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An Introduction to Parallel
Programming

SECOND EDITION

Peter S. Pacheco
University of San Francisco

Matthew Malensek
University of San Francisco
Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1: Why parallel computing

1.1. Why we need ever-increasing performance

1.2. Why we're building parallel systems

1.3. Why we need to write parallel programs

1.4. How do we write parallel programs?

1.5. What we'll be doing

1.6. Concurrent, parallel, distributed

1.7. The rest of the book

 1.8. A word of warning

1.9. Typographical conventions

1.10. Summary

1.11. Exercises

Bibliography

Chapter 2: Parallel hardware and parallel software

2.1. Some background

2.2. Modifications to the von Neumann model

2.3. Parallel hardware

2.4. Parallel software

2.5. Input and output

2.6. Performance

2.7. Parallel program design

2.8. Writing and running parallel programs

2.9. Assumptions

2.10. Summary

2.11. Exercises

Bibliography

Chapter 3: Distributed memory programming with MPI

 3.1. Getting started

3.2. The trapezoidal rule in MPI

3.3. Dealing with I/O

3.4. Collective communication

3.5. MPI-derived datatypes

3.6. Performance evaluation of MPI programs

3.7. A parallel sorting algorithm

3.8. Summary

3.9. Exercises

3.10. Programming assignments

Bibliography

Chapter 4: Shared-memory programming with Pthreads

4.1. Processes, threads, and Pthreads

4.2. Hello, world

4.3. Matrix-vector multiplication

4.4. Critical sections

4.5. Busy-waiting

4.6. Mutexes

4.7. Producer–consumer synchronization and semaphores

4.8. Barriers and condition variables

 4.9. Read-write locks

4.10. Caches, cache-coherence, and false sharing

4.11. Thread-safety

4.12. Summary

4.13. Exercises

4.14. Programming assignments

Bibliography

Chapter 5: Shared-memory programming with OpenMP

5.1. Getting started

5.2. The trapezoidal rule

5.3. Scope of variables

5.4. The reduction clause

5.5. The parallel for directive

5.6. More about loops in OpenMP: sorting

5.7. Scheduling loops

5.8. Producers and consumers

5.9. Caches, cache coherence, and false sharing

5.10. Tasking

5.11. Thread-safety

5.12. Summary
 5.13. Exercises

5.14. Programming assignments

Bibliography

Chapter 6: GPU programming with CUDA

6.1. GPUs and GPGPU

6.2. GPU architectures

6.3. Heterogeneous computing

6.4. CUDA hello

6.5. A closer look

6.6. Threads, blocks, and grids

6.7. Nvidia compute capabilities and device architectures

6.8. Vector addition

6.9. Returning results from CUDA kernels

6.10. CUDA trapezoidal rule I

6.11. CUDA trapezoidal rule II: improving performance

6.12. Implementation of trapezoidal rule with warpSize thread

blocks

6.13. CUDA trapezoidal rule III: blocks with more than one warp

6.14. Bitonic sort

6.15. Summary
 6.16. Exercises

6.17. Programming assignments

Bibliography

Chapter 7: Parallel program development

7.1. Two n-body solvers

7.2. Sample sort

7.3. A word of caution

7.4. Which API?

7.5. Summary

7.6. Exercises

7.7. Programming assignments

Bibliography

Chapter 8: Where to go from here

Bibliography

Bibliography

Bibliography

Index
Copyright
Morgan Kaufmann is an imprint of Elsevier
50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139,
United States

Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system, without
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organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and
the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our
website: www.elsevier.com/permissions.

This book and the individual contributions contained in it

are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than
as may be noted herein).
Cover art: “seven notations,” nickel/silver etched plates,
acrylic on wood structure, copyright © Holly Cohn

Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly
changing. As new research and experience broaden our
understanding, changes in research methods,
professional practices, or medical treatment may become
necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their
own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using
any information, methods, compounds, or experiments
described herein. In using such information or methods
they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety
of others, including parties for whom they have a
professional responsibility.

To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor

the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability
for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a
matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or
from any use or operation of any methods, products,
instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library
of Congress

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ISBN: 978-0-12-804605-0

For information on all Morgan Kaufmann publications

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Typeset by VTeX
Printed in United States of America

Last digit is the print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedication

To the memory of Robert S. Miller

Preface
Parallel hardware has been ubiquitous for some time
now: it's difficult to find a laptop, desktop, or server that
doesn't use a multicore processor. Cluster computing is
nearly as common today as high-powered workstations
were in the 1990s, and cloud computing is making
distributed-memory systems as accessible as desktops. In
spite of this, most computer science majors graduate with
little or no experience in parallel programming. Many
colleges and universities offer upper-division elective
courses in parallel computing, but since most computer
science majors have to take a large number of required
courses, many graduate without ever writing a
multithreaded or multiprocess program.
It seems clear that this state of affairs needs to change.
Whereas many programs can obtain satisfactory
performance on a single core, computer scientists should
be made aware of the potentially vast performance
improvements that can be obtained with parallelism, and
they should be able to exploit this potential when the need
arises.
Introduction to Parallel Programming was written to
partially address this problem. It provides an introduction
to writing parallel programs using MPI, Pthreads, OpenMP,
and CUDA, four of the most widely used APIs for parallel
programming. The intended audience is students and
professionals who need to write parallel programs. The
prerequisites are minimal: a college-level course in
mathematics and the ability to write serial programs in C.
 The prerequisites are minimal, because we believe that
students should be able to start programming parallel
systems as early as possible. At the University of San
Francisco, computer science students can fulfill a
requirement for the major by taking a course on which this
text is based immediately after taking the “Introduction to
Computer Science I” course that most majors take in the
first semester of their freshman year. It has been our
experience that there really is no reason for students to
defer writing parallel programs until their junior or senior
year. To the contrary, the course is popular, and students
have found that using concurrency in other courses is much
easier after having taken this course.
If second-semester freshmen can learn to write parallel
programs by taking a class, then motivated computing
professionals should be able to learn to write parallel
programs through self-study. We hope this book will prove
to be a useful resource for them.
The Second Edition
It has been nearly ten years since the first edition of
Introduction to Parallel Programming was published.
During that time much has changed in the world of parallel
programming, but, perhaps surprisingly, much also remains
the same. Our intent in writing this second edition has been
to preserve the material from the first edition that
continues to be generally useful, but also to add new
material where we felt it was needed.
The most obvious addition is the inclusion of a new
chapter on CUDA programming. When the first edition was
published, CUDA was still very new. It was already clear
that the use of GPUs in high-performance computing would
become very widespread, but at that time we felt that
GPGPU wasn't readily accessible to programmers with
relatively little experience. In the last ten years, that has
clearly changed. Of course, CUDA is not a standard, and
features are added, modified, and deleted with great
rapidity. As a consequence, authors who use CUDA must
present a subject that changes much faster than a
standard, such as MPI, Pthreads, or OpenMP. In spite of
this, we hope that our presentation of CUDA will continue
to be useful for some time.
Another big change is that Matthew Malensek has come
onboard as a coauthor. Matthew is a relatively new
colleague at the University of San Francisco, but he has
extensive experience with both the teaching and
application of parallel computing. His contributions have
greatly improved the second edition.
About This Book
As we noted earlier, the main purpose of the book is to
teach parallel programming in MPI, Pthreads, OpenMP, and
CUDA to an audience with a limited background in
computer science and no previous experience with
parallelism. We also wanted to make the book as flexible as
possible so that readers who have no interest in learning
one or two of the APIs can still read the remaining material
with little effort. Thus the chapters on the four APIs are
largely independent of each other: they can be read in any
order, and one or two of these chapters can be omitted.
This independence has some cost: it was necessary to
repeat some of the material in these chapters. Of course,
repeated material can be simply scanned or skipped.
On the other hand, readers with no prior experience with
parallel computing should read Chapter 1 first. This
chapter attempts to provide a relatively nontechnical
explanation of why parallel systems have come to dominate
the computer landscape. It also provides a short
introduction to parallel systems and parallel programming.
Chapter 2 provides technical background on computer
hardware and software. Chapters 3 to 6 provide
independent introductions to MPI, Pthreads, OpenMP, and
CUDA, respectively. Chapter 7 illustrates the development
of two different parallel programs using each of the four
APIs. Finally, Chapter 8 provides a few pointers to
additional information on parallel computing.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “He sees a tarantula. Now watch!” whispered Adam.
Suddenly the wasp darted down to the edge of a low bush, into
some coarse grass that grew there. Instantly came a fierce whiz of
wings, like the buzz of a captured bumblebee, only much louder and
more vibrant. Adam saw the blades of grass tumble. A struggle to the
death was going on there. Adam crawled over a few yards, drawing
Genie with him; and they saw the finish of a terrific battle between the
wasp and a big hairy tarantula.
“There! It’s over, and the tarantula is dead,” said Adam. “Genie, I
used to watch this kind of a desert fight, and not think much more
about it. But one day I made a discovery. I had a camp over here, and
I watched a tarantula wasp kill a tarantula. I didn’t know it then, but
this wasp was a female, ready to lay her eggs. Well, she rolled the big
spider around until she found a place that suited her. Then she dug a
hole, rolled him into it, covered him over, and flew away. I wondered
then why she did that. I went away from that camp, and after a while I
came back. Then one day I remembered about the wasp burying the
tarantula. And so, just for fun and curiosity, I found the grave—it was
near the end of a stone—and I opened it up. What do you think I
discovered?”
“Tell me!” exclaimed Genie, breathlessly.
“I found the tarantula almost eaten up by a lot of tiny wasps, as
much like worms as wasps! Then I understood. That tarantula wasp
had killed the tarantula, laid her eggs inside his body, tumbled him into
his grave, and covered him over. By and by those eggs hatched, and
the little wasps ate the tarantula—lived and grew, and after a while
came out full-fledged tarantula wasps like their mother.”
 CHAPTER XXIV

T IME passed. The days slipped by to make weeks, and weeks

merged into months. Summer with its hot midday hours, when
man and beast rested or slept, seemed to shorten its season
by half. No human creature ever entered a desert oasis without joy, nor
left it without regret. As time went fleeting by Adam now and then
remembered Dismukes, and these memories were full of both gladness
and pathos. He tried to visualize the old prospector in the new role of
traveler, absorber of life, spendthrift, and idler. Nevertheless, Adam
could never be sure in his heart that Dismukes would find what he
sought.

But for the most part of the still, hot, waking hours, Adam, when
he was not working or sleeping, devoted himself to Genie. The girl
changed every day—how, he was unable to tell. Most wondrous of all in
nature was human life, and beyond all sublimity was the human soul!
Every morning at sunrise Genie knelt by her mother’s grave with
bowed head and clasped hands, and every evening at sunset or in the
golden dusk of twilight she again knelt in prayer.
“Genie, why do you kneel there—now?” asked Adam once, unable
to contain his curiosity. “You did not use to do it. Only the last few
weeks or month.”
“I forgot I’d promised mother,” she replied. “Besides, could I pray
when I wanted to die?”
“No, I suppose not. It would be hard,” replied Adam, gravely.
“Please don’t think me curious. Tell me, Genie, what do you pray for?”
“I used to pray, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ as mother taught me
when I was little. But now I make up my own prayers. I ask God to
keep the souls of mother and father in heaven. I pray I may be good
and happy, so when they look down and see me they will be glad. I
pray for you, and then for every one in the world.”
Slow, strong unrest, the endless moving of contending tides,
heaved in Adam’s breast.
“So you pray for me, Genie?... Well, it is good of you. I hope I’m
worthy.... But, why do you pray?”
She pondered the question. Thought was developing in Genie.
“Before mother died I prayed because she taught me. Since then—
lately—it—it lifts me up—it takes away the sorrow here.” And she put a
hand over her heart.
“Genie, then you believe in God—the God who is supposed to
answer your prayers?”
“Yes. And he is not a god like Taquitch—or the beasts and rocks
that the Indians worship. My God is all around me, in the sunshine, in
the air, in the humming bees and whispering leaves and murmuring
water. I feel him everywhere, and in me, too!”
“Genie, tell me one prayer, just one of yours or your mother’s that
was truly answered,” appealed Adam, with earnest feeling.
“We prayed for some one to come. I know mother prayed for some
one to save me from being alone—from starving. And I prayed for
some one to come and help her—to relieve her terrible dread about
me.... And you came!”
Adam was silenced. What had he to contend with here? Faith and
fact were beyond question, as Genie represented them. What little he
knew! He could not even believe that a divine guidance had been the
spirit of his wandering steps. But he was changing. Always the future—
always the unknown calling—always the presentiment of sterner
struggle, of larger growth, of ultimate fulfillment! His illusion, his fetish,
his phantasmagoria rivaled the eternal and inexplicable faith of his
friend Dismukes.

* * * * *
 Andreas Canyon was far from the camp under the cottonwoods,
but Adam and Genie, having once feasted their eyes upon its wildness
and beauty and grandeur, went back again and again, so that presently
the distance in the hot sun was no hindrance, and the wide area of
white, glistening, terrible cholla cactus was no obstacle.
For that matter the cactus patch was endurable because of its
singular beauty. Adam could not have told why cholla fascinated him,
and, though Genie admitted she liked to look at the frosty silver-lighted
cones and always had an impulse to prick her fingers on the cruel
thorns, she could not explain why.
“Genie, the Yaqui Indians in Sonora love this cholla,” said Adam.
“Love it as they hate Mexicans. They will strip a Mexican naked, tear
the skin off the soles of his feet, and drive him through the cholla until
he’s dead. It wouldn’t take long!... All prospectors hate cholla. I hate it,
yet I—I guess I’m a little like the Yaquis. I often prick my finger on
cholla just to feel the sting, the burn, the throb. The only pain I could
ever compare to that made by cholla is the sting of the sharp horn of a
little catfish back in Ohio. Oh! I’ll never forget that! A poison, burning
sting!... But cholla is terrible because the thorns stick in your flesh.
When you jerk to free yourself the thorns leave the cones. Each thorn
has an invisible barb and it works deeper and deeper into flesh.”
“Don’t I know!” exclaimed Genie, emphatically. “I’ve spent whole
hours digging them out of my feet and legs. But how pretty the cholla
shines! Only it doesn’t tell the truth, does it, Wanny?”
“Child, please don’t call me Wanny. It’s so—so silly,” protested
Adam.
“It’s not. No sillier than your calling me child! I’m nearly fifteen. I’m
growing right out of my clothes.”
“Call me Adam.”
“No, I don’t like that name. And I can’t call you mister or father or
brother.”
“But what’s wrong with Adam?”
 “I read in mother’s bible about Adam and Eve. I hated her when
the devil got into her. And I didn’t like Adam. And I don’t like the name
Adam. You’d never have been driven from heaven.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Adam, ruefully. “Genie, I was
wicked when I was a—a young man.”
“You were! Well, I don’t care. You’d never be tempted to disobey
the Lord—not by Eve with all her stolen apples!”
“All right, called me Wanny,” returned Adam, and he made haste to
change the subject. There were times when Genie, with her simplicity,
her directness, her curiosity, and her innocence, caused Adam extreme
perplexity, not to say embarrassment. He remembered his own bringing
up. It seemed every year his childhood days came back closer. And
thrown as he was in constant companionship with this child of nature,
he began to wonder if the sophisticated education of children,
especially girls, as it had been in his youth, was as fine and simple and
true to life as it might have been.
Andreas Canyon yawned with wide mouth and huge yellow cliffs.
Just beyond the mouth of the canyon and across the wide space from
cliff to slope bloomed the most verdant and beautiful oasis of that
desert region. Huge gray bowlders, clean and old, and russet with
lichen, made barricade for a clear stream of green water, as if to
protect it from blowing desert sand. Yet there were little beaches of
white sand, lined by colored pebbles. Green rushes and flags grew in
the water. Beyond the stream, on the side of the flat-rocked slope, lay
a many-acred thicket of mesquite, impenetrable except for birds and
beasts. The green of the leaves seemed dominated by bronze colors of
the mistletoe.
The oasis proper, however, was the grove of cottonwoods,
sycamores, and palms. How bright green the foliage of cottonwoods—
and smooth white the bark of sycamores! But verdant and cool as it
was under their shade, Adam and Genie always sought the aloof and
stately palms, wonderful trees not native there, planted years and
years before by the Spanish padres.
“Oh, I love it here!” exclaimed Genie. “Listen to the palms whisper!”
 They stood loftily, with spreading green fanlike leaves at the tops,
and all the trunks swathed and bundled apparently in huge cases of
straw. These yellow sheaths were no less than the leaves that had
died. As the palms grew the new leaves kept bursting from the tufted
tops, and those leaves lowest down died and turned yellow.
“Genie, your uncle seems a long time coming back for you,”
remarked Adam.
“I hope he never comes,” she replied.
Adam was surprised and somewhat disconcerted at her reply, and
yet strangely pleased.
“Why?” he asked.
“Oh, I never liked him and I don’t want to go away with him.”
“Your mother said he was a good man—that he loved you.”
“Uncle Ed was good, and very kind to me. I—I ought to be
ashamed,” replied Genie. “But he drank, and when he drank he kissed
me—he put his hands on me. I hated that.”
“Did you ever tell your mother?” inquired Adam.
“Yes. I told her. I asked her why he did that. And she said not to
mind—only to keep away from him when he drank.”
“Genie, your uncle did wrong, and your mother did wrong not to
tell you so,” declared Adam, earnestly.
“Wrong? What do you mean—wrong? I only thought I didn’t like
him.”
“Well, I’ll tell you some day.... But now, to go back to what you said
about leaving—you know I’m going with you when your uncle comes.”
“Wanny, do you want that time to come soon?” she asked, wistfully.
“Yes, of course, for your sake. You’re getting to be a big girl. You
must go to school. You must get out to civilization.”
“Oh! I’m crazy to go!” she burst out, covering her face. “Yet I’ve a
feeling I’ll hate to leave here.... I’ve been so happy lately.”
 “Genie, it relieves me to hear you’re anxious to go. And it pleases
me to know you’ve been happy lately. You see I’m only a—a man, you
know. How little I could do for you! I’ve tried. I’ve done my best. But at
that best I’m only a poor old homeless outcast—a desert wanderer!
I’m——”
“Hush up!” she cried, with quick, sweet warmth. Swiftly she
enveloped him, hugged him close, and kissed his cheek. “Wanny, you’re
grand!... You’re like Taquitch—you’re my Taquitch with face like the
sun! And I love you—love you as I never loved anyone except my
mother! And I hope Uncle Ed never comes, so you’ll have to take care
of me always.”
Adam gently disengaged himself from Genie’s impulsive arms, yet,
despite his embarrassment and confused sense of helplessness, he felt
the better for her action. Natural, spontaneous, sincere, it warmed his
heart. It proved more than all else what a child she was.
“Genie, let me make sure you understand,” he said, gravely. “I love
you, too, as if you were my little sister. And if your uncle doesn’t come
I’ll take you somewhere—find you a home. But I never—much as I
would like to—never can take care of you always.”
“Why?” she flashed, with her terrible directness.
Adam had begun his development of Genie by telling the truth; he
had always abided by it; and now, in these awakening days for her, he
must never veer from the truth.
“If I tell you why—will you promise never to speak of it—so long as
you live?” he asked, solemnly.
“Never! I promise. Never, Wanny!”
“Genie, I am an outcast. I am a hunted man. I can never go back
to civilization and stay.”
Then he told her the story of the ruin of his life. When he finished
she fell weeping upon his shoulder and clung to him. For Adam the
moment was sad and sweet—sad because a few words had opened up
the dark, tragic gulf of his soul; and sweet because the passionate grief
of a child assured him that even he, wanderer as he was, knew
something of sympathy and love.
“But, Wanny, you—could—go and—be—pun—ished—and then—
come back!” she cried, between sobs. “You’d—never—have to—hide—
any more.”
Out of her innocence and simplicity she had spoken confounding
truth. What a terrible truth! Those words of child wisdom sowed in
Adam the seed of a terrible revolt. Revolt—yea, revolt against this
horrible need to hide—this fear and dread of punishment that always
and forever so bitterly mocked his manhood! If he could find the
strength to rise to the heights of Genie’s wisdom—divine philosophy of
a child!—he would no longer hate his shadowed wandering steps down
the naked shingles and hidden trails of the lonely desert. But, alas!
whence would come that strength? Not from the hills! Not from the
nature that had made him so strong, so fierce, so sure to preserve his
life! It could only come from the spirit that had stood in the dusky
twilight beside a dying woman’s side. It could come only from the spirit
to whom a child prayed while kneeling at her mother’s grave. And for
Adam that spirit held aloof, illusive as the specters of the dead, beyond
his grasp, an invisible medium, if indeed it was not a phantom, that
seemed impossible of reality in the face of the fierce, ruthless,
inevitable life and death and decay of the desert. Could God be nature
—that thing, that terrible force, light, fire, water, pulse—that quickening
of plant, flesh, stone, that dying of all only to renew—that endless
purpose and progress, from the first whirling gas globe of the universe,
throughout the ages down to the infinitesimal earth so fixed in its
circling orbit, so pitiful in its present brief fertility? The answer was as
unattainable as to pluck down the stars, as hopeless as to think of the
fleeting of the years, as mysterious as the truth of where man came
from and whence he was to go.

* * * * *
Snow on the gray old peak! It reminded Adam how, long ago, from
far down the valley, he had watched the mountain crown itself in
dazzling white. Snow on the heights meant winter that tempered the
heat, let loose the storm winds; and therefore, down in the desert,
comfort and swiftly flying days. Indeed, so swift were they that Adam,
calling out sad and well-remembered words, “Oh, time, stand still
here!” seemed to look at a few more golden sunsets and, lo! again it
was spring. Time would not stand still! Nor would the budding,
blossoming youth of Genie! Nor would the slow-mounting might of the
tumult in Adam’s soul!

* * * * *
Then swifter than the past, another year flew by. Genie’s uncle did
not come. And Adam began to doubt that he would ever come. And the
hope of Genie’s, that he never would come began insidiously to enter
into Adam’s thought. Again the loneliness, the solitude and silence, and
something more he could not name, began to drag Adam from duty,
from effort of mind. The desert never stopped its work, on plant, or
rock, or man. Adam knew that he required another shock to quicken
his brain, to stir again the spiritual need, to make him fight the subtle,
all-pervading, ever-present influence of the desert.
In all that time Adam saw but two white men, prospectors passing
by down the sandy trails. Indians came that way but seldom. Across
the valley there was an encampment, which he visited occasionally to
buy baskets, skins, meat, and to send Indians out after supplies. The
great problem was clothes for Genie. It was difficult to get materials,
difficult for Genie to make dresses, and impossible to keep her from
tearing or wearing or growing out of them. Adam found that Indian
moccasins, and tough overalls such as prospectors wore, cut down to
suit Genie, and woolen blouses she made herself, were the only things
for her. Like a road runner she ran over the rocks and sand! For Genie,
cactus was as if it were not! As for a hat, she would not wear one.
Adam’s responsibility weighed upon him. When he asked Genie what in
the world she would wear when he took her out of the desert, to pass
through villages and ranches and towns, where people lived, she
naïvely replied, “What I’ve got on!” And what she wore at the moment
was, of course, the boyish garb that was all Adam could keep on her,
and which happened just then to be minus the moccasins. Genie loved
to scoop up the warm white sand with her bare brown feet, and then
to dabble them in the running water.
 “Well, I give up!” exclaimed Adam, resignedly. “But when we do get
to Riverside or San Diego, where there’s a store, you’ve got to go with
me to buy girl’s dresses and things—and you’ve got to wear them.”
“Oh, Wanny, that will be grand!” she cried, dazzled at the prospect.
“But—let’s don’t go—just yet!”

* * * * *
In the early fall—what month it was Adam could not be sure—he
crossed the arm of the valley to the encampment of the Coahuilas. The
cool nights and tempering days had made him hungry for meat. He
found the Indian hunters at home, and, in fact, they had just packed
fresh sheep meat down from the mountain. They were of the same
tribe as the old chief, Charley Jim, who had taught Adam so much of
the desert during those early hard years over in the Chocolates. Adam
always asked for news of Charley Jim, usually to be disappointed. He
was a nomad, this old chieftain, and his family had his wandering spirit.
Adam shouldered his load of fresh meat and took his way down out of
the canyon where the encampment lay, to the well-beaten trail that
zigzagged along the irregular base of the mountain.
Adam rested at the dividing point of the trails. It was early in the
day, clear and still. How gray and barren and monotonous the desert!
All seemed dead. A strange, soft, creeping apathy came over Adam,
not a dreaminess, for in his dreams he lived the past and invented the
future, but a state wherein he watched, listened, smelled, and felt, all
unconscious that he was doing anything. Whenever he fell into this
trance and was roused out of it, or came out of it naturally, then he
experienced a wonderful sense of vague content. That feeling was
evanescent. Always he longed to get it back, but could not.
In this instant his quick eye caught sight of something that was
moving. A prospector with a brace of burros—common sight indeed it
was to Adam, though not for the last few years.
The man was coming from the south, but outside of the main trail,
for which, no doubt, he was heading. Adam decided to wait and
exchange greetings with him. After watching awhile Adam was
constrained to mutter, “Well, if that fellow isn’t a great walker, my eyes
are failing!” That interested him all the more. He watched burros and
driver grow larger and clearer. Then they disappeared behind a long,
low swell of sand fringed by sage and dotted by mesquite. They would
reappear presently, coming out behind the ridge at a point near Adam.
Some minutes later he saw that the burros and driver had not only
cleared the end of the ridge, but were now within a hundred yards of
where he sat. The burros were trotting, with packs bobbing up and
down. Only the old slouch hat of the prospector showed above the
packs. Manifestly he was a short man.
“Say, but he’s a walker!” ejaculated Adam.
Suddenly sight of that old slouch hat gave Adam a thrill. Then the
man’s shoulders appeared. How enormously broad! Then, as the burros
veered to one side, the driver’s whole stature was disclosed. What a
stride he had, for a man so short! Almost he seemed as wide as he was
long. His gait was rolling, ponderous. He wore old, gray, patched
clothes that Adam wildly imagined he had seen somewhere.
Suddenly he yelled at the burros: “Hehaw! Gedap!”
That deep voice, those words, brought Adam leaping to his feet,
transfixed and thrilling. Had he lost his mind? What trick of desert
mirage or illusion! No—the burros were real—they kicked up the dust—
rattled the pebbles in the sage; no—the man was real, however he
seemed a ghost of Adam’s past.
“Dismukes!” shouted Adam, hoarsely.
The prospector halted his long, rolling stride and looked. Then
Adam plunged over sand and through sage. He could not believe his
eyes. He must get his hands on this man, to prove reality. In a trice the
intervening space was covered. Then Adam, breathless and aghast,
gazed into a face that he knew, yet which held what he did not know.
“Howdy, Wansfell! Thought I’d meet you sooner or later,” said the
man.
His voice was unmistakable. He recognized Adam. Beyond any
possibility of doubt—Dismukes! In the amaze and gladness of the
moment Adam embraced this old savior and comrade and friend—
embraced him as a long-lost brother or as a prodigal son. Then Adam
released him, with sudden dawning consciousness that Dismukes
seemed to have no feeling whatever about this meeting.
“Dismukes! I had to grab you—just to feel if it was you. I’m
knocked clean off my pins,” declared Adam, breathing hard.
“Yes, it’s me, Wansfell,” replied Dismukes. His large, steady eyes,
dark brown like those of an ox, held an exceeding and unutterable
sadness.
“Back on the desert? You!” exclaimed Adam. “Dismukes, then you
lost your gold—bad luck—something happened—you never went to the
great cities—to spend your fortune—to live and live?”
“Yes, friend, I went,” replied Dismukes.
A great awe fell upon Adam. His keen gaze, cleared of the mist of
amaze, saw Dismukes truly. The ox eyes had the shadow of supreme
tragedy. Their interest was far off, as if their sight had fixed on a dim,
distant mountain range of the horizon. Yet they held peace. The broad
face had thinned. Gone was the dark, healthy bronze! And the beard
that had once been thick and grizzled was now scant and white. The
whole face expressed resignation and peace. Those wonderful wide
shoulders of Dismukes appeared just as wide, but they sagged, and the
old, tremendous brawn was not there. Strangest of all, Dismukes wore
the ragged gray prospector’s garb which had been on his person when
Adam saw him last. There! the yellow stain of Death Valley clay—and
darker stains—sight of which made Adam’s flesh creep!
“Ah! So you went, after all,” replied Adam, haltingly. “Well! Well!...
Let’s sit down, old comrade. Here on this stone. I confess my legs feel
weak.... Never expected to see you again in this world!”
“Wansfell, no man can ever tell. It’s folly to think an’ toil an’ hope
for the future.”
What strong, sad history of life revealed itself in that reply!
“Ah!... I— But never mind what I think. Dismukes, you’ve not been
on the desert long.”
 “About a week. Outfitted at San Diego an’ came over the mountain
trail through El Campo. Landed in Frisco two weeks an’ more ago. By
ship from Japan.”
“Did you have these old clothes hid away somewhere?” inquired
Adam. “I remember them.”
“No. I packed them wherever I went for the whole three years.”
“Three years! Has it been that long?”
“Aye, friend Wansfell, three years.”
Adam gazed out across the desert with slowly dimming eyes. The
wasteland stretched there, vast and illimitable, the same as all the
innumerable times he had gazed. Solemn and gray and old, indifferent
to man, yet strengthening through its passionless fidelity to its own
task!
“Dismukes, I want you to tell me where you went, what you did,
why you came back,” said Adam, with earnestness that was entreaty.
Dismukes heaved a long sigh. He wagged the huge, shaggy head
that was now gray. But he showed no more indication of emotion. How
stolid he seemed—how locked in his aloofness!
“Yes, I’ll tell you,” he said. “Maybe it’ll save you somethin’ of what I
went through.”
Then he became lost in thought, perhaps calling upon memory,
raking up the dead leaves of the past. Adam recalled that his own
memory of Dismukes and the past brought note of the fact how the old
prospector had loved to break his habit of silence, to talk about the
desert, and to smoke his black pipe while he discoursed. But now
speech did not easily flow and he did not smoke.
“Lookin’ back, I seem to see myself as crazy,” began Dismukes.
“You’ll remember how crazy. You’ll remember before we parted up
there on the Mohave at that borax camp where the young man was—
who couldn’t drive the mules.... Wansfell, from the minute I turned my
back on you till now I’ve never thought of that. Did you drive the
ornery mules?”
 “Did I?” Adam’s query was a grim assertion. “Every day for three
months! You remember Old Butch, that gray devil of a mule. Well,
Dismukes, the time came when he knew me. If I even picked up the
long bull whip Old Butch would scream and run to lay his head on me.”
“An’ you saw the young driver through his trouble?”
“That I did. And it was more trouble than he told us then. The boss
Carricks had was low-down and cunning. He’d got smitten with the
lad’s wife—a pretty girl, but frail in health. He kept Carricks on jobs
away from home. We didn’t meet the lad any too soon.”
“Humph! That’s got a familiar sound to me,” declared Dismukes.
“Wansfell, what’d you do to thet low-down boss?”
“Go on with your story,” replied Adam.
“Aha! That’s so. I want to make Two Palms Well before dark....
Wansfell, like a horned-toad on the desert, I changed my outside at
Frisco. Alas! I imagined all within—blood—mind—soul had changed!...
Went to Denver, St. Louis, an’ looked at the sights, not much
disappointed, because my time seemed far ahead. Then I went to my
old home. There I had my first jar. Folks all dead! Not a relation livin’.
Could not even find my mother’s grave. No one remembered me an’ I
couldn’t find any one I ever knew. The village had grown to a town. My
old home was gone. The picture of it—the little gray cottage—the vines
an’ orchard—lived in my mind. I found the place. All gone! Three new
houses there. Forty years is a long time! I didn’t build the church or set
out a park for the village of my boyhood.... Then I went on to Chicago,
Philadelphia, New York. Stayed long in New York. At first it fascinated
me. I felt I wanted to see it out of curiosity. I was lookin’ for some
place, somethin’ I expected. But I never saw it. The hotels, theaters,
saloons, gamblin’ hells, an’ worse—the operas an’ parks an’ churches—
an’ the wonderful stores—I saw them all. Men an’ women like ants
rushin’ to an’ fro. No rest, no sleep, no quiet, no peace! I met people, a
few good, but most bad. An’ in some hotels an’ places I got to be well
known. I got to have a name for throwin’ gold around. Men of business
sought my acquaintance, took me to dinners, made much of me—all to
get me to invest in their schemes. Women! Aw! the women were my
second disappointment! Wansfell, women are like desert mirages.
Beautiful women, in silks an’ satins, diamonds blazin’ on bare necks an’
arms, made eyes at me, talked soft an’ sweet, an’ flattered me an’
praised me an’ threw themselves at me—all because they thought I
had stacks an’ rolls an’ bags of gold. Never a woman did I meet who
liked me, who had any thought to hear my story, to learn my hope!
Never a kind whisper! Never any keen eye that saw through my
outside!
“Well, I wasn’t seein’ an’ findin’ the life I’d hoped for. That New
York is as near hell as I ever got. I saw men with quiet faces an’
women who seemed happy. But only in the passin’ crowds. I never got
to meet any of them. They had their homes an’ troubles an’ happiness,
I figured, an’ they were not lookin’ for anyone to fleece. It was my
habit to get into a crowd an’ watch, for I come to believe the mass of
busy, workin’ ordinary people were good. Maybe if I’d somehow made
acquaintance with a few of them it’d have been better. But that wasn’t
seein’ life. I thought I knew what I wanted.
“All my yearnin’s an’ dreams seemed to pall on me. Where was the
joy? Wansfell, the only joy I had was in findin’ some poor beggar or
bootblack or poor family, an’ givin’ them gold. The great city was full of
them. An’ I gave away thousands of dollars. God knows that was some
good. An’ now I see if I could have stuck it out, livin’ among such
people, I might have been of some use in the world. But, man! livin’
was not possible in New York. All night the hotels roared. All night the
streets hummed an’ clanged. There was as many people rushin’ around
by night as by day, an’ different from each other, like bats an’ hawks. I
got restless an’ half sick. I couldn’t sleep. I seemed suffocatin’ for fresh
air. I wanted room to breathe. When I looked up at night I couldn’t see
the stars. Think of that for a desert man!
“At last I knew I couldn’t find what I wanted in New York, an’ I
couldn’t hunt any longer there. I had to leave. My plans called for goin’
abroad. Then came a strange feelin’ that I must have had all the time,
but didn’t realize. The West called me back. I seemed to want the
Middle West, where I’d planned to buy the green farm. But you know
I’m a man who sticks to his mind, when it’s made up. There were
London, Paris, Rome I’d dreamed about an’ had planned to see. Well, I
had a hell of a fight with somethin’ in myself before I could get on that
ship. Right off then I got seasick. Wansfell, the bite of a rattlesnake
never made me half as sick as that dirty-gray, windy sea. The trip
across was a nightmare.... London was a dreary place as big as the
Mohave an’ full of queer fishy-eyed people whom I couldn’t
understand. But I liked their slow, easy-goin’ ways. Then Paris....
Wansfell, that Paris was a wonderful, glitterin’ beautiful city, an’ if a city
had been a place for me, Paris would have been it. But I was lost. I
couldn’t speak French—couldn’t learn a word. My tongue refused to
twist round their queer words. All the same, I saw what I’d set out to
see.... Wansfell, if a man fights despair for the women of the world,
he’ll get licked in Paris. An’ the reason is, there you see the same thing
in the homely, good, an’ virtuous little wives as you see in those
terrible, fascinatin’, dazzlin’ actresses. What that somethin’ is I couldn’t
guess. But you like all Frenchwomen. They’re gay an’ happy an’ square.
If I applied the truth of this desert to these Frenchwomen, I’d say the
somethin’ so fascinatin’ in them is that the race is peterin’ out an’ the
women are dyin’ game.
“From Paris I went to Rome, an’ there a queer state of mind came
to me. I could look at temples an’ old ruins without even seein’ them—
with my mind on my own country. All this travel idea, seein’ an’ learnin’
an’ doin’, changed so that it was hateful. I cut out Egypt, an’ I can’t
remember much of India an’ Japan. But when I got on ship bound for
Frisco I couldn’t see anythin’ for a different reason, an’ that was tears.
I’d come far to find joy of life, an’ now I wept tears of joy because I
was homeward bound. It was a great an’ splendid feelin’!
“The Pacific isn’t like the Atlantic. It’s vast an’ smooth an’ peaceful,
with swells like the mile-long ridges of the desert. I didn’t get seasick.
An’ on that voyage I got some rest. Maybe the sea is like the desert.
Anyway, it calmed me, an’ I could think clear once more. As I walked
the deck by day, or hung over the rail by night, my yearnin’s an’
dreams came back. When I reached Frisco I’d take train for the Middle
West, an’ somewhere I’d buy the green ranch an’ settle down to peace
an’ quiet for the rest of my life. The hope was beautiful. I believed in it.
That wild desire to search for the joy of life had to be buried. I had
been wrong about that. It was only a dream—a boy’s dream, on the
hope of which I had spent the manhood of my best years. Ah! it was
bitter—bitter to realize that. I—who had never given in to defeat!... But
I conquered my regret because I knew I had just mistaken what I
wanted. An’ it was not wholly too late!... Wansfell, you’ve no idea of
the size of the old earth. I’ve been round it. An’ that Pacific! Oh, what
an endless ocean of waters! It seemed eternal, like the sky. But—at last
—I got to—Frisco.”
Here Dismukes choked and broke down. The deep, rolling voice lost
its strength for a moment. He drew a long, long breath that it hurt
Adam to hear.
“Wansfell, when my feet once more touched land it was as though
I’d really found happiness,” presently went on Dismukes, clearing his
throat of huskiness. “I was in the clouds. I could have kissed the very
dirt. My own, my native land!... Now for the last leg of the journey—an’
the little farm—the home to be—friends to make—perhaps a sweet-
faced woman an’ a child! Oh, it was as glorious as my lost dreams!
“But suddenly somethin’ strange an’ terrible seized hold of me. A
hand as strong as the wind gripped my heart.... The desert called
me!... Day an’ night I walked the streets. Fierce as the desert itself I
fought. Oh, I fought my last an’ hardest fight!... On one hand was the
dream of my life—the hope of a home an’ happiness—what I had
slaved for. Forty years of toil! On the other hand the call of the desert!
Loneliness, solitude, silence, the white, hot days, the starlit nights, the
vast open desert, free and peaceful, the gray wastes, the colored
mountains, sunrise and sunset. Ah! The desert was my only home. I
belonged to the silence an’ desolation. Forty years a wanderer on the
desert, blindly seekin’ for gold! But, oh, it was not gold I wanted! Not
gold! Nor fortune! That was my dream, my boyish dream. Gold did not
nail me to the desert sands. That was only my idea. That was what
brought me into the wastelands. I misunderstood the lure of the
desert. I thought it was gold, but, no! For me the desert existed as the
burrow for the fox. For me the desert linked my strange content to the
past ages. For me the soul of the desert was my soul.... I had to go
back!... I could live nowhere else.... Forty years! My youth—my
manhood!... I’m old now—old! My dreams are done.... Oh, my God!... I
had to come back!”
 Adam sat confounded in grief, in shock. His lips were mute. Like a
statue he gazed across the wasteland, so terribly magnified, so terribly
illumined by the old prospector’s revelation. How awful the gigantic red
rock barriers! How awful the lonely, limitless expanse of sand! The
eternal gray, the eternal monotony!
“Comrade, take the story of my life to heart,” added Dismukes.
“You’re a young man still. Think of my forty years of hell, that now has
made me a part of the desert. Think of how I set out upon my journey
so full of wild, sweet hope! Think of my wonderful journey, through the
glitterin’ cities, round the world, only to find my hope a delusion!... A
desert mirage!”
“Man, I cannot think!” burst out Adam. “I am stunned.... Oh, the
pity of it—the sickening, pitiless fatality! Oh, my heart breaks for you!...
Dismukes, of what use is hope? Oh, why do we fight? Where—where
does joy abide for such as you and me?”
The great, rolling ox eyes gleamed upon Adam, strong with the
soul of peace, of victory in their depths.
“Wansfell, joy an’ happiness, whatever makes life worth livin’, is in
you. No man can go forth to find what he hasn’t got within him.”
Then he gazed away across the desert, across sand and cactus and
mesquite, across the blue-hazed, canyon-streaked ranges toward the
north.
“I go to Death Valley,” he continued, slowly, in his deep voice. “I
had left enough gold to grub-stake me. An’ I go to Death Valley, but
not to seek my fortune. It will be quiet and lonely there. An’ I can think
an’ rest an’ sleep. Perhaps I’ll dig a little of the precious yellow dust,
just to throw it away. Gold!... The man who loves gold is ruined.
Passion makes men mad.... An’ now I must go.”
“Death Valley? No! No!” whispered Adam.
“Straight for Death Valley! It has called me across half the earth. I
remember no desert place so lonely an’ silent an’ free. So different
from the noisy world of men that crowds my mind still! There I shall
find peace, perhaps my grave. See! life is all a hopin’ to find! I go on
my way. Wansfell, we never know what drives us. But I am happy
now.... Our trails have crossed for the last time. Good-by.”
He wrung Adam’s hand and quickly whirled to his burros.
“Hehaw! Gedap!” he shouted, with a smack on their haunches.
Adam whispered a farewell he could not speak. Then, motionless, he
watched the old prospector face the gray wastes toward the north and
the beckoning mountains. Adam had an almost irresistible desire to run
after Dismukes, to go with him. But the man wanted to be alone. What
a stride he had! The fruitless quest had left him that at least. The same
old rolling gait, the same doggedness! Dismukes was a man who could
not be halted. Adam watched him—saw him at last merge and
disappear in the gray, lonely sage. And then into Adam’s strained sight
seemed to play a quivering mirage—a vision of Death Valley, ghastly
and white and naked, the abode of silence and decay set down under
its dark-red walls—the end of the desert and the grave of Dismukes.
 CHAPTER XXV

T HE November morning was keen and cold and Adam and Genie
were on their way to spend the day at Andreas Canyon. Adam
carried a lunch, a gun, and a book. Genie seemed so
exuberant with wonderful spirits that she could scarcely keep her little
moccasined feet on the sand. Adam had an unconscious joy in the sight
of her.

A dim old Indian trail led up one of the slopes of Andreas Canyon,
to which Adam called Genie’s attention.
“We’ll climb this some day—when it comes time to take you away,”
said Adam. “It’s a hard climb, but the shortest way out. And you’ll get
to see the desert from the top of old Jacinto. That will be worth all the
climb.”
His words made Genie pensive. Of late the girl had become more
and more beyond Adam’s comprehension—wistful and sad and dreamy
by turns, now like a bird and again like a thundercloud, but mostly a
dancing, singing creature full of unutterable sweetness of life.
Beyond the oasis, some distance up the canyon, was a dense
growth of mesquite and other brush. It surrounded a sandy glade in
which bubbled forth a crystal spring of hot water. The bottom was
clean white sand that boiled up in the center like shining bubbles.
Indians in times past had laid stones around the pool. A small
cottonwood tree on the west side of the glade had begun to change
the green color of the leaves to amber and gold. All around the glade,
like a wild, untrimmed hedge, the green and brown mesquites stood
up, hiding the gray desert, insulating this cool, sandy, beautiful spot,
hiding it away from the stern hardness outside.
 Genie had never been here. Quickly she lost her pensiveness and
began to sing like a lark. She kicked one moccasin one way and the
other in another direction. Straightway she was on the stones, with her
bare, slender, brown feet in the water.
“Ooooo! It’s hot!” she cried, ecstatically. “But, oh, it’s fine!” And she
dipped them back.
“Genie, you stay here and amuse yourself,” said Adam. “I’m going
to climb. Maybe I’ll be back soon—maybe not. You play and read, and
eat the lunch when you’re hungry.”
“All right, Wanny,” she replied, gayly. “But I should think you’d
rather stay with me.”
Adam had to be alone. He needed to be high above the desert,
where he could look down. Another crisis in his transformation was
painfully pending. The meeting with Dismukes had been of profound
significance, and its effect was going to be far-reaching.
He climbed up the zigzag, dim trail, rising till the canyon yawned
beneath him, and the green thicket where he had left Genie was but a
dot. Then the way led round the slope of the great foothill, where he
left the trail and climbed to the craggy summit. It was a round, bare
peak of jagged bronze rock, and from this height half a mile above the
desert the outlook was magnificent. Beyond and above him the gray
walls and fringed peaks of San Jacinto towered, sculptored and grand
against the azure blue.
Finding a comfortable seat with rest for his back, Adam faced the
illimitable gulf of color and distance below. Always a height such as
this, where, like a lonely eagle, he could command an unobstructed
view, had been a charm, a strange delight of his desert years. Not
wholly had love of climbing, or to see afar, or to feel alone, or to travel
in beauty, been accountable for this habit.
Adam’s first reward for this climb, before he had settled himself to
watch the desert, was sight of a condor. Only rarely did Adam see this
great and loneliest of lonely birds—king of the eagles and of the blue
heights. Never had Adam seen one close. A wild, slate-colored bird,
huge of build, with grisly neck and wonderful, clean-cut head, cruelty
beaked! Even as Adam looked the condor pitched off the crag and
spread his enormous wings.
A few flaps of those wide wings—then he sailed out over the gulf,
and around, rising as he circled. When he started he was below Adam;
on the first lap of that circle he rose even with Adam’s position; and
when he came round again he sailed over Adam, perhaps fifty feet.
Adam thrilled at the sight. The condor was peering down with
gleaming, dark, uncanny eyes. He saw Adam. His keen head and great,
crooked beak moved to and fro; the sun shone on his gray-flecked
breast; every feather of his immense wings seemed to show, to quiver
in the air, and the tip feathers were ragged and separate. He cut the air
with a soft swish.
Around he sailed, widening his circle, rising higher, with never a
movement of his wings. That fact, assured by Adam’s sharp sight, was
so marvelous that it fascinated him. What power enabled the condor to
rise without propelling himself? No wind stirred down there under the
peaks, so he could not lift himself by its aid. He sailed aloft. He came
down on one slope of his circle, to rise up on the other, and always he
went higher. How easily! How gracefully! He was peering down for
sight of prey in which to sink cruel beak and talons. Once he crossed
the sun and Adam saw his shadow on the gleaming rocks below. Then
his circles widened across the deep canyon, high above the higher
foothills, until he approached the lofty peak. Higher still, and here the
winds of the heights caught him. How he breasted them, sailing on and
up, soaring toward the blue!
Adam watched the bird with strained eyes that hurt but never tired.
To watch him was one of the things Adam needed. On and ever
upward soared the condor. His range had changed with the height. His
speed had increased with the wind. His spirit had mounted as he
climbed. The craggy gray peak might have harbored his nest and his
mate, but he gave no sign. High over the lonely cold heights he soared.
There, far above his domain, he circled level for a while, then swooped
down like a falling star, miles across the sky, to sail, to soar, to rise
again. Away across the heavens he flew, wide winged and free, king of
the eagles and of the winds, lonely and grand in the blue. Never a
movement of his wings! Higher he sailed. Higher he soared till he was a
fading speck, till he was gone out of sight to his realm above.
“Gone!” sighed Adam. “He is gone. And for all I know he may be a
spirit of the wind. From his invisible abode in the heavens he can see
the sheep on the crags—he can see me here—he can see Genie below
—he can see the rabbit at his burrow.... Nature! Life! Oh, what use to
think? What use to torture myself over mystery I can never solve? I
learn one great truth only to find it involved in greater mystery.”

* * * * *
Adam had realized the need of shocks, else the desert influence
would insulate him forever in his physical life. The meeting with
Dismukes had been one.
Why had Dismukes been compelled to come back to the desert?
What was the lure of the silent places? How could men sacrifice
friends, people, home, love, civilization for the solitude and loneliness
of the wastelands? Where lay the infinite fascination in death and
decay and desolation? Who could solve the desert secret?
Like white, living flames, Adam’s thoughts leaped in his mind.
These wanderers of the wastelands, like Dismukes and himself,
were not laboring under fancy or blindness or ignorance or imagination
or delusion. They were certainly not actuated by a feeling for some
nameless thing. The desert was a fact. The spell it cast was a fact. Also
it began to dawn upon Adam that nothing in civilization, among
glittering cities and moving people, in palaces or hovels, in wealth or
poverty, in fame or ignominy, in any walk of worldly life, could cast a
spell of enchantment, could swell women’s hearts and claim men’s
souls like the desert. The secret then had to do with a powerful effect
of the desert—that was to say, of lonely and desolate and wild places—
upon the minds of human beings.
Adam remembered how Dismukes had loved to travel alone. If he
had any selfishness in his great heart, it had been to gloat over the
lonely places by himself. Even with Adam he seldom shared those
moments of watching and listening. Always, some part of every day, he
would spend alone on a ridge, on a height, or out on the sage,
communing with this strange affinity of the desert. Adam had known
Dismukes, at the end of a hard day’s travel, to walk a mile and climb to
a ledge, there to do nothing at all but watch and listen. It was habit.
He did it without thinking. When Adam confronted him with the fact he
was surprised. On Adam’s side, this strange faculty or obsession,
whatever it was, seemed very much more greatly marked. Dismukes
had, or imagined he had, the need to seek gold. Adam had little to do
but wander over the waste ways of the desert.
And now Adam, stirred to his depths by the culminating, fatal
tragedy of Dismukes’ life, and a passionate determination to
understand it, delved into his mind and memory as never before, to
discover forgotten lessons and larger growths. But not yet in his
pondering did they prove to him why every day of his desert life, and
particularly in the last few years, had he gone to this or that lonely spot
for no reason at all except that it gave him strange, vague happiness.
Here was an astounding fact. He could have seen the same beauty,
color, grandeur, right from his camp. The hours he had passed thus
were innumerable.
What had he done, what had gone on in his mind, during all these
seemingly useless and wasted hours? Nothing! Merely nothing it
seemed to sit for hours, gazing out over the desolate, gray-green,
barren desert, to sit listening to the solitude, or the soft wind, or the
seep of sand, or perhaps the notes of a lonely bird. Nothing, because
most of all that time he did not have in his mind the significance of his
presence there. He really did not know he was there. This state of
apparent unconsciousness had never been known to Adam at all until
Magdalene Virey had given him intimation of it. He had felt the thing,
but had never thought about it. But during these three years that he
had lived near San Jacinto it had grown until he gained a strange and
fleeting power to exercise it voluntarily. Even this voluntary act seemed
unthinking.
Adam, now, however, forced it to be a thinking act. And after many
futile efforts he at last, for a lightning flash of an instant, seemed to
capture the state of mind again. He recognized it because of an equally
swift, vague joy that followed. Joy, he called it, for want of a better
name. It was not joy. But it was wildly sweet—no—not so—but perhaps
sweetly wild. That emotion, then, was the secret of the idle hours—the
secret of the doing nothing. If he could only grasp the secret of the
nothing! Looked at with profound thought, this nothing resolved itself
into exactly what it had seemed to his first vague, wandering thought—
merely listening, watching, smelling, feeling the desert. That was all.
But now the sense of it began to assume tremendous importance.
Adam believed himself to be not only on the track of the secret of the
desert’s influence, but also of life itself.
Adam realized that during these lonely hours he was one instant a
primitive man and the next a thinking, or civilized, man. The thinking
man he understood; all difficulty of the problem lay hid in this other
side of him. He could watch, he could feel without thinking. That
seemed to be the state of the mind of an animal. Only it was a higher
state—a state of intense, feeling, waiting, watching suspension! Adam
divined that it was the mental state of the undeveloped savage, and
that it brought fleeting moments of strange emotion.
Beyond all comprehension was the marvel of inscrutable nature.
Somehow it had developed man. But the instincts of the ages were
born with him when he was born. In blood, bone, tissue, heart, and
brain! Wonder beyond that was the wonder that man had ever become
civilized at all! Some infinite spirit was behind this.
In the illumination of his mind Adam saw much that had been
mystery to him. When he had hunted meat, why had the chase been
thrilling, exciting, pressing his heart hot against his side, sending his
blood in gusts over his body? What a joy to run and leap after the
quarry! Strange indeed had been his lust to kill beasts when, after
killing, he was sorry. Stranger than this was a fact keen in his memory
—the most vivid and intense feeling—come back from his starvation
days when he had a wild rapture in pursuit of birds, rats, snakes that
he had to kill with stones. Never, in all the years, had this rapture
faded. Relic of his cruel boyhood days, when, like all boys, he had killed
for the sake of killing, until some aspect of his bloody, quivering victim
awakened conscience! Conscience then must be the great factor in
human progress—the difference between savage and civilized man.
Terribly strange for Adam to look at his brawny hands and remember
what they had done to men! Over him, then, gushed the hot blood,
over him quivered the muscular intensity, over him waved the fierce
passion which, compared with that of his boyhood, was as the blaze of
sun to a candle. He had killed men in ruthless justice, in strife of self-
defense, but always afterward he had regretted. He had fought men in
a terrible, furious joy, with eyes tingeing red, with nerves impervious to
pain, with the salt taste of a fellow creature’s blood sweet on his
snarling lips, but always afterward he was full of wonder and shame.
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.

* * * * *
The sun was westering when he descended the long, zigzag trail.
He walked slowly, tired from his mental strain. And when he got down
the sun was just tipping the ramparts above, flooding the canyon with
golden haze and ruddy rays. Adam thought that Genie, weary from
long waiting, would be asleep on the sand, or at least reading, and that
he could slip into the glade to surprise her. They played a game of this
sort, and to her had gone most of the victories.
Like a panther he slid through the grasping mesquite boughs, and
presently, coming to the denser brush, he stooped low to avoid making
a rustle. As he moved along, bending so that he touched the sand with
his hands, he came upon two fat beetles wagging and contesting over
possession of some little particle. Scooping up a handful of sand, he
buried them, and then, as they so ludicrously scrambled out, he
gathered them up, intending, if he could get behind Genie unobserved,
to drop them on her book or bare feet.
Thus it happened that he did not look ahead until after he had
straightened up inside the glade. All before him seemed golden gleams
and streaks of sunset rose. The air was thick with amber haze. Genie
stood naked, ankle-deep in the bubbling spring. Like an opal her
slender white body caught glimmer and sheen. Wondrously transparent
she looked, for the sunlight seemed to shine through her! The red-gold
tints of her hair burned like a woven cord of fire in bronze. Glistening
crystal drops of water fell from her outstretched hands and her round
arms gleamed where the white met the line of tan. The light of the sun
shone upon her pensive, beautiful face as she stood wholly unaware of
intrusion. Then she caught the sound of Adam’s stifled gasp. She saw
him. She burst into a scream of startled, wild laughter that rang with a
trill through the dell.
Adam, breaking the spell of that transfixed instant, rushed
headlong away.
 CHAPTER XXVI

G AINING the open, Adam strode swiftly down the trail to where
the canyon spread wide and ended in the bowlder-strewn
desert.

The world in which he moved seemed transfigured, radiant with the

last glow of dying day, with a glory of golden gleam. His heart pounded
and his blood flooded to and fro, swelling his veins. Life on the earth
for him had been shot through and through with celestial fire. His feet
were planted on the warm sands and his hands reached to touch the
gray old bowlders. He needed these to assure himself that he had not
been turned into the soft, cool wind or the slanting amber rays so
thickly glistening with particles of dust, or the great, soaring king of the
eagles. Adam crushed a bunch of odorous sage to his face, smelled it,
breathed it, tasted it; and the bitter sweetness thrilled his senses. It
was real. It was a part of the vast and glowing desert, of the wonderful
earth, of the infinite universe that he yearned to incorporate into his
being. The last glorious rays of the setting sun shone upon him and
magnified his stature in a long, purple shadow. How the last warmth
seemed to kiss his cheek as it sank behind the rim of the range! The
huge bowlders were warm and alive under his hands. He pricked his
fingers upon the cholla thorns just to see the ruddy drops of his life’s
current; and there was strange joy in the sting which proved him flesh
and blood and nerve. He stood alone, as he had many thousands of
times on the gray old desert, his feet on the sand, his knees in the
sage; but the being alone then was inexpressibly different. It was as if
he had, like the tarantula wasp, been born from a cocoon stage in a
dark, dead cell, into a beautiful world of light, of freedom, of color, of
beauty, of all that was life. He felt the glory of his beating heart, his
throbbing pulse, his sight and all his sense. He turned his face to the
cool, sweet, sage-scented breeze, and then he lifted it to the afterglow
of sunset. Ah! the new, strange joy of life—the incalculable force of the
natural man!
The luminous desert stretched before him, valley and mountain,
and beyond them was other range and other valley, leading to the sea,
and across its heaving bosom were other lands; and above him was the
vast, deep-blue sky with its pale evening star, and beyond them began
the infinite.
Adam felt himself a part of it all. His ecstasy was that he lived.
Nature could not deny him. He stood there, young and strong and vital.
Then he heard Genie calling him. With a start he turned to answer.
She was running down the trail. How swift, how lithe, how light! The
desert had given her the freedom, the grace, the suppleness of its wild
denizens. Like a fawn she bounded over the stones, and her hair
caught the last gleams of glowing sunlight. When she neared Adam she
checked her flying steps, pattering to a halt, one brown hand over her
breast.
“Wheooo!” she burst out, panting. “I—couldn’t—find—you. Why’d—
you come—so far?”
The something that had come between Adam’s sight and the desert
now surrounded Genie. Immeasurably she was transformed, and the
change seemed a mystery.
“We must hurry back. It’ll soon be dark. Come,” he replied.
With step as free and swift as his she kept pace with him.
“Wanny, you stole up on me—tried to scare me—while I was
bathing,” she said, with arch reproach.
“Genie, it was an accident,” he returned, hurriedly, and how
strangely the blood tingled in his face! “I meant to scare you—yes. But
I—I never thought—I never dreamed ... Genie, I give you my word....
Please say you believe me!”
“Why, Wanny,” she said, in surprise, “of course I believe you! It’s
nothing to mind about. I didn’t mind.”