He saw a miniature painting of a girl’s face, oval, pure as a flower, with beautiful curls of dark bronze, and magnificent eyes. In these last Adam recognized the mother of this girl. The look of them, the pride and fire, if not the color, were the same as Magdalene Virey’s.
“A sweet and lovely face,” said Adam.
“Ruth!” she whispered. “My daughter—my only child—my baby that I abandoned to save her happiness!... Oh, mockery of life that I was given such a heart to love—that I was given such a perfect child!”
* * * * *
The midsummer midnight furnace winds began to blow.
They did not blow every night or many nights consecutively; otherwise all life in the valley would soon have become extinct. Adam found the hot winds heretofore, that he had imagined were those for which the valley was famed, were really comfortable compared with these terrible furnace blasts. In trying to understand their nature, Adam concluded they were caused by a displacement of higher currents of cool air. Sometime during the middle of the night there began a downward current of cool air from the mountain heights; and this caused a disturbance of the vast area of hot air in the burning valley below sea level. The tremendous pressure drove the hot air to find an outlet so it could rise to let the cool air down, and thus there came gusts and gales of furnace winds, rushing down the valley, roaring up the canyons.
The camp of the Vireys, almost in the center of one of these outlets and scarcely a quarter of a mile from the main valley, lay open to the full fury of these winds.
* * * * *
The 1st of August was a hazy, blistering day in which the valley smoked. Veils of transparent black heat—shrouds of moving white transparent heat! The mountains’ tops were invisible, as if obscured in thin, leaden-hued fog; their bases showed dull, sinister red through the haze. Nothing moved except the strange veils and the terrible heaven-wide sun that seemed to have burst. It was a day when, if a man touched an unshaded stone with his naked hand, he would be burned as by a hot iron. A solemn, silent, sulphurous, smoky, deadly day, inimical to life!
But at last the sunset of red hell ended that day and merciful darkness intervened. The fore part of the night was hot, yet endurable, and a relief compared to the sunlit hours. Adam marked, however, or imagined, a singular, ominous, reddish hue of the dim stars, a vast still veil between him and the sky, a waiting hush. He walked out into the open, peering through the dimness, trying to comprehend. The color of the stars and heavens, and of the dull black slopes, and of the night itself, seemed that of a world burned out. Immense, dim, mysterious, empty, desolate! Had this Death Valley finally unhinged his mind? But he convinced himself that it was normal. The unreality, the terror, the forbidding hush of all the elements, the imminence of catastrophe—these were all actually present. Anything could happen here. Exaggeration of sense was impossible. This Death Valley was only a niche of the universe and the universe only a part of the infinite. He felt his intelligence and emotion, and at the same time the conviction that only a step away was death. The old wonder arose—was death the end? Not possible! Yet the cruelty, the impassivity of nature, letting the iron consequences fall—this seemed to crush him. For the sake of a woman who suffered agony of body and mind, Adam was at war with nature and the spirit of creation. Why? The eternal query had no answer. It never would be answered.