CHAPTER XIX
Adam was thrown prostrate. In the thick, smothering dust he all but lost his senses. Adam felt what seemed a stream of stones rolling over his feet. The thundering, deafening roar rolled on, spread and thinned to a rattling crash, deadened and ceased. Then from the hollows of the hills boomed a mighty echo, a lifting and throwing of measureless sound, that thumped from battlement to battlement and rumbled away like muttering thunder.
The silence then was terrible by contrast. As horror relaxed its grim clutch Adam began to realize that miraculously he had been spared. In the hot, dusty pall he fought for breath like a drowning man. The heavy dust settled and the lighter drifted away.
Adam clambered to his feet. The huge bowlder that had been his ship of safety appeared to be surrounded by a sea of small rocks, level with where he stood. The avalanche had spread a deep layer of rocks all over and beyond the space adjacent to the camp. Not a vestige of the shack remained. Magdalene Virey had been buried forever beneath a mass of stone. Adam’s great frame shuddered with the convulsions of his emotion. He bent and bowed under the inevitable. “Oh, too late! too late!... Yet I knew all the time!” was the mournful cry he sent out into the silence. Dazed, sick, horror-stricken, he bowed there above Magdalene Virey’s sepulcher and salt tears burned his eyes and splashed down upon the dusty stones. He suffered, dully at first, and then acutely, as his stunned consciousness began to recover. Tragic this situation had been from the beginning, and it could have had but one end.
Suddenly he remembered Virey. The thought transformed him.
“He must have slid with the avalanche,” muttered Adam. “Buried under here somewhere. One sepulcher for him and wife!... So he wanted it—alive or dead!”
The lower part of the great slope was now solid rock, dusty and earthy in places, in others the gray color of live granite. It led his eye upward, half a mile, to the wide, riblike ridge that marked the lower margin of another slope of weathered rocks. It shone in the hot sunlight. Dark veils of heat rose, resembling smoke against the sky. The very air seemed trembling, and over that mountain-side hovered the shadow of catastrophe.
A moving white object caught Adam’s roving sight. His desert eyes magnified that white object. A man! He was toiling over the loose stones.
“Virey!” burst out Adam, and with the explosion of the word all of the desert stormed in him and his nature was no different from the cataclysm that had shorn and scarred the slope.