As he climbed he gazed up into the coppery sky, but his hot and tired eyes could not endure the great white blaze that was the sun. Halfway up he halted to rest, and from here he had measureless view of the desert. Then his dull brain revived to a final shock. For he seemed to see a thousand miles of green-gray barrenness, of lifting heat veils like transparent smoke, of wastes of waved sand, and of ranges of upheaved rock. How terribly it confronted him! Pitiless mockery of false distances on all sides! A sun-blasted world not meant for man! Then Adam ascended to the summit of the ridge. A glaring void seemed flung at him. His chocolate-hued mountain range was not far away. From this height he could see all the gray-green level of desert between him and the range. He stared. Again there seemed flung in his face a hot glare of space. There was no river. “Where, where’s--the river?” gasped Adam, mistrusting his eyesight. But the wonderful Rio Colorado, the strange red river beloved by desert wanderers, did not flow before him--or to either side--or behind. It must have turned to flow on the other slope of this insurmountable range. “God has--forsaken me!” cried Adam, in despair, and he fell upon the rocks. But these rocks, hot as red-hot plates of iron, permitted of no contact, even in a moment of horror. Adam was burned to stagger up, to plunge and run and fall down the slope, out upon the level, to the madness that awaited him. He must rush on to the river--to drink and drink--to bathe in the cool water that flowed down from the snow-fed lakes of the north. Thoughts about water possessed his mind--pleasant, comforting, hurrying him onward. Memory of the great river made pictures in his mind, and there flowed the broad red waters, sullen and eddying and silent. All the streams and rivers and lakes Adam had known crowded their images across his inward eye, and this recall of the past was sweet. He remembered the brook near his old home--the clear green water full of bright minnows and gold-sided sunfish; how it used to flow swiftly under the willow banks where violets hid by mossy stones, and how it tarried in deep dark pools under shelving banks, green and verdant and sweet smelling; how the ferns used to bend over in graceful tribute and the lilies float white and gold, with great green-backed frogs asleep upon the broad leaves. The watering trough on the way to school, many and many a time, in the happy days gone by, had he drunk there and splashed his brother Guerd. Guerd, who hated water and had to be made to wash, when they were little boys! The old well on Madden’s farm with its round cobblestoned walls where the moss and lichen grew, and where the oaken bucket, wet and dark and green, used to come up bumping and spilling, brimful of clear cold water--how vividly he remembered that! His father had called it granite water, and the best, because it flowed through the cold subterranean caverns of granite rock. Then there was