The spell of the desert will grip you before you’ve left the main road five miles behind. That night you’ll sleep beneath steady stars and listen to the whispers that are the night noises of the desert.
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.
And if you’re one of those who love it, you’ll get to the point where the whispers mean much.
You won’t hear ’em until you get in your blankets and the camp fire has died down to a mere blotch of dull red against the gray sand of the desert. Then a wind will stir up from some place. The embers will fan into a golden glow, and you’ll hear the whispers. Of course you’ll know it’s just the sand rattling against the cacti. Maybe, if the wind gets stronger, it’ll be sand rustling against sand.
But those are the desert whispers, and you’ll get so you listen for them. 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.
I’ve made my stake out of the desert, and I feel kindly toward it. I’ve got enough now to wear fine clothes and have a chauffeur to drive me the places I want to go. I’ve struck it rich, and people nudge each other when I go to the theater and point me out — Bob Zane, the man that opened the virgin lode.
At first I thought I’d never go back to the desert. I was tired of living on rationed water. I wanted to be where I could take a bath every day, twice a day if I wanted. I craved fresh linen, vegetables, cream in my coffee, beautiful women, theaters, newspapers.
I thought I was satisfied.
I’d stand on Hollywood Boulevard at the corner of Cahuenga and watch ’em pass, the well-fleshed, firm-skinned beauties with their peach-and-cream throats, their red lips, and their exploring eyes.
But I got sick of it without even knowing I was.
It happened one afternoon. She was a Spanish girl, and she wasn’t of the boulevards. Her skin didn’t have the smooth gloss of city life. It had been baked by sun, caressed by wind, moistened by infrequent rain. She was slender, almost stringy. But she moved with a lithe grace that her city sisters couldn’t ape; she was vital as a panther.
I thought of her often that evening. I couldn’t get her out of my mind.
I drifted into a palatial picture theater. The sound picture wailed through its action. There was a desert scene. I slipped forward to the edge of my chair. And then something happened to the lights. The house was dark. When the picture machine went on the blink you could hardly see your hand in front of your face.
Some one called for patience, that the break was temporary and would be repaired in less than thirty seconds.
The audience sat there in the gloom, and started to whisper. Funny about men, that way. In the dark they seem to lack confidence. They whispered as surreptitiously as though they were afraid of the gloom, afraid a loud noise might bring some night animal pouncing down upon them — instinct, I guess, carry-over memories of past lives when men were food for animals, instead of animals being food for men.
That whisper started in the back of the house. It grew in volume, like a desert wind sweeping down a cañon, sending rustling sand against the cacti. Soon the whisper swept around me, hissing in my very ears, a vast composite of sound — and the lights went on, showing the desert scene on the screen.
I got to my feet as one in a daze.
I tramped on somebody’s feet, and he growled. A woman tittered. I didn’t even notice them. I stumbled to the aisle, walked rapidly toward the door. My chauffeur was coming at ten thirty. I didn’t have time to wait for him, couldn’t even stop to telephone him.
I caught a taxi and went to the Arcade Depot. There was a train for Yuma in twenty minutes. I got a lower. Daylight found me at Yuma. I got a flivver and some blankets, a canteen, some grub. I didn’t get much. I was too impatient, like a man who has been too long separated from a loving mistress.
By ten o’clock I was well out in the desert.
That night I sat by a little camp fire. The stars blazed steadily. The little winds were dancing about, making the embers flare up to gold, then dull to russet red. I stretched in my blankets and listened.
Pretty soon I began to hear them, the whispers of the desert.
All about me was that heavy, oppressive silence that stretches down from the very stars. It was broken only by the whispers. Those whispers were so faint I couldn’t hear ’em at first. Then the wind freshened, and I could hear the sand whispering to the sand.
I thought it was the desert giving me a welcome back to it, and I smiled a sleepy smile. Then I thought I heard the word “Tucson,” and I straightened and snapped my eyes open. The word had sounded awful plain.
But it was just a funny sound the sand had made against the cacti, and I closed my eyes and drowsed again, half listening, half sleeping. I dozed, awoke, sighed and settled to sleep.
And the whispers became plainer. I could hear words, soft, hissing, whispered words.
“The señor will come?” asked a hissing voice. There seemed to be something more to it than a sand whisper.
“But the señor must come! The man dies.”
And there was a warm breath on my cheek. I fancied a soft hand caressed my hair, drew itself along my forehead.
“Softly; to awaken suddenly is bad. The señor must open his eyes—”
I snapped my eyes open to see her.
She was dark-skinned, and her oval face was bent over my own, her lips half parted. The eyes were catching the starlight, sending it back. They seemed limpid pools of dark romance, swimming in reflected starlight.
I straightened, and she drew back.
“It is all right, señor,” she said in the language of Mexico. “I feared to awaken you suddenly. It is bad for you, and you might have reached for your gun and gone ‘boom!’ and it would have been all over for poor little me.”
She laughed, and the stars caught the glint of her pearly teeth and showed them against the warm mystery of her pink mouth.
“You must come,” she said.
I struggled to a sitting posture.
“Why must I come, and where?”
“You must come with me to save one of your race who is dying. We have no automobile, nothing but a burro cart, and the heat of the sun would kill him before he reached the main road. But you have your automobile. We saw the lights of your car, saw your camp fire, and it was decided that I should come. I have walked for more than two hours, señor, and the camp was hard to find. You made a very small fire, and you let it go out early.”
I nodded.
“I wanted to listen to the sand,” I said, before I thought.
She lost her smile as she regarded me.
“The señor, then, knows the desert,” she said. “It is well, otherwise he would not believe.”
“What wouldn’t I believe?”
“That which you are to hear. But come.”
I kicked the blankets off. She sat silent while I dressed. None of the false modesty of city maidens, none of the curiosity of the morbid, none of the brazenness of the hard-faced women of the camps. She was what she was, a child of the desert; and because I also was of the desert, we were in perfect accord.
I knew that I was to go on some errand of mercy, that this young woman had walked miles through soft sand that clung to her ankles, that she was worried about the one I must try to save. I knew that speed counted for something, and I pulled into my clothes, flung the canteen in the car, tossed in the blankets without waiting to roll them, and motioned her to the seat beside me.