Long hours and slow miles passed behind him. When the burros broke through Adam had a task for all his strength. Once he could not pull Jennie out of a pitfall without unpacking her. And the time came when he had the added task of leading the way and dragging the burros with ropes. Burros did not lead well on good ground, let alone over this scored and burst salt crust. The heat and oppressiveness and dense silence increased toward midnight; and then began a soft and steady movement of air down the valley. Adam felt a prickling of his skin and a drying of the sweat upon him. An immense and mournful moan breathed over the wasteland, like that of a mighty soul in travail. Adam got out of the hummocky zone upon the dry, crisp, white level of salt, soda, borax, alkali, where thin, pale sheets of powder moved with the silken rustle of seeping and shifting sands. Most fortunate was the fact that the rising wind was at his back. He strode on, again driving the burros ahead, holding straight for the dim notched peak. The rising wind changed the silence, the night, the stars, the valley--changed all in some unearthly manner. It seemed to muster all together, to move all, to insulate even the loneliness, and clothe them in transforming, drifting, shrouds of white, formless bodies impelled by nameless domination. Phantasmagoria of white winds, weird and wild! Midnight furnace blasts of Death Valley! Nature’s equilibrium--nature’s eternal and perfect balance of the elements! Out here in the open, the hollow roar that had swelled and lulled through the canyons was absent. An incessant moaning, now rising, now falling, attended the winds on their march down the valley. Other difference there was here, and it was in the more intense heat. And the blowing of white shrouds into the opaque gloom, the sweeping of sheets of powdery dust along the level floor, the thick air that bore taste of bitter salt and odor of poison gas--these indeed seemed not phenomena of normal earth. The wind increased to a gale. Then suddenly it lulled and died, leaving the valley to a pale, silent deadness; and again, preceded by a mournful wail, it rose harder and fiercer till it was blowing seventy miles an hour. These winds were the blasts of fury. They held heated substance. The power behind them was the illimitable upper air, high as the sky and wide as the desert, relentlessly bearing down to drive way the day’s torrid heat.