Beyond the oasis, some distance up the canyon, was a dense growth of mesquite and other brush. It surrounded a sandy glade in which bubbled forth a crystal spring of hot water. The bottom was clean white sand that boiled up in the center like shining bubbles. Indians in times past had laid stones around the pool. A small cottonwood tree on the west side of the glade had begun to change the green color of the leaves to amber and gold. All around the glade, like a wild, untrimmed hedge, the green and brown mesquites stood up, hiding the gray desert, insulating this cool, sandy, beautiful spot, hiding it away from the stern hardness outside. Genie had never been here. Quickly she lost her pensiveness and began to sing like a lark. She kicked one moccasin one way and the other in another direction. Straightway she was on the stones, with her bare, slender, brown feet in the water. “Ooooo! It’s hot!” she cried, ecstatically. “But, oh, it’s fine!” And she dipped them back. “Genie, you stay here and amuse yourself,” said Adam. “I’m going to climb. Maybe I’ll be back soon--maybe not. You play and read, and eat the lunch when you’re hungry.” “All right, Wanny,” she replied, gayly. “But I should think you’d rather stay with me.” Adam had to be alone. He needed to be high above the desert, where he could look down. Another crisis in his transformation was painfully pending. The meeting with Dismukes had been of profound significance, and its effect was going to be far-reaching. He climbed up the zigzag, dim trail, rising till the canyon yawned beneath him, and the green thicket where he had left Genie was but a dot. Then the way led round the slope of the great foothill, where he left the trail and climbed to the craggy summit. It was a round, bare peak of jagged bronze rock, and from this height half a mile above the desert the outlook was magnificent. Beyond and above him the gray walls and fringed peaks of San Jacinto towered, sculptored and grand against the azure blue. Finding a comfortable seat with rest for his back, Adam faced the illimitable gulf of color and distance below. Always a height such as this, where, like a lonely eagle, he could command an unobstructed view, had been a charm, a strange delight of his desert years. Not wholly had love of climbing, or to see afar, or to feel alone, or to travel in beauty, been accountable for this habit. Adam’s first reward for this climb, before he had settled himself to watch the desert, was sight of a condor. Only rarely did Adam see this great and loneliest of lonely birds--king of the eagles and of the blue heights. Never had Adam seen one close. A wild, slate-colored bird, huge of build, with grisly neck and wonderful, clean-cut head, cruelty beaked! Even as Adam looked the condor pitched off the crag and spread his enormous wings.