Just under the skin of every man and every woman, perhaps stronger in one than another, flowed red blood in which primitive instincts still lived and would always live. That was the secret of the desert. The lonely, desolate land, the naked sand and rock-ribbed hills, the wilderness of silence and solitude stirred the instinctive memory of a primitive day. Men watched and listened unthinkingly in the wastelands, for what they knew not, but it was for the fleeting trancelike transformation back to savage nature. There were many reasons for which men became wanderers in the wastelands--love of gold; the need to forget or to remember; passion and crime and wanderlust; the appeal of beauty and sublimity--but what nailed them to the forbidding and inhospitable desert was the instinct of the savage. That was the secret of the spell of the desert. Men who had been confined to cities, chained to dull and humdrum toils, stagnating in the noisy haunts, sore and sick and deflated, standing for some impossible end, when let loose in the gray, iron-walled barrens of the desert were caught by a subtle and insidious enchantment that transfigured some, made beasts of most, and mysteriously bound all. Travelers passing across could not escape it, and they must always afterward remember the desert with a thrill of strange pleasure and of vague regret. Women who had been caught by circumstance and nailed to homes along the roads or edges of the desert must feel that nameless charm, though they hated the glaring, desolate void. Magdalene Virey, resigned to her doom in Death Valley, had responded to the nature that was in her. Through this thing Adam saw the almost inconceivable progress of men upward. If progress had not been slow, nature would never have evolved him. And it seemed well that something of the wild and the primitive must forever remain instinctive in the human race. If the primitive were eliminated from men there would be no more progress. All the gladness of the senses lived in this law. The sweetness of the ages came back in thoughtless watching. The glory of the sunrise, the sadness of the sunset, the whisper of the wind and the murmur of the stream, the music of birds and their beauty--the magic of these came back from the dim, mystic dreamland of the primal day, from the childhood of the race. Nature was every man’s mother. Nevertheless, the wonder and the splendor of life was the age-long progress of man toward unattainable perfection, the magnificent victory of humanity over mastery by primal instincts. And the fact that this seemed true to Adam made him wonder if the spirit of this marvelous life was not God. * * * * *