As the hours wore away the air grew hotter, denser. Like a blanket it seemed to lie heavily on Adam. It was the hottest, stillest, most oppressive, strangest night of all his desert experience. Sleep was impossible. Rest was impossible. Inaction was impossible. Every breath seemed impossible of fulfillment. A pressure constricted Adam’s lungs. The slow, gentle walk that he drove himself to take, which it was impossible to keep from taking, brought out a hot flood of sweat on his body, and the drops burned as they trickled down his flesh.
“If the winds blow to-night!” he muttered, in irresistible dread.
Something told him they would blow. To-night they would blow harder and hotter than ever before. The day of leaden fire had promised that. Nature had her midnight change to make in the elements. Time would not stand still. The universe prevailed on its inscrutable course; the planets burned; the suns blazed upon their earths; and this ball of rock on which Adam clung, groaning with the other pygmies of his kind, whirled and hurtled through space, now dark and then light, now hot and then cold, slave to a blazing master ninety million miles away. It was all so inconceivable, inscrutable, unbelievable.
There came a movement of air fanning his check, emphasizing the warmth. He smelled anew the dry alkali dust, the smoky odor, almost like brimstone. The hour was near midnight and the deathlike silence brooded no more. A low moan, as of a lost soul, moved somewhere on the still air. Weird, dismal, uncanny, it fitted the spectral shadows and shapes around him, and the night with its mystery. No human sound, though it resembled the mourn of humanity! A puff of hot wind struck Adam in the face, rushed by, rustling the dead and withered brush, passed on to lull and die away. It seemed to leave a slow movement in the still air, a soft, restless, uneasy shifting, as of an immense volume becoming unsettled. Adam knew. Behind that sudden birth of life of dead air pressed the furious blasts of hell—the midnight furnace wind of Death Valley.
Adam listened. How strange, low, sad the moan! His keen ears, attuned to all varieties of desert sound, seemed to fill and expand. The moan swelled to a low roar, lulling now, then rising. Like no sound he had ever heard before, it had strange affinity with the abyss of shadows. Suddenly the air around Adam began a steady movement northward. Its density increased, or else the movement, or pressure behind, made it appear so. And it grew swift, until it rustled the brush. Down in the valley the roar swelled like the movement of a mighty storm through a forest. When the gale reached the gateway below Adam it gave a hollow bellow.
The last of the warm, still air was pressed beyond Adam, apparently leaving a vacuum, for there did not appear to be air enough to breathe. The roar of wind sounded still quite distant, though now loud. Then the hot blast struck Adam—a burning, withering wind. It was as if he had suddenly faced an open furnace from which flames and sparks leaped out upon him. That he could breathe, that he lived a moment, seemed a marvel. Wind and roar filled the wide space between the slopes and rushed on, carrying sand and dust and even shadows with it. That blast softened in volume and had almost died away when another whooped up through the gateway, louder and stronger and hotter than its predecessor. It blew down Adam’s sun shelter of brush and carried the branches rustling away. Then stormed contending tides of winds until, what with burning blasts and whirling dust devils and air thick with powdered salt and alkali, life became indeed a torment for Adam, man of the desert as he was.
In the face of these furnace winds, tenacity of life had new meaning for Adam. The struggle to breathe was the struggle of a dying man to live. But Adam found that he could survive. It took labor, greater even than toiling through a sandstorm, or across a sun-scorched waste to a distant water hole. And it was involuntary labor. His great lungs were not a bellows for him to open when he chose. They were compelled to work. But the process, in addition to the burn and sting, the incessant thirst, the dust-laden air, the hot skullbone like an iron lid that must fly off, and the strange, dim, red starlight, the somber red varying shadow, the weird rush and roar and lull—all these created heroic fortitude if a man was to endure. Adam understood why no human being could long exist in Death Valley.
“She will not live through the night,” muttered Adam. “But if she does, I think I’ll take her away.”
While in the unearthly starlit gloom, so dimly red, Adam slowly plodded across to the Virey camp, that idea grew in his mind. It had augmented before this hour, only to faint at the strength of her spirit, but to-night was different. It marked a climax. If Magdalene Virey showed any weakening, any change of spirit, Adam knew he would have reached the end of his endurance.
She would be lying or sitting on the stone bench. It was not possible to breathe inside the shack. Terrible as were the furnace winds, they had to be breasted—they had to be fought for the very air of life. She had not the strength to walk up and down, to and fro, through those endless hours.