It’s the law of nature that only the fittest survive. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 273)
The reason men don’t know the law of life is because they’re afraid to look Eternity in the face. Out in the desert they have to look at Eternity. It’s on all sides of them; they can’t turn their eyes away. That’s the spell of the desert. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 268)
The desert is peculiar. It’s something that can’t be described. You either feel the spell of the desert or you don’t. You either hate it or you love it. In either event you’ll fear it.
There it lies, miles on miles of it, dry lake beds, twisted mountains of volcanic rock, sloping sage-covered hills, clumps of Joshua trees, thickets of mesquite, bunches of giant cactus. It has the moods of a woman, and the treachery of a big cat.
And always it’s vaguely restive. During the daytime the heat makes it do a devil’s dance. The horizons shimmer and shake. Mirages chase one another across the dry lake beds. The winds blow like the devil from one direction, and then they turn and blow like the devil from the other direction.
Sand marches on an endless journey, coming from Lord knows where, and going across the desert in a slithering procession of whispering noise that’s as dry as the sound made by a sidewinder when he crawls past your blankets. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 178)
Now desert whispers are funny things. Maybe you’ve got to believe in the desert before you believe in desert whispers. At any rate, you’ve got to know what it’s like to spend the long desert night bedded down in the drifting sand before you’ll know much about the desert, or the whispers, either. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 177–178)
It’s at night when the desert’s still and calm and the steady stars blaze down like torches that you can hear the whispers best. Then you’ll lie in your blankets with your head pillowed right on the surface of the desert, and you’ll hear the dry sagebrush swish in the wind. It sounds as though the leaves are whispering. Then you’ll hear the sand rattling against the cactus, and it’ll sound like a different kind of a whisper, a finer, more stealthy whisper.
And then, usually just before you’re getting to sleep, you’ll hear that finest whisper of all, the sand whispering to the sand. Of course, if you’d wake up and snap out of it, you’d know that it was just the sound made by windblown sand drifting across the sandy face of the desert.
But you don’t wake up like that. You drift off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the sand whispering to the sand. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 178–179)
And if you’re one of those who love it, you’ll get to the point where the whispers mean much. (“Golden Bullets,” 290)
You’ll finally get so you can almost interpret ’em. Sounds funny, but it isn’t. It’ll come just as you’re dropping off to sleep. You’ll hear the sand whisper to the sand, and the sand answer, and you’ll be just drowsy enough so you’ll nod your head in confirmation. But the next morning you can’t tell what it was you were agreeing to. (“Golden Bullets,” 291)
But a tenderfoot who’s frightened of the desert can go crazy if he gets to listening to the slithering comments of the desert. (“Sign of the Sun,” 112)
When he becomes afraid of something, he wants to get away from that something. When he starts to run from the desert and finds that it’s all around him, he goes clean batty. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 274)
Nobody knows all that happens, right at the finish, when the desert has her way with a man. It’s a grim secret that only the desert herself and the buzzards can tell.
But this much is certain. (“Blood-Red Gold,” 169)
When a man finally feels the last agony approaching in the desert, he starts to tear off his clothing and begins to run. Then, at the last, he stops and starts to dig at the desert with his bare hands, shredding the flesh away from the bone. It is a horrible death — even for a murderer. (“The Land of Painted Rocks,” 88)
Go through the desert in a Pullman car and you’ll be bored. Travel through it in an automobile and you’ll be mildly interested, but disappointed.
“So this is the desert,” you’ll think. “This is the place about which I’ve heard so much! Shucks, it’s nothing much, just sand and mountains, cacti and sunshine; gasoline stations, not quite so handy.”
But get away from the beaten trail in the desert. Get out with your camp equipment loaded on the backs of burros. Or even take a flivver and get off the main roads. See what happens.
The spell of the desert will grip you before you’ve left the main road five miles behind. (“Golden Bullets,” 290)
No more civilization, no more tourist cars, no more roadside hot dog stands, no more fool questions. Just the night — silence — and the desert. (“The Land of Painted Rocks,” 60)
By morning you’ll either hate and fear it, or you’ll love it. I never knew any middle point, not with any one. The desert engenders either fear or fascination, either love or hate. (“Golden Bullets,” 290)
There’s the sense of being all alone, yet not being alone. A man comes to know himself when he’s in the desert. Lots of himself is a lot littler than he ever thought, and a lot of himself is a lot bigger. It’s the little part that shrivels away and the big part that grows and becomes company when a man gets out into the desert.
Unless, of course, a man’s just naturally a little man all the way through, and then the little part comes leering out through the cracks of the character, sees the naked desert, and gets out of control, like the fabled genie that came out of a bottle. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 249)
Which is why I love the desert. (“The Land of Painted Rocks,” 78)
When you burn off the veneer of convention in the tempering fires of the desert you find what’s underneath. (“The Law of Drifting Sand,” 286)
Turn a man loose in the furnace heat of the desert for a couple of years and things start happening to him.
If he has courage, the desert will make him. If he hasn’t, it’ll break him. But there’s one thing that’s certain, a man won’t be a hypocrite with the desert. (“Sign of the Sun,” 110)
It’ll kill off four-flushers and cowards and make a man find himself. (“Singing Sand,” 32)
That’s why the desert shapes character better than any other thing on earth. (“Sign of the Sun,” 110)
Charles G. Waugh and
Martin H. Greenberg
Singing Sand
I. Whiskey — Neat
Every place a man lives leaves its stamp upon that man.
The city dweller differs from the desert man. It ain’t always easy to tell just where the difference comes in, but you can tell it. I knew that Harry Karg was from the city the minute I saw him, and I knew he was hard.
It wasn’t his body that was hard. It was his mind.
He was in a saloon in Mexicali, and he was drinking whisky. The more he drank the harder his eyes got, the more he watched himself.
Lots of people take a few drinks and relax. Their muscles slacken, their lips get loose, and they laugh when there’s nothing to laugh at. But it wasn’t that way with Karg. Every time he hoisted his elbow he got more cautious, more wary in his glance, more tight about the lips.
I’ve seen a few desert men that way, but Karg was the first city man I’d ever seen that was like that.