“But suddenly somethin’ strange an’ terrible seized hold of me. A hand as strong as the wind gripped my heart.... _The desert called me!_... Day an’ night I walked the streets. Fierce as the desert itself I fought. Oh, I fought my last an’ hardest fight!... On one hand was the dream of my life--the hope of a home an’ happiness--what I had slaved for. Forty years of toil! On the other hand the call of the desert! Loneliness, solitude, silence, the white, hot days, the starlit nights, the vast open desert, free and peaceful, the gray wastes, the colored mountains, sunrise and sunset. Ah! The desert was my only home. I belonged to the silence an’ desolation. Forty years a wanderer on the desert, blindly seekin’ for gold! But, oh, it was not gold I wanted! Not gold! Nor fortune! That was my dream, my boyish dream. Gold did not nail me to the desert sands. That was only my idea. That was what brought me into the wastelands. I misunderstood the lure of the desert. I thought it was gold, but, no! For me the desert existed as the burrow for the fox. For me the desert linked my strange content to the past ages. For me the soul of the desert was my soul.... _I had to go back!_... I could live nowhere else.... Forty years! My youth--my manhood!... I’m old now--old! My dreams are done.... Oh, my God!... I HAD TO COME BACK!” Adam sat confounded in grief, in shock. His lips were mute. Like a statue he gazed across the wasteland, so terribly magnified, so terribly illumined by the old prospector’s revelation. How awful the gigantic red rock barriers! How awful the lonely, limitless expanse of sand! The eternal gray, the eternal monotony! “Comrade, take the story of my life to heart,” added Dismukes. “You’re a young man still. Think of my forty years of hell, that now has made me a part of the desert. Think of how I set out upon my journey so full of wild, sweet hope! Think of my wonderful journey, through the glitterin’ cities, round the world, only to find my hope a delusion!... A desert mirage!” “Man, I cannot think!” burst out Adam. “I am stunned.... Oh, the pity of it--the sickening, pitiless fatality! Oh, my heart breaks for you!... Dismukes, of what use is hope? Oh, why do we fight? Where--where does joy abide for such as you and me?” The great, rolling ox eyes gleamed upon Adam, strong with the soul of peace, of victory in their depths. “Wansfell, joy an’ happiness, whatever makes life worth livin’, is in _you_. No man can go forth to find what he hasn’t got within him.” Then he gazed away across the desert, across sand and cactus and mesquite, across the blue-hazed, canyon-streaked ranges toward the north.