heir faces to the south. But they did not advance.
They stood with distended eyes and suspended breath. The city had
disappeared.

Adan was the first to find speech. "A fog?" he asked. "A rain storm?"

"There is neither. The horizon is as blue and clear as it is on the
north and east and west. It is a miracle. Let me think a moment."

He sat down and took his head between his hands. After a while he
looked up. "For hours I have been trying to remember something," he
said. "Do you remember what that mayor domo said to us?--Keep straight
on, straight on, never turning to the left, for that way lies the
terrible Mojave desert, I barely heard his last words at the time; that
is the reason I have had such a time remembering. We are in the Mojave
desert, my friend."

Adan, whose mouth was still wide open, sat down and rolled his eyes
from east to west. "Caramba!" he ejaculated finally.

"I could say a good deal more than Caramba. All that I have heard of
this Mojave comes back to me. There is no water on it, no living thing
but half choked cacti and stunted palms. Men who are lost on it go mad
and die of thirst--"

"Ay, yi, yi!"

"Si, senor. However, it might be much worse. It is winter, not
summer,--when the heat kills in a day; we have food and a little wine;
we are young and very strong; we have not come so many leagues that we
cannot walk back. And we have each other. Think, were we alone!"

"Yes, it might be worse," said Adan, "but all the same it might be six
or eight leagues to the northwest better. And that city? What was it?
Where has it gone?"

"I do not know." Privately he believed that it had been a glimpse of
heaven, and was disturbed lest it might have been a portent of death.
But his mind was too active, his nature too independent to sit down
under superstition. If he died on the desert, it would not be through
lack of effort to get out of it.

He stood up, setting his lips. "Come," he said. "We gain nothing by
sitting here, and we are both fresh; we can walk many leagues before
night."

"Do you know which way to go?" asked Adan.

Roldan swept the horizon with his eyes. The buttes they had passed had
displaced the solitary landmark of the morning. There was not a
hoof-beat on the hard split ground. Roldan shrugged his shoulders.

"We can at least follow the sun. Los Angeles must be due west. Come."

The sun was past the zenith and sloping to the west. The boys turned
their backs upon it and tr