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Scientists go up to the Rio Grande in New Mexico, see evidence of ancient irrigation ditches, of receding springs and decreasing waters; and they at once pronounce desiccation. The earth is burning up at the rate of an inch or two of water in a century; moisture is receding toward the Poles as it has in Mars, till Mars is mostly arid, sun-parched desert round its middle and ice round the Poles.
His thoughts continually traveled back to the Eskimo of the frozen North, and to Africa and her sun-parched deserts and star-strewn skies with the roaming Bedouin in the background who regarded the earth as a footstool to be used only as a means to an end and houses as habitations fit only for slaves.
A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and flour- and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of the boat herself.
The cattle lowed from hunger, finding no food on the sun-parched meadows. Only at night and in the forests while the dew lasted was there any freshness. But on the road, the highroad along which the troops marched, there was no such freshness even at night or when the road passed through the forest; the dew was imperceptible on the sandy dust churned up more than six inches deep.
Then, while the wheat grew taller, and the air warmer every day, the prairie assumed an evanescent beauty which it presently put off again, for the flush faded from the grasses, and only the birch bluff remained for a refuge filled with cool neutral shadow in a sun-parched land.
"What did he catch 'em on?" he asked as he stretched his arms. "Minnows." "Let's try a couple of ours." They scraped the hooks free of the whitened worms with their finger nails and rebaited, only to find that the sun-parched flesh softened and floated away soon after it was lowered into the water. "Have to buy some fresh ones! Got any money?"
Yet he had seen the bayadere for an instant only, when passing through Kasí upon his way to China, to the vast empire of souls that thirsted after the refreshment of Buddha's law, as sun-parched fields thirst for the life-giving rain.
All game had apparently shunned the dreary, sun-parched waste, but hunger was now and then appeased by a few fish which they caught in the streams, or some sun-dried salmon, or a dog given to them by the kind-hearted Shoshones whose lodges they sometimes came across. At last the party tired of this weary route.
His heart went out to that other heart, beating for him alone so truly, so faithfully, full of such unquestioning adoration and obedience, in mud-walled sun-parched Omdurman.
And looking back up the village street I thought of the woman in the churchyard, her sun-parched eager face, her questioning eyes and friendly smile: what was the secret of its attraction? what did that face say to me or remind me of? what did it suggest? Now it was plain enough.
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