Dust of the Desert

by Robert Welles Ritchie

Retrospect could not long hold Benicia’s mind against the joy of the homing journey. For the desert she loved spoke to her a welcome long dreamed in the stifling precincts of cities. There was the sky she had yearned for, something of infinite depths which did not shut down over the earth like an inverted cup; rather an impalpable sea wherein the earth swam free. Morning gold still tinted it. And the mountains that rose sheer from the desert floor with no lesser foothill heights: under the sun they were blue in the east and where slant rays fell upon western barriers a tawny strength of naked rock clothed them. Between the feet of the mountain stretched the level desert plain far and far beyond the power of eye to compass; grey with the grey of saltbush and greasewood, overtones of green where the first leaves of the mesquite and ironwood answered the call of the spring sun.

Quelele had turned the machine onto a westward wending road once the Line was crossed at Sonizona. A few straggling ranches near the border town, then the unsullied desert. Westward and southward sped the machine, deep into the greatest stretch of unpeopled wilderness between the Barren Grounds of the Dominion and Panama.

The Desert of Altar lies there. From the Line south to the Yaqui River and from the Gulf of California, once called the Sea of Cortez, eastward to the Sierra Madre:—here is the terra incognita of Sonora; here is the dominion of thirst. A territory large as New England and with a population smaller than the average New England mill town. A vast graveyard of vanished peoples, who left behind them mountains terraced with fortifications laid in unbroken breastworks of porphyry and rocks pictured with their annals of life and death. Rain comes only with occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms which wake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from the sky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into their basketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads and croaking frogs.

Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A man caught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand made mud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on end but are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate sole leather. In the furnace heat of summer furious rain storms occur in the higher air but the moisture is sucked up by the sun before it touches earth. Gold lies scattered on the surface of the desert and water must be mined. The desert kind slay after the manner of the ages but declare a truce at the waterhole. Death of all life is ever-present, yet grant so much as a permanent trickle of the life-giving fluid and the dust is covered with a glory of green.

For its devotees the desert holds mysteries potent beyond comprehension of folk in a softer land. The venturing padres of an elder day called it the Hand of God; they walked in the hand of God and were not afraid. Divinity, force, original cause—whatever may be your term for that power which jewels the grass with dew and swings the suns in their courses—this is very close in the desert. In great cities man has driven the Presence far from him by his silly rackets of steam and electricity, by his farcical reproductions of cliffs and pinnacles. In the Desert of Altar he walks in silence and with God. The very air is kinetic with the energy that brought forth life on a cooled planet.

The desert had been Benicia’s teacher; had moulded her spirit to its own pattern of elemental strength. Born the last of the O’Donojus in the desert oasis that was the ultimate remnant of the once kingly Rancho del Refugio—grant of a Spanish Philip to her ancestor—she had been reared in the asperities of the land, had absorbed into her bone and tissue the rigours and simple verities of a wilderness. Because there was no son in the Casa O’Donoju and because, too, this only daughter came into the world with the inheritance of a spirit impetuous and errant as a desert bird, Don Padraic, her father, gave over all attempts at imposing on her the straight decorum that shackles the Spanish maiden of gentle blood. With the death of her mother when Benicia was still in short skirts came this loosening of the bonds. Instead of growing to maturity a shy creature who must never quit the sight of a duenna and whose eyes shall tell no secrets, the girl warmed to a wonderful companionship with her father, lived the life of a boy.

Her flaming red hair bobbed about the fringe of milling cores of wild cattle at the round-up. At Sahuaro feasts of the Papagoes, Mo Vopoki (Lightning Hair) added her shrill soprano to the chorus of the Frog Doctor Song. She learned where gold lay in shallow pockets and winnowed it from the sands in the Indian fashion. She brought home a mewing, spitting kitten she had taken from a bobcat’s litter. Her doll was discarded for a rifle before her strength could shoulder it.

Schooling came in her father’s library, filled with books in three languages. English and music, the music of the great harp, became her passions. The harp had been her great-grandmother’s; Don Padraic could make the mesh of strings sing with the sound of rain on flowers. He was her first teacher. Then, when twenty years were hers and Don Padraic realized something besides the wild desert life was needed to round out the full beauty of his daughter’s soul, he had urged further studies on the harp as the excuse for Benicia’s two years in the cities of the States. Those two years had served well to overlay upon the rugged handiwork of the wild the softness and subtleties of culture.

Benicia believed she possessed all her father’s confidences. So she did—all but one. She did not know that when she came into the world with tiny head furry in burning red Donna Francisca, her mother, had cried herself into hysteria and Don Padraic’s heart had gone cold. Nor was she ever told that her flaming hair marked her with the finger of Nemesis.

This day of the return from exile no premonition of the inheritance of fate arose to disturb the singing heart of the girl. She rattled on to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerning her father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on the rancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic’s fief in the waste lands. She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; of white men’s wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of water so plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a long serpent’s mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machines like the king condor and flew hundreds of miles between sun and sun. To all of which big Quelele, never lifting his eyes from the thin rut lines in the sand, answered with a single monosyllable “Hi,” wherein was compounded all his capacity for wonder.