Desert vegetation increased. Adam toiled on, breathing hard, careless now of the reaching thorns and heedless of the rougher ground.
He was perfectly conscious of a subtle changing of his spirit, but because it seemed a drifting farther and farther from thought he could not comprehend it. Courage diminished as fear augmented. More and more his will and intelligence gave way to sensorial perceptions. More and more he felt the urge to hurry, and, though reason warned against the folly of this, it was not strong enough to compel him to resist. He did hurry more and stumbled along. Like breath of a furnace the heat rose from the rocky, sandy soil; and from above there seemed to bear down the weight of the leaden fire.
His skin became as dry as dust and began to shrivel. It did not blister. The pain now came from burn of the flesh underneath. He felt that his blood was drying up. A stinging sensation as of puncture by a thousand thorns throbbed in his face and neck. The heat burned through his clothes, and the soles of his boots were coals of fire. Doggedly he strove forward. A whistle accompanied his panting breaths. Most intolerable of all was thirst—the bitter, astringent taste in the scant saliva that became pasty and dry, the pain in his swelling tongue, the parched constriction in his throat.
At last he reached the base of a low rocky ridge which for long had beckoned to him and mocked him. It obstructed sight of the slope to the mountain range. Surely between that ridge and the slope ran the river. The hope spurred him upward.
As he climbed he gazed up into the coppery sky, but his hot and tired eyes could not endure the great white blaze that was the sun. Halfway up he halted to rest, and from here he had measureless view of the desert. Then his dull brain revived to a final shock. For he seemed to see a thousand miles of green-gray barrenness, of lifting heat veils like transparent smoke, of wastes of waved sand, and of ranges of upheaved rock. How terribly it confronted him! Pitiless mockery of false distances on all sides! A sun-blasted world not meant for man!
Then Adam ascended to the summit of the ridge. A glaring void seemed flung at him. His chocolate-hued mountain range was not far away. From this height he could see all the gray-green level of desert between him and the range. He stared. Again there seemed flung in his face a hot glare of space. There was no river.
“Where, where’s—the river?” gasped Adam, mistrusting his eyesight.
But the wonderful Rio Colorado, the strange red river beloved by desert wanderers, did not flow before him—or to either side—or behind. It must have turned to flow on the other slope of this insurmountable range.
“God has—forsaken me!” cried Adam, in despair, and he fell upon the rocks.
But these rocks, hot as red-hot plates of iron, permitted of no contact, even in a moment of horror. Adam was burned to stagger up, to plunge and run and fall down the slope, out upon the level, to the madness that awaited him.