-tinged, horizon-wide mantle creeping up
the slope? Through it the copper sun glowed, paled, died. Was it only
twilight? Was it gloom? If he thought about it he had a feeling that
it was the herald of night and the night must be a vigil, and that made
him tremble.

At night he had formed a habit of climbing up the lava slope as far as
the smooth trail extended, and there on a promontory he paced to and
fro, and watched the stars, and sat stone-still for hours looking down
at the vast void with its moving, changing shadows. From that
promontory he gazed up at a velvet-blue sky, deep and dark, bright with
millions of cold, distant, blinking stars, and he grasped a little of
the meaning of infinitude. He gazed down into the shadows, which,
black as they were and impenetrable, yet have a conception of
immeasurable space.

Then the silence! He was dumb, he was awed, he bowed his head, he
trembled, he marveled at the desert silence. It was the one thing
always present. Even when the wind roared there seemed to be silence.
But at night, in this lava world of ashes and canker, he waited for
this terrible strangeness of nature to come to him with the secret. He
seemed at once a little child and a strong man, and something very old.
What tortured him was the incomprehensibility that the vaster the space
the greater the silence! At one moment Gale felt there was only death
here, and that was the secret; at another he heard the slow beat of a
mighty heart.

He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He did not
realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And when
he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the
primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he
had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale
of a man's values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More of
desert experience, Gale believe, would be too much for intellect. The
desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over a
strange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to the
savage?

Yaqui was the answer to that. When Gale acknowledged this he always
remembered his present strange manner of thought. The past, the old
order of mind, seemed as remote as this desert world was from the
haunts of civilized men. A man must know a savage as Gale knew Yaqui
before he could speak authoritatively, and then something sti