As he stepped down the avalanche below grated with strange, harsh sound. It seemed to warn him. Halting, he gazed with clearer eyes. What was this change in Virey? Adam bent and peered. Had the man’s hair turned snow white?
Adam made another and a longer stride downward. And that instant the slope trembled. Virey flung up his arms as if to ward off another rolling stone. A rending, as of the rock-bound fastness of the slope yielding its hold—then the avalanche, with Virey in the center, moved downward, slowly heaving like a swell of weighted waves, and started to roll with angry roar. It gathered a ponderous momentum. It would never stop again on that slope. A shining, red-tinged dust cloud shrouded Virey. And then the avalanche, spilling over the declivity below, shocked the whole mountain slope and lifted to the heavens a thick-crashing, rolling roar of thunder. Death Valley engulfed the hollow echo and boomed thunder across to the battlements of the Funeral Mountains. And when the last rumble wore away, silence and solitude reigned there, pervasive and peaceful, as they had in the ages before man, with his passions, had evolved to vex nature.
CHAPTER XX
Adam’s return to camp was as vague as one of his desert nightmares. But as thought gained something of ascendency over agitation he became aware of blood and dust and sweat caked with his clothes upon his person, proving the effect of his supreme exertions. He had heaved an endless number of rocks; he had heaved the mountain-side down upon Virey, all to no avail. A higher power had claimed him. And the spirit of Magdalene Virey, like her living presence, had inscrutably come between Adam and revenge.
* * * * *
When Adam had packed his burros, twilight in the clefts of the hills had deepened to purple. He filled his canteens, and started the burros down toward the gateway. The place behind him was as silent as a grave. Adam did not look back. He felt the gray obscurity close over the scene.
Down at the gateway he saw that the valley was still light with the afterglow of sunset. Diagonally and far across the ashen waste he descried the little dark patch which he knew to be an oasis, where the waters of Furnace Creek sank into the sands.
The intense heat, the vast stillness, the strange radiation from the sand, the peculiar gray light of the valley, told Adam that the midnight furnace winds would blow long before he reached his destination. But he welcomed any physical ordeal. He saw how a great strife with the elements, a strain to the uttermost of his strength and his passion to fight, would save his faith, his hope, perhaps his mind.
So gradual was the change from twilight to darkness that he would scarcely have noted it but for the dimming of the notched peak. Out there in the open valley it was not dark. It was really the color of moonlight on marble. Wan, opaque, mystic, it made distance false. The mountains seemed far away and the stars close. Like the bottom of the Dead Sea, drained of its bitter waters, was this Death Valley. Action, strong and steady use of muscle, always had served to drive subjective broodings and wonderings and imaginings from Adam’s mind. But not here, in this sink, at night! He seemed continually and immensely confronted with the unreality of a fact—a live man alone on the salt dead waste of Death Valley. Measureless and unbreakable solitude! The waste hole into which drained the bitter dregs of the desert!