The world in which he moved seemed transfigured, radiant with the last glow of dying day, with a glory of golden gleam. His heart pounded and his blood flooded to and fro, swelling his veins. Life on the earth for him had been shot through and through with celestial fire. His feet were planted on the warm sands and his hands reached to touch the gray old bowlders. He needed these to assure himself that he had not been turned into the soft, cool wind or the slanting amber rays so thickly glistening with particles of dust, or the great, soaring king of the eagles. Adam crushed a bunch of odorous sage to his face, smelled it, breathed it, tasted it; and the bitter sweetness thrilled his senses. It was real. It was a part of the vast and glowing desert, of the wonderful earth, of the infinite universe that he yearned to incorporate into his being. The last glorious rays of the setting sun shone upon him and magnified his stature in a long, purple shadow. How the last warmth seemed to kiss his cheek as it sank behind the rim of the range! The huge bowlders were warm and alive under his hands. He pricked his fingers upon the cholla thorns just to see the ruddy drops of his life’s current; and there was strange joy in the sting which proved him flesh and blood and nerve. He stood alone, as he had many thousands of times on the gray old desert, his feet on the sand, his knees in the sage; but the being alone then was inexpressibly different. It was as if he had, like the tarantula wasp, been born from a cocoon stage in a dark, dead cell, into a beautiful world of light, of freedom, of color, of beauty, of all that was life. He felt the glory of his beating heart, his throbbing pulse, his sight and all his sense. He turned his face to the cool, sweet, sage-scented breeze, and then he lifted it to the afterglow of sunset. Ah! the new, strange joy of life—the incalculable force of the natural man!
The luminous desert stretched before him, valley and mountain, and beyond them was other range and other valley, leading to the sea, and across its heaving bosom were other lands; and above him was the vast, deep-blue sky with its pale evening star, and beyond them began the infinite.
Adam felt himself a part of it all. His ecstasy was that he lived. Nature could not deny him. He stood there, young and strong and vital.
Then he heard Genie calling him. With a start he turned to answer. She was running down the trail. How swift, how lithe, how light! The desert had given her the freedom, the grace, the suppleness of its wild denizens. Like a fawn she bounded over the stones, and her hair caught the last gleams of glowing sunlight. When she neared Adam she checked her flying steps, pattering to a halt, one brown hand over her breast.
“Wheooo!” she burst out, panting. “I—couldn’t—find—you. Why’d—you come—so far?”
The something that had come between Adam’s sight and the desert now surrounded Genie. Immeasurably she was transformed, and the change seemed a mystery.
“We must hurry back. It’ll soon be dark. Come,” he replied.
With step as free and swift as his she kept pace with him.
“Wanny, you stole up on me—tried to scare me—while I was bathing,” she said, with arch reproach.
“Genie, it was an accident,” he returned, hurriedly, and how strangely the blood tingled in his face! “I meant to scare you—yes. But I—I never thought—I never dreamed ... Genie, I give you my word.... Please say you believe me!”