He would go on as he had begun, fighting the desert and its barrenness, its blasting heat, its evil influences, wandering over these wastelands that must be his home; and he would stake the physical prowess of him to yet harder, fiercer tasks of toil, driving his spirit to an intenser, whiter flame. If the desert could develop invincible energy of strength in a man, he would earn it. If there were a divinity in man, infinitely beyond the beasts of the desert and the apes of the past, a something in mysterious affinity with that mighty being he sensed out there in the darkness, then he would learn it with a magnified and all-embracing consciousness. Adam went to his bed on the warm sands complete in two characters--a sensing, watching, listening man like the savage in harmony with the nature of the elements around him, and a feeling, absorbed, and meditating priest who had begun to divine the secrets beyond the dark-shadowed, starlit desert waste. * * * * * Adam’s first sight of Death Valley came at an early morning hour, as he turned a last curve in the yawning canyon he had descended. He stood in awe. “Oh, desolation!” he cried. And it seemed that, as the shock of the ghastliness beneath him passed, he remembered with flashing vividness all that had come to him in his long desert wanderings, which seemed now to cumulate its terrible silence, desolation, death, and decay in this forbidding valley. He remembered the origin of that name--Death Valley. In 1849, when the California gold frenzy had the world in its grip, seventy Mormon gold seekers had wandered into this red-walled, white-floored valley, where sixty-eight of them perished. The two that escaped gave this narrow sink so many hundred feet below sea level the name Death Valley! Many and many another emigrant and prospector and wanderer, by his death from horrible thirst and blasting heat and poison-dusted wind and destroying avalanche and blood-freezing cold, had added to the significance of that name and its dreadful fame. On one side the valley was shadowed by the ragged Funeral range; on the other by the red and gloomy Panamints. Furnace Creek, the hot stream that came down from the burning slopes; and Ash Meadow, the valley floor, gray and dead, like the bed of a Dead Sea; and the Devil’s Chair, a huge seat worn by the elements in the red mountain wall, where the death king of the valley watched over his fiends--these names were vivid in Adam’s mind along with others given by prospectors in uncouth or eloquent speech. “She’s a hummer in July,” said one; and another, “Salty lid of hell”; and still another, “Valley of the white shadow of death.”