“How about the Indians who lived in the desert for hundreds of years?” asked Adam.
“What’s a handful of Indians? An’ what’s a few years out of the millions of years that the desert’s been here, just as it is now? Nothin’—nothin’ at all! Wansfell, there will be men come into the desert, down there below the Salton Sink, an’ in other places where the soil is productive, an’ they’ll build dams an’ storage places for water. Maybe a lot of fools will even turn the Colorado River over the desert. They’ll make it green an’ rich an’, like the Bible says, blossom as a rose. An’ these men will build ditches for water, an’ reservoirs an’ towns an’ cities, an’ cross the desert with railroads. An’ they’ll grow rich an’ proud. They’ll think they’ve conquered it. But, poor fools! they don’t know the desert! Only a man who has lived with the desert much of his life can ever know. Time will pass an’ men will grow old, an’ their sons an’ grandsons after them. A hundred an’ a thousand years might pass with fruitfulness still in the control of man. But all that is only a few grains of time in all the endless sands of eternity. The desert’s work will have been retarded for a little while. But the desert works ceaselessly an’ with infinite patience. The sun burns, the frost cracks, the avalanche rolls, the rain weathers. Slowly the earth crust heaves up into mountains an’ slowly the mountains wear down, atom by atom, to be the sands of the desert. An’ the winds—how they blow for ever an’ ever! What can avail against the desert winds? They blow the sand an’ sift an’ seep an’ bury.... Men will die an’ the places that knew them will know them no more. An’ the desert will come back to its own. That is well, for it is what God intended.”
“God and nature, then, with you are one and the same?” queried Adam.
“Yes. Twenty years sleepin’ on the sand with the stars in my face has taught me that. Is it the same with you?”
“No. I grant all that you contend for the desert and for nature. But I can’t reconcile nature and God. Nature is cruel, inevitable, hopeless. But God must be immortality.”
“Wansfell, there’s somethin’ divine in some men, but not in all, nor in many. So how can that divinity be God? The immortality you speak of—that is only your life projected into another life.”
“You mean if I do not have a child I will not have immortality?”
“Exactly.”
“But what of my soul?” demanded Adam, solemnly.
Dismukes drooped his shaggy head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’ve gone so deep, but I can’t go any deeper. That always stumps me. I’ve never found my soul! Maybe findin’ my soul would be findin’ God. I don’t know.... An’ you, Wansfell—once I said you had the spirit an’ mind to find God on the desert. Did you?”