"Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness as a
child, fearfully certain of a reply.
Then another voice, cadenced like the soft rush of waves up the sand,
would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere away!" And in
the indefiniteness of that answer he found an inexplicable joy. The
vagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast with pregnant possibilities as
his desert. His was the eternity of hope, boundless and splendid in its
extravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself to
be a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, yet always with his
feet upon the wide threshold of his kingdom.
Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of stars
and silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobility
of the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....
The desert, impassively withering him to the shell of a man, or wracking
him terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day and
night with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the perfume of
a woman's hair.
Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-house
and gave royally like a courtesan of kings.
The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakening
bitter on his lips.
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