elicate, glassy tremblings. Sometimes in the distance the mirage hung
brilliant, a blue lake with waves crisping on a yellow shore. They
watched it with hungry eyes, a piece of illusion framed by the bleached
and bitter reality.

When evening came the great transformation began. With the first
deepening of color the desert's silent heart began to beat in
expectation of its hour of beauty. Its bleak detail was lost in
shrouding veils and fiery reflection. The earth floor became a golden
sea from which the capes reared themselves in shapes of bronze and
copper. The ring of mountains in the east flushed to the pink of the
topaz, then bending westward shaded from rosy lilac to mauve, and where
the sunset backed them, darkened to black. As the hour progressed the
stillness grew more profound, the naked levels swept out in wilder
glory, inundated by pools of light, lines of fire eating a glowing way
through sinks where twilight gathered. With each moment it became a
more tremendous spectacle. The solemnity attendant on the passage of a
miracle held it. From the sun's mouth the voice of God seemed calling
the dead land to life.

Each night the travelers gazed upon it, ragged forms gilded by its
radiance, awed and dumb. Its splendors crushed them, filling them with
nostalgic longings. They bore on with eyes that were sick for a sight
of some homely, familiar thing that would tell them they were still
human, still denizens of a world they knew. The life into which they
fitted and had uses was as though perished from the face of the earth.
The weak man sunk beneath the burden of its strangeness. Its beauty
made no appeal to him. He felt lost and dazed in its iron-ringed
ruthlessness, dry as a skeleton by daylight, at night transformed by
witchfires of enchantment. The man and woman, in whom vitality was
strong, combatted its blighting force, refused to be broken by its
power. They desired with vehemence to assert themselves, to rebel, not
to submit to the sense of their nothingness. They turned to one
another hungry for the life that now was only within themselves. They
had passed beyond the limits of the accustomed, were like detached
particles gone outside the law of gravity, floating undirected through
spaces where they were nothing and had nothing but their bodies, their
passions, themselves.

To a surface observation they would have appeared as stolid as savages,
but their nerves were taut as drawn viol