Adan was the first to find speech. "A fog?" he asked. "A rain storm?"
"There is neither. The horizon is as blue and clear as it is on the north and east and west. It is a miracle. Let me think a moment."
He sat down and took his head between his hands. After a while he looked up. "For hours I have been trying to remember something," he said. "Do you remember what that mayor domo said to us?--Keep straight on, straight on, never turning to the left, for that way lies the terrible Mojave desert, I barely heard his last words at the time; that is the reason I have had such a time remembering. We are in the Mojave desert, my friend."
Adan, whose mouth was still wide open, sat down and rolled his eyes from east to west. "Caramba!" he ejaculated finally.
"I could say a good deal more than Caramba. All that I have heard of this Mojave comes back to me. There is no water on it, no living thing but half choked cacti and stunted palms. Men who are lost on it go mad and die of thirst--"
"Ay, yi, yi!"
"Si, senor. However, it might be much worse. It is winter, not summer,-- when the heat kills in a day; we have food and a little wine; we are young and very strong; we have not come so many leagues that we cannot walk back. And we have each other. Think, were we alone!"
"Yes, it might be worse," said Adan, "but all the same it might be six or eight leagues to the northwest better. And that city? What was it?
Where has it gone?"
"I do not know." Privately he believed that it had been a glimpse of heaven, and was disturbed lest it might have been a portent of death.
But his mind was too active, his nature too independent to sit down under superstition. If he died on the desert, it would not be through lack of effort to get out of it.
He stood up, setting his lips. "Come," he said. "We gain nothing by sitting here, and we are both fresh; we can walk many leagues before night."
"Do you know which way to go?" asked Adan.
Roldan swept the horizon with his eyes. The buttes they had passed had displaced the solitary landmark of the morning. There was not a hoof- beat on the hard split ground. Roldan shrugged his shoulders.
"We can at least follow the sun. Los Angeles must be due west. Come."
The sun was past the zenith and sloping to the west. The boys turned their backs upon it and trudged on, only pausing once for a half-hour to divide the meagre remains of their store. Evening came; the sun leaned his elbows on the horizon in front of them, leered at the contracted visages and blinking eyes resolutely facing him, then slid leisurely down; and night came suddenly. The boys flung themselves on the ground and slept.
They awoke consumed with hunger and thirst. Their mouths and nostrils were coated with the fine irritating dust of the desert, scarcely visible but always felt. But their smarting eyes were greeted by a refreshing sight: not a half-league before them, directly in their course, was a lake, a lake as blue as the metallic sky above, and lightly fringed with palms and orange-trees. Beyond was a forest of silver leaves--an olive orchard.
"A Mission!" exclaimed Roldan, and even Adan sprang to his feet and marched westward with some enthusiasm. But alas! although they trudged with dogged persistence for fully a league, striving to forget the gnawing at their vitals in the exquisite prospect filling the eye, the lake seemed to march ahead of them, in perfect time with their weary feet. Suddenly the two boys paused and faced each other.
"This accursed desert is bewitched," said Roldan. His face was white, but more with anger than fear; for the first time in his life he realised the helplessness of man when at the mercy of nature, and he did not like the sensation. He had a strong, and by this time, well developed instinct to govern, to bend others to his will, and he swore now that he would walk out of this desert unharmed if only for the pleasure of cheating a force mightier than himself. He turned and looked at the sun.
"We have been going in a wrong direction," he said. "That lake has been shifting gradually toward the southwest, and taken us nearly a league out of our course. The first thing we know we will be in Baja California, where there is nothing but deserts, and they are all on mountain tops. We must strike north again. I am sure that last night we were due west of Los Angeles."
"But the lake? the Mission?"
"I do not believe there is any lake. There are things you and I do not understand in this world--although we are learning--and I believe that this strange desert has the power to make scenes like the theatres they who have travelled tell us of. Be sure that lake will disappear like the city."
They turned north in order to get in line with the sun; and out of the tail of their eyes they saw the lake march with them. When they finally turned to the west again it faced them once more. They linked arms suddenly and trudged on, hungry, parched, beset by superstitious fears, but not forgetting to turn every half hour and glance at the sun until he passed the meridian and pointed for the west. And suddenly the lake seemed to slip behind a wall.
"There is really something there this time," said Roldan, closing one eye and curving his hand about the other. "It is ugly enough to be real.
It is no use to say how far anything is in this place, but I should think we would reach it before long."
And long before they did reach it they knew what it was--a thicket of cacti some two miles long and of unknown depth. The plants were eight or ten feet high, and the broad thick leaves, spiked, as only the leaves of the cactus are, looked to be welded together. But that was from a distance. When the boys reached the thicket they saw that the plants in reality were some feet apart, although there appeared to be no end to them. The boys sat down suddenly, their strength deserting them. They threw their arms forward on their knees and dropped their heads. For a half hour or more they sat motionless, then Roldan looked up and fixed his glassy eyes on the forbidding wall, which at close proximity seemed to girt* the horizon.
