Dust of the Desert Read online

  CHAPTER V

  THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE

  Benicia O'Donoju by the side of the big Papago Quelele and with thetwin towns on the Line behind her--ahead the unlimned immensity ofthe wilderness--gave herself to the exhilaration of flight. For theskimming and dipping of the little car over the wave crests of thedesert was like the flight of the desert quail, who rarely liftshimself above the height of the mesquite in his unerring dartings frombush to bush. On its partially deflated tires, provision against sandtraps and the expansion of imprisoned air under heat, the skeletonthing reeled off its twenty miles an hour with snortings.

  The final incident at the Arizora station--little Colonel Urgo andhis unceremonious jettisoning--left no abiding impression with thespirited desert girl. His struttings and posings, his humorouslyimpetuous wooing, resumed at the El Paso station after the two years'interruption of her stay in the States, were for her no more thanthe high stepping of some barnyard Lothario. Benicia, little given tothe morbid business of self-analysis, was not sensible of how exactlythe dual strain of blood in her had reacted to Urgo's advances; howit had been the swift thrust of Spanish temper which had prompted herto resort to the pronged weapon from her hair at El Paso even as thepersistent Irish humour tang inherent in the O'Donoju name had flashedout in the dumping of the suitor at Arizora.

  No, Hamilcar Urgo's dapper figure was as evanescent as the mirage, butthere was another which appeared to replace it. A man with the figureof an athlete and a forthright way of looking at one--perhaps the leastbit too self-assured, perhaps inviting rebuke did one but feel in thehumour of rebuking. One of those quick-witted Americans, ever readyon a hair trigger of resourcefulness yet seeming to carry a situationas if no situation existed. Nice eyes, yes. A pleasant laugh, rich inhumour. But so New Yorkish! He thought the desert a place where noone lived willingly. Amusing conceit! And his name was--? Ah, yes,Hickman--Grant Hickman. One would try to remember that name.

  Retrospect could not long hold Benicia's mind against the joy of thehoming journey. For the desert she loved spoke to her a welcome longdreamed in the stifling precincts of cities. There was the sky shehad yearned for, something of infinite depths which did not shut downover the earth like an inverted cup; rather an impalpable sea whereinthe earth swam free. Morning gold still tinted it. And the mountainsthat rose sheer from the desert floor with no lesser foothill heights:under the sun they were blue in the east and where slant rays fell uponwestern barriers a tawny strength of naked rock clothed them. Betweenthe feet of the mountain stretched the level desert plain far and farbeyond the power of eye to compass; grey with the grey of saltbush andgreasewood, overtones of green where the first leaves of the mesquiteand ironwood answered the call of the spring sun.

  Quelele had turned the machine onto a westward wending road once theLine was crossed at Sonizona. A few straggling ranches near the bordertown, then the unsullied desert. Westward and southward sped themachine, deep into the greatest stretch of unpeopled wilderness betweenthe Barren Grounds of the Dominion and Panama.

  The Desert of Altar lies there. From the Line south to the YaquiRiver and from the Gulf of California, once called the Sea of Cortez,eastward to the Sierra Madre:--here is the terra incognita of Sonora;here is the dominion of thirst. A territory large as New England andwith a population smaller than the average New England mill town. Avast graveyard of vanished peoples, who left behind them mountainsterraced with fortifications laid in unbroken breastworks of porphyryand rocks pictured with their annals of life and death. Rain comes onlywith occasional summer thunder storms up from the Gulf, storms whichwake dead rivers into furious flood. So precious is this water from thesky that the primitive peoples weave mystic rain symbols into theirbasketry for a fetish, and their songs are all of thunderheads andcroaking frogs.

  Here in the Desert of Altar the impossible becomes commonplace. A mancaught in a river bed by the spearhead of a freshet drowns in sand mademud and irresistibly rushing. Cattle drink no water for months on endbut are sustained by munching cactus whose spines can penetrate soleleather. In the furnace heat of summer furious rain storms occur in thehigher air but the moisture is sucked up by the sun before it touchesearth. Gold lies scattered on the surface of the desert and water mustbe mined. The desert kind slay after the manner of the ages but declarea truce at the waterhole. Death of all life is ever-present, yet grantso much as a permanent trickle of the life-giving fluid and the dust iscovered with a glory of green.

  For its devotees the desert holds mysteries potent beyond comprehensionof folk in a softer land. The venturing padres of an elder day calledit the Hand of God; they walked in the hand of God and were not afraid.Divinity, force, original cause--whatever may be your term for thatpower which jewels the grass with dew and swings the suns in theircourses--this is very close in the desert. In great cities man hasdriven the Presence far from him by his silly rackets of steam andelectricity, by his farcical reproductions of cliffs and pinnacles. Inthe Desert of Altar he walks in silence and with God. The very air iskinetic with the energy that brought forth life on a cooled planet.

  The desert had been Benicia's teacher; had moulded her spirit to itsown pattern of elemental strength. Born the last of the O'Donojus inthe desert oasis that was the ultimate remnant of the once kinglyRancho del Refugio--grant of a Spanish Philip to her ancestor--shehad been reared in the asperities of the land, had absorbed into herbone and tissue the rigours and simple verities of a wilderness.Because there was no son in the Casa O'Donoju and because, too, thisonly daughter came into the world with the inheritance of a spiritimpetuous and errant as a desert bird, Don Padraic, her father, gaveover all attempts at imposing on her the straight decorum that shacklesthe Spanish maiden of gentle blood. With the death of her mother whenBenicia was still in short skirts came this loosening of the bonds.Instead of growing to maturity a shy creature who must never quit thesight of a duenna and whose eyes shall tell no secrets, the girl warmedto a wonderful companionship with her father, lived the life of a boy.

  Her flaming red hair bobbed about the fringe of milling cores of wildcattle at the round-up. At _Sahuaro_ feasts of the Papagoes, Mo Vopoki(Lightning Hair) added her shrill soprano to the chorus of the FrogDoctor Song. She learned where gold lay in shallow pockets and winnowedit from the sands in the Indian fashion. She brought home a mewing,spitting kitten she had taken from a bobcat's litter. Her doll wasdiscarded for a rifle before her strength could shoulder it.

  Schooling came in her father's library, filled with books in threelanguages. English and music, the music of the great harp, became herpassions. The harp had been her great-grandmother's; Don Padraic couldmake the mesh of strings sing with the sound of rain on flowers. He washer first teacher. Then, when twenty years were hers and Don Padraicrealized something besides the wild desert life was needed to round outthe full beauty of his daughter's soul, he had urged further studieson the harp as the excuse for Benicia's two years in the cities of theStates. Those two years had served well to overlay upon the ruggedhandiwork of the wild the softness and subtleties of culture.

  Benicia believed she possessed all her father's confidences. So shedid--all but one. She did not know that when she came into the worldwith tiny head furry in burning red Donna Francisca, her mother, hadcried herself into hysteria and Don Padraic's heart had gone cold. Norwas she ever told that her flaming hair marked her with the finger ofNemesis.

  This day of the return from exile no premonition of the inheritanceof fate arose to disturb the singing heart of the girl. She rattledon to the stoical Papago at the wheel unending questions concerningher father and the most humble of the Indian retainers living on therancherias about the oasis, Don Padraic's fief in the waste lands.She told the credulous Quelele stories of the cities she had seen; ofwhite men's wickiups climbing as high as the hill of La Nariz; of waterso plentiful that it was launched at a burning house out of a longserpent's mouth; how men lifted themselves above the earth in machineslike the king condor and flew hundreds of miles bet
ween sun and sun.To all of which big Quelele, never lifting his eyes from the thin rutlines in the sand, answered with a single monosyllable "Hi," whereinwas compounded all his capacity for wonder.

  South and west about the skirts of the Pajarito they went, and theninto the old road up from Caborca, the ancient highway called the Roadof the Dead Men which swings north parallel with the Line, cutting thetails of numerous ranges that are great in Arizona. And so, when theday was hardly more than half spent, the little car crawled to theheight called the Nose of the Devil, and Benicia saw below her land ofdesire.

  Fists of the mountains grudgingly opened out to permit a broad basinrunning from east to west, and there against the savage baldness ofsentinel ranges showed a ribbon of green. Green of precious gems itwas. So vivid in the setting of the drought land. So cyclonic itsassault of colour against the eye inured to the duns and greys of ahundred miles of parched terrain. And in the midst of the oasis theshining white dot, which was the house of the O'Donoju; of Benicia'sfather and his fathers before him back to the day of a royal favouritebaptized Michael O'Donohue. The Casa O'Donoju in El Jardin deSoledad--the Garden of Solitude.

  Indian women, in skirts of orange and cerise and with gay mantles overtheir sleek hair, lined the way to the avenue of royal date palmswhich led from the bridge over the Rio Dulce straight to the whitesingle-story house of 'dobe, heavy walled and loopholed like a fort.They waved and sent shouts of welcome to the mistress of the casa asshe passed.

  Benicia knew her father would not be outside the house to greet her;their love was not for the servants to see. Rather he would be waitingin their own trysting place, the place where he had given her farewelltwo years before. The girl leaped from the car before the heavystudded oak door breaking the solid white front of the house at itscentre. It was opened to her by old 'Cepcion, feminine major domo ofthe household servants. Benicia paused to give the parchment cheeks akiss, then she danced down a flagged hall to the flare of green markingthe patio garden in the centre of the house.

  Here was a place of beauty and a fragrant cave of coolness--the verysecret heart of the Garden of Solitude. Open to the sky and withcloistered dimness of the four sides of the house all about, the patiowas a tiny jungle of climbing things, all green and riotous blossoms.A stately date palm reigned in the centre behind the little basin ofthe fountain; curtains of purple bougainvillea draped themselves downits shaggy ribs; lavender water-hyacinths sailed their little barquesin the pool; geraniums flamed in living fire against the pillars of thearcades.

  There in the garden waited a man all in white. Snow white his heavyhair and beard, though the life in his deep-set eyes and the vigorousset of his shoulders belied age; white were his thin garments of silkand flannel.

  He caught the flash of a red head through the greenery, saw an eager,breathless face turned questioningly.

  "'Nicia, heart of my heart--!"

  Then she ran to him, paused just an instant to lift swift fingersunder his chin and tilt his head. Their eyes measured each the lovethat welled brimming in the soul's windows. Then the father drew hisdaughter close to his heart and his lips brushed her forehead.

  "'Nicia, my strong one, your father has great need of you."