At daybreak the girl was up to tell the Seer good-by.
“I wish,” she said wistfully, as she stood
with him a moment at the gate, “I wish it was
my Desert that you and Abe were going to survey.”
The engineer smilingly answered: “Some
day, perhaps, that, too, will come.”
“I know it will,” she said simply.
And as she stood before him in all the beautiful strength
of her young womanhood, the Seer felt that sweet,
mysterious power of her personality—felt
it with a father’s loving pride. “I
believe you do know, Barbara,” he said; “I
believe you do.”
What the Indian told the
seer.
In the making of Barbara’s Desert the canyon-carving,
delta-building river did not count the centuries of
its labor; the rock-hewing, beach-forming waves did
not number the ages of their toil; the burning, constant
sun and the drying, drifting winds were not careful
for the years. Therefore is the time of the real
beginning of what happened in this, the land of my
story, unknown.
Somewhere in the eternity that lies back of all the
yesterdays, the great river found the salt waves of
the ocean fathoms deep in what is now The King’s
Basin and extending a hundred and seventy miles north
of the shore that takes their wash to-day. Slowly,
through the centuries of that age of all beginnings,
the river, cutting canyons and valleys in the north
and carrying southward its load of silt, built from
the east across the gulf to Lone Mountain a mighty
delta dam.
South of this new land the ocean still received the
river; to the north the gulf became an inland sea.
The upper edge of this new-born sea beat helpless
against a line of low, barren hills beyond which lay
many miles of a rainless land. Eastward lay yet
more miles of desolate waste. And between this
sea and the parent ocean on the west, extending southward
past the delta dam, the mountains of the Coast Range
shut out every moisture-laden cloud and turned back
every life-bearing stream. Thus trapped and helpless,
the bright waters, with all their life, fell under
the constant, fierce, beating rays of the semi-tropical
sun and shrank from the wearing sweep of the dry,
tireless winds. Uncounted still, the centuries
of that age also passed and the bottom of that sea
lay bare, dry and lifeless under the burning sky,
still beaten by the pitiless sun, still swept by the
scorching winds. The place that had held the glad
waters with their teeming life came to be an empty
basin of blinding sand, of quivering heat, of dreadful
death. Unheeding the ruin it had wrought, the
river swept on its way.
And so—hemmed in by mountain wall, barren
hills and rainless plains; forgotten by the ocean;
deserted by the river, that thirsty land lay, the
loneliest, most desolate bit of this great Western
Continent.
