the sad-eyed dog. His unrealities were the shimmering sheets of water in
every low place; the baseless mountains floating in the air; the green
slopes rising close at hand; beautiful buttes of dark blue riding the
open sand, like monstrous barks at sea; the changing outlines of desert
shapes in pink haze and veils of purple and white lustre--all illusions,
all mysterious tricks of the mirage.

In the heat of midday Hare yielded to its influence and reined in his
horse under a slate-bank where there was shade. His face was swollen and
peeling, and his lips had begun to dry and crack and taste of alkali.
Then Wolf pattered on; Silvermane kept at his heels; Hare dozed in the
saddle. His eyes burned in their sockets from the glare, and it was a
relief to shut out the barren reaches. So the afternoon waned.

Silvermane stumbled, jolting Hare out of his stupid lethargy. Before him
spread a great field of bowlders with not a slope or a ridge or a mesa
or an escarpment. Not even a tip of a spur rose in the background. He
rubbed his sore eyes. Was this another illusion?

When Silvermane started onward Hare thought of the Navajos' custom to
trust horse and dog in such an emergency. They were desert-bred; beyond
human understanding were their sight and scent. He was at the mercy now
of Wolf's instinct and Silvermane's endurance. Resignation brought him
a certain calmness of soul, cold as the touch of an icy hand on fevered
cheek. He remembered the desert secret in Mescal's eyes; he was about to
solve it. He remembered August Naab's words: "It's a man's deed!" If
so, he had achieved the spirit of it, if not the letter. He remembered
Eschtah's tribute to the wilderness of painted wastes: "There is the
grave of the Navajo, and no one knows the trail to the place of his
sleep!" He remembered the something evermore about to be, the unknown
always subtly calling; now it was revealed in the stone-fettering
grip of the desert. It had opened wide to him, bright with its face
of danger, beautiful with its painted windows, inscrutable with its
alluring call. Bidding him enter, it had closed behind him; now he
looked upon it in its iron order, its strange ruins racked by fire, its
inevitable remorselessness.

XV. DESERT NIGHT

THE gray stallion, finding the rein loose on his neck, trotted forward
and overtook the dog, and thereafter followed at his heels. With the
setting of the sun a slight breeze stirred, and freshened as twili