o the west in the path of the sun their summits
loomed two hundred feet high.

He went back to his car and drove it desperately at the slope, only to
bury the rear wheels to the axles; and as he dug them out the sand from
the wave crest began to whisper and slip and slide. He cleared a great
space and started his motor, but at the first shuddering tug the sand
began to tremble and in a rush the wave was upon him. It buried him deep
and as he leapt from his machine little rills of singing sand flowed
around it. So far it had carried him, this high-powered, steel-springed
racer; but now he must leave it for the sand to cover over and cross the
great Valley alone. On many a rocky slope and sliding sand-hill it had
clutched and plunged and fought its way, but now it was smothered in the
treacherous, silt-fine sand and he must leave it, like a partner, to
die. Yet if die it must, then in its desert burial the last trace of
Wiley Holman would be lost. The first wind that blew would wipe out his
footprints and the racer would sink beneath the waves. Wiley took his
canteen, and Charley's bottle of whiskey, his rifle and a small sack of
food and dared the great silence alone.

While his motor had done the work he had not minded the heat and the
pressure of blood in his head, but as he toiled up the sandy slope,
sinking deeper at each stride, he felt the breath of the sand. All day
it had lain there drinking in the sun's rays and now in the evening,
when the upper air was cool, it radiated a sweltering heat. Wiley
mounted to the summit of wave after wave, fighting his way towards the
Gateway to the north; and then, beaten at last and choking with the
exertion, he turned and followed a crest. The sand piled up before him
in a vortex of sharp-edged ridges, reaching their apex in a huge pyramid
to the west, and as he toiled on past its flank he felt a gusty rush of
air, sucking down through Emigrant Wash. It was the wind, after all,
that was king of Death Valley; for whichever way it blew it swept the
sand before it, raising up pyramids and tearing them down. Along the
crest of the high wave a feather-edge of sand leapt out like a plume
into space and as he stopped to watch it Wiley could see that the
mountain was moving by so much across the plain.

A luminous half-moon floated high in the heavens and the sky was
studded thick with pin-point stars. In that myriad of little stars,
filling in between the big ones, the milky way was