Free Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) by Zane Grey Page B

street, and of a dark-bronze hue. They shone as if they had been varnished. And a closer glance showed Adam the many reddish tints of bisnagi cactus growing in the cracks between the stones.
    His misgivings were soon verified. He had to descend here, for the afternoon was far gone, and whatever the labour and pain, he must reach the road before dark. The rocks were sharp, uneven, and as slippery as if they had been wet. At the very outset Adam slipped, and, falling with both hands forward, he thrust them into a cactus. The pain stung, and when he had to pull hard to free himself from the thorns, it was as if his hands had been nailed. He could not repress moans as he tried to pull out the thorns with his teeth. They stuck tight. The blood ran in little streams. But he limped on, down the black slope.
    The white road below grew closer and closer. It was a goal. This slope of treacherous rocks and torturing cacti was a physical ordeal that precluded memory, of the past or consideration of the present. When Adam at last reached the road, there to fall exhausted and wet and burning upon 'a flat rock, it seemed that he had been delivered from an inferno.
    Presently he sat up to look around him. A wonderful light showed upon the world--the afterglow of sunset. Picacho bore a crown of gold. All the lower tips of ranges were purpling in shadow. To the southward a wide grey barren road led to an endless bleak plateau, flat and dark, with dim spurs of mountains in the distance. Desolate, lifeless, silent--the gateway to the desert! Adam felt steal over him a sense of awe. The vastness of seen and suggested desert seemed flung at him, as if nature meant to reveal to him the mystery and might of space. The marvellous light magnified the cacti and the rocks and the winding ranges and the bold peaks, and the distances, until all were unreal. Adam felt that he had overcome a great hardship, accomplished a remarkable feat, had climbed and descended a range as sharp toothed as jagged lava. But to what end! Something in the bewildering light of the west, in the purple shadows growing cold in the east, in the tremendous oppression of illimitable space and silence and solitude and desolation--something inexplicable repudiated and mocked his physical sense of great achievement.
    All at once, in a flash, he remembered his passion, his crime, his terror, his flight. Not until that instant had intelligence operated in harmony with his feelings. He lifted his face in the cool, darkening twilight. The frowning mountains held aloof, and all about him seemed detached, rendering his loneliness absolute and immutable.
    "Oh! Oh!" he moaned. "What will become of me?...No family--no friends--no hope!...Oh, Guerd, my brother! His blood on my hands!...He ruined my life! He's killed my soul!...Oh, damn him, damn him! he's made me a murderer!"
    Adam fell face down on the rock with breaking heart. His exceeding bitter cries seemed faint and lost in the midst of the vastness of desert and sky. The deepening of twilight to darkness, the cold black grandeur of the great peak, the mournful wail of a desert wolf, the pure pale evening star that pierced the purple sky, the stupendous loneliness and silence of that solitude--all these facts seemed Nature's pitiless proof of her indifference to man and his despair. His hope, his prayer, his frailty, his fall, his burden and agony and life--these were nothing to the desert that worked inscrutably through its millions of years, nor to the illimitable expanse of heaven, deepening its blue and opening its cold, starry eyes. But a spirit as illimitable and as inscrutable breathed out of the universe and over the immensity of desert space--a spirit that breathed to the soul of the ruined man and bade him rise and take up his burden and go on down the naked shingles of the world.
    Despair and pride and fear of death, and this strange breath of life, dragged Adam up and drove him down the desert road. For a mile he staggered and