them was the hardest kind of work, for the surfaces were composed of a deep deposit of minute grains and dust and our feet sank into them as quickly as though we were engaged in a plunge through a colossal flour bin or a wheat pit.
But our complaints and discouragements were providentially rebuked. Fighting our way up and down these dry quagmires of dust, stumbling, falling and not infrequently assisting to extricate one another from the floury embrace, we had come to the crest of a ridge which crossed diagonally one of these shapeless, tortuous mounds. This ridge, over the mean level of the plain, was almost twenty feet high, a good measure of the strength of the wind suction which had built it up. We were dusty, almost exhausted, and the water we had carefully conserved, as best we might (for the bags were not watertight) in our canvas receptacles, was approaching a dangerous depletion. It was absolutely necessary, fight against it as we might, to wash our mouths and throats, clogged and asperate as they were with the grains and dust, quite often, or, it seems to me, we would have been suffocated. What gratitude we felt you may imagine, when, on surmounting the ridge, our eyes fell upon a small pool of water entrapped upon some impervious bottom, in a natural bowl, enclosed by the ridge on which we halted and a lower ridge beyond us. The familiar thought of how it transcended in value any imaginable wealth of gold and diamonds at that moment flashed, I guess, through all of our minds. We camped there. The water was clear and cool, for, I should have mentioned it, the weather had been colder, and, when our “fixed Sun,” as Goritz called it was hidden, we suffered somewhat from imperfect protection.
“Queer we don’t hit any more of those weird phantoms that own this place, isn’t it?” said Hopkins.
“Oh,” I replied, “they may be watching us now, listening to us. You can’t tell. I think they’re a sort of supernatural people that can do almost anything. Perhaps they wear magic cloaks, hats, shoes, that make them invisible. Speak easy when you meet ’em Spruce, and don’t abuse them behind their backs, for—it may be—to their faces.”
“Look here, Alfred, I really believe you’ve loosened a nut in that tight little head of yours. To hear you talk gets on my nerves. Don’t do it. Hasn’t the Professor explained it all as Evolution, and how exceedingly friendly these fine folk will be to us when they get a bead on our own families. As for speaking easy, I shan’t speak at all. With me it’s the case of Pat once again, and I couldn’t get even as far as he did with the Frenchman with his “Parlez-vous français, and—give me the loan of your gridiron.”
“Alfred,” asked the Professor, “could you talk with them, if it turns out that their language is Hebrew?”
“Certainly,” I answered, “I am a Jew, and my earliest training has never been forgotten. I have been hugging the thought that I can understand them or make them understand me. I grant, along traditional lines there was something Hebraic in their looks.”
“Yes Alfred—this,” said Hopkins, touching his nose.