He was enjoying a new sensation, feeling vague, restless
thoughts surge up within him which were so vague, so elusive as to be
hardly grasped. At first it was only the loneliness, the isolation and
desolation of the thing which appalled him. Then slowly into that
feeling there entered something which was a kind of awe, almost an
actual fear. A man, a man like young Greek Conniston, was a small
matter out here; the desert a great, unmerciful, unrelenting God.
First loneliness, then awe tinged with a vague fear, and then
something which Conniston had never felt before in his life. A great,
deep admiration, a respect, a soul-troubling yearning toward the very
thing from which his city-trained senses shrank. He was experiencing
what the men who live upon its rim or deep in its heart are never free
from feeling. For all men fear the desert; and when they know it they
hate it, and even then the magic of it, brewed in the eternal
stillness, falls upon them, and though they draw back and curse it,
they love it! The desert calls, and he who hears must heed the call.
It calls with a voice which talks to his soul. It calls with the dim
lure of half-dreamed things. It beckons with the wavering streamers of
gold and crimson light thrown across the low horizon at sunrise and
sunset.
Greek Conniston was not an introspective man. His life, the life of a
rich man's son, had left little room for self-examination of mood and
purpose and character.
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