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"The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns to ashes; or it prospers, and anon, like snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting a little hour or two, is gone." Libra A crowned king, with a scythe raised in the air, looks closely at two boys wrestling beneath him in a field of grain, a red poppy below them.
To have the dreaded reality suddenly brought so close, set at the limit of a few short weeks, grimly waiting at a definite point in the distance, made her repugnance break loose in alarmed words. "Longer than that," she cried. "The desert's the hardest place, and we'll go slow, very slow, there."
With the first deepening of color the desert's silent heart began to beat in expectation of its hour of beauty. Its bleak detail was lost in shrouding veils and fiery reflection. The earth floor became a golden sea from which the capes reared themselves in shapes of bronze and copper.
The brush was small, six inches high, but the wheels bounced over it madly. The whole car hurtled and bounded in a riot of motion. It dived, it plunged nose upward, it roared like a fiend but it shot with cannon-ball velocity across the desert's floor. Five minutes later Bostwick's car was almost fronting the team in the road, with its score of dusty mules.
For strange voices shall call to him and strange lights shall beckon him, and he must wait and listen. And this shall be the strangest: far off across the burning sands where, to other men, there is only the desert's waste, he shall see a blue sea! On that sea the sun shines always, and the water is blue as burning amethyst, and the foam is white on the shore.
Then tell me not then tell me not 'Tis sorrowful to dwell alone; My heart within the city pent Pines for the desert's liberty; The streets are red with blood, and fear Makes pale and mournful women's faces.
And of water. Continued plague of flies. A pretty view. Tributaries join. Nicholls's Fish ponds. Characteristics of watering places. Red hill. Another spring. Unvarying scene. Frost, thermometer 28 degrees. A bluff hill. Gibson's Desert again. Remarks upon the Ashburton. The desert's edge. Barren and wretched region. Low ridges and spinifex. Deep native well. Thermometer 18 degrees.
With the Desert's bulk you could cover up every last inch of the United States, and in under where the edges projected out, you could tuck England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Denmark, and all Germany. Yes, sir, you could hide the home of the brave and all of them countries clean out of sight under the Great Sahara, and you would still have 2,000 square miles of sand left."
Never before had a railroad been built across so bleak a plain, a treeless and waterless expanse, stretching for hundreds of miles in a dead level, over which the winds drove at will the shifting sands, constantly threatening to bury any work which man ventured to lay upon the desert's broad breast.
She thought of the garden of Count Anteoni, and of herself kneeling on the hot sand with her arms on the white parapet and gazing out over the regions of the sun, of her dream upon the tower, of her vision when Irena danced. He was there, part of the noon, part of the twilight, chief surely of the worshippers who swept on in the pale procession that received gifts from the desert's hands.
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