The gales accelerated Adam’s progress, so that sometimes he was almost running. Often he was thrown to his knees. And when the midnight storm reached its height the light of the stars failed, the outline of mountains faded in a white, whirling chaos, dim and moaning and terrible. Adam felt as if blood and flesh were burning up, drying out, shriveling and cracking. He lost his direction and clung to the burros, knowing their instinct to be surer guide than his. There came a time when pain left him, when sense of physical contacts and motions began to fade, when his brain seemed to reel. The burros dragged him on, and lower he swayed; oftener he plunged to his knees, plowing his big hands in the salt and lowering his face into the flying sheets of powder. He gasped and coughed and choked, and fought to breathe through his smothering scarf. And at last, as he fell exhausted, blind and almost asphyxiated, the hot gales died away. The change of air saved Adam from unconsciousness. He lay there, gradually recovering, until he gained feeling enough to know the burros were pulling on the rope which tied them and him together. They were squealing. They were trying to drag him, to warn him, to frighten him into the action that would save his life. Thus goaded, Adam essayed to get upon his feet, and the effort seemed a vague, interminable lifting of colossal weights, and a climbing up dragging stairs of sand. But for the burros he would have plunged in a circle. Then followed a black and horrible interval in which he seemed hauled across a pale shingle of naked earth, peopled with specters, a wandering, lost man, still alive but half dead, leashed to the spirits of burros he had driven to their death. Uphill, always uphill they pulled him, with his feet clogged by the clutching sands. A gray dawn broke, and his entrance into the light resembled climbing out of somber depths to the open world. Another drab wall of iron rock seemed to loom over him. The valley of the white shadows of death had been crossed. A green patch of mesquites and cottonwoods gleamed cool and dark out of the gray sands. The burros ran, with bobbing packs, straight to the water they had scented. Staggering on after them, Adam managed to remove their burdens; and that took the remnant of his strength. Yielding to a dead darkness of sense, he fell under the trees.