At first he ran fleetly, with endurance apparently unimpaired, but he meant to slow down and husband his strength as soon as he dared. Before him stretched a desert floor of fine, shining gravel, like marbles, absolutely bare of any vegetation for what seemed hundreds of yards; and then began to appear short bunches of low meager brush called greasewood, and here and there isolated patches of ocatilla. These multiplied and enlarged in the distance until they looked as if they would afford cover enough to hide Adam from his pursuers. Hot, wet with sweat, strong, and panting, he ran another mile, to find the character of the desert changing.
Reaching the zone of plant life, he soon placed a thin but effective barrier of greasewood and ocatilla behind him. Then he slowed down to catch his breath. Before him extended a vast hazy expanse, growing darker with accumulated growths in the distance. To the right rose the chocolate mountain range, and it ran on to fade in the dim horizon. Behind him now stood the lone black peak, and to the left rose a low, faint wavering line of white, like billows of a sea. This puzzled him until at length he realized it was sand. Sand—and it, like the range, faded in the distant horizon.
Adam also made the discovery that as he looked back over his shoulder he was really looking down a long, gradual slope. Plainly he could see the edge of the desert where he had come up, and often, as he traveled along at a jog trot, he gazed around with fearful expectancy. He had imagined that his running had given rise to the breeze blowing in his face. But this was not so. A rather stiff wind was blowing straight at him. It retarded his progress, and little puffs of fine, invisible sand or dust irritated his eyes. Then the tears would flow and wash them clear again. With all his senses and feelings there mingled a growing preponderance of thought or realization of the tremendous openness of the desert. He felt as though a door of the universe had opened to him, and all before him was boundless. He had no fear of it; indeed, there seemed a comfort in the sense of being lost in such a vastness; but there was something intangible working on his mind. The wind weighed upon him, the coppery sky weighed upon him, the white sun weighed upon him, and his feet began to take hold of the ground. How hot the top of his head and his face! All at once the sweat appeared less copious and his skin drier. With this came a strong thirst. The saliva of his mouth was pasty and scant. He swallowed hard and his throat tightened. A couple of pebbles that he put into his mouth mitigated these last sensations.
Intelligence gave him pause then, and he halted in his tracks. If death was relentlessly pursuing him, it was no less confronting him there to the fore, if he passed on out of reach of the river. Death from thirst was preferable to capture, but Adam was not ready to die. He who had loved life clung to it all the more fiercely now that the sin of Cain branded his soul. He still felt unlimited strength and believed that he could go far. But the sun was hotter than he had ever experienced it; the heat appeared to strike up from the earth as well as burn down from above; and it was having a strange effect upon him. He had sensed a difficulty in keeping to a straight line of travel, and at first had put it down to his instinct for zigzagging to his greasewood bush and that ocatilla plant to place them behind him. Moving on again, he turned toward the chocolate mountain and the river.
It seemed close. He saw the bare gray desert with its green growths slope gradually to the rugged base of the range. Somewhere between him and there ran the river. He strained his eyesight. How strangely and clearly the lines of one ridge merged into the lines of another! There must be distance between them. But it could not be seen. The range looked larger and farther away the more he studied it—the air more full of transparent haze, the red and russet and chocolate hues more quiveringly suggestive of illusion.
“Look here,” panted Adam, as he halted once more. “I’ve been told about the desert. But I didn’t pay particular attention and now I can’t remember.... I only know it’s hot—and this won’t do.”
It was just then that Adam, gazing back down the gray desert, saw puffs of dust and horses.
Panic seized him. He ran directly away from his pursuers, bending low, looking neither to right nor to left, violent, furious, heedless, like an animal in flight. And with no sense of direction, with no use of reason, he ran on till he dropped.
Then his breast seemed to split and his heart to lift with terrific pressure, agonizing and suffocating. He lay on the ground and gasped, with his mouth in the dust. Gradually the paroxysm subsided.
He arose to go on, hot, dry, aching, dizzy, but still strong in his stride.