The distance was immeasurable. He was without water, without food, and the vast waste of the desert was the sickly color of dead flesh deepening in places to rusty red or to the hazy purple of distance. Within the limits of his knowledge lay no habitation of men except the drowsy Spanish colonies along the coast. Yet, colonies er not, the sea was there, and the men of Brittany are born to the sea. So he turned his face westward and let the distance unroll behind him.
Now he had not long to live. From the crest of the ridge he stared out across the unbelievable expanse of the desert. The gourd that hung from his shoulder was empty for many hours. His boots were tatters of leather, his cheeks and eyes sunken, his lips gray and cracked. '
Morning had come at last, and Jacob Almayer licked the dew from the barrel of his rifle and looked westward. Although due west was the way he had traveled and due west he should continue, off to his right there lay the shadow of an ancient trail, lying like the memory of a dream across the lower slope of the mesa. The trail was old. So old the rocks had taken the patina of desert time, so old that it skirted the curve of an ancient beach where once lapped the waters of a vanished sea. The old trail led away in a long, graceful sweep, toward the west-northwest, following the high ground toward some destination he could not guess.
West was his logical route. Somewhere out there the road from Mexico to the California missions cut diagonally across the desert. By heading directly west he might last long enough to find that road, yet the water gourd was dry and the vast sun-baked basin before him offered no promise. The ancient folk who made this path must have known where water could be found, yet if the sea had vanished from this basin might not the springs have vanished also?
Jacob Almayer was a big man, powerful in the chest and broad in the shoulders, a fighter by instinct and a man who would, by the nature of him, die hard. He was also a man of ironic, self-deriding humor, and it was like him to have no illusions now. And it was like him to look down the ancient trail with curious eyes. For how many centuries had this trail been used? Walked by how many feet, dust now these hundreds of years? And for how long had it been abandoned?
Such a path is not born in a month, nor are the stones marked in a year. Yet the ages had not erased the marks of their passing, although without this view from the crest it was doubtful if the trail could be seen. But once seen and recognized for what it was, following it should not be hard. Moreover, at intervals the passing men had dropped stones into neat piles.
To mark the miles? The intervals were irregular. To break the monotony? A ritual, perhaps? Like a Tibetan spinning a prayer wheel? Was each stone a prayer? An invocation to the gods of travelers? Gods abandoned for how long?
'I could use their help,' Jacob Almayer said aloud, 'I could use them now.' Either path might lead to death, and either might lead to water and life, but which way?
Curiosity triumphed, or rather, his way of life triumphed. Had it not always been so with him? And those others who preceded him? Was it not curiosity more than desire for gain that led them on? And now, in what might be the waning hours of life, it was no time to change.
Jacob Almayer looked down the shimmering basin and he looked along the faint but easy sweep of the trail. He could, of course, rationalize his choice. The trail led over high ground, along an easier route; trust an Indian to keep his feet out of the heavy sand. Jacob Almayer turned down the trail, and as he did so he stooped and picked up a stone from the ground.
The sun lifted into the wide and brassy sky and the basin swam with heat. The free-swinging stride that had carried him from the Colorado was gone now, but the trail was good and he walked steadily. He* began -to sweat again, and smelled the odors of his unwashed clothes, his unbathed body; the stale smell of old sweat. Yet the air he breathed, however hot, was like wine like water, one could almost swallow it. Soon he came to a pile of stones and he dropped the stone he carried and picked up another, then walked on.
Upon his shoulder the gourd flopped loosely, and his dry tongue fumbled at the broken flesh of his lips. After several hours he stopped sweating, and when he inadvertently touched the flesh of his face it felt hot and dry. When he paused at intervals he found it becoming harder and harder to start again but he kept on, unable to rest for long, knowing that safety if it came would be somewhere ahead.
Sometimes his boots rolled on rocks and twisted his feet painfully, and he could feel that his socks were stuck to his blistered feet with dried blood. Once he stumbled and fell, catching himself on his hands, but clumsily so that the skin was torn and lacerated. For a long minute he held himself on his hands and knees, staring drunkenly at the path beneath him, caught in some trancelike state when he was neither quite conscious nor quite unconscious, but for the moment was just flesh devoid of animation. Finally he got to his feet and, surprised to find himself there, he started on, walking with sudden rapidity as if starting anew. Cicadas hummed in the cacti and greasewood, and once he saw a rattler coil and buzz angrily, but he walked on.
Before him the thread of the trail writhed among the rocks, emerged, and then fell away before him to a lower level, so faint yet beckoning, always promising, drawing him into the distance as a magnet draws filings of iron. He no longer thought, but only walked, hypnotized by his own movement. His mind seemed to fill with the heat haze and he remembered nothing but the rocks, dropping and carrying stones with the deadly persistence of a drunken man.
Now the trail skirted the white line of an ancient beach, where the sand was silver with broken shell and where at times he came upon the remains of ancient fires, blackened stones, charred remains of prehistoric shells and fish bones.
His eyes were bloodshot now, slow to move and hard to focus. Dust devils danced in the desert heat waves. He clung to the thread of the path as to the one thing in this shimmering land of mirages that was real, that was familiar.
Then he tripped.
He fell flat on his face, and he lay still, face against the gravel of the partial slope, the only sound that of his hoarse breathing. Slowly he pushed himself up, got into a sitting position. Drunkenly he stared at his palms, scraped and gouged by the fall. With infinite and childish concentration he began to pick the sand from the wounds, and then he licked at the blood. He got up then, because it was his nature to get up. He got up and he recovered his gun, making an issue of bending without losing balance, and triumphant when he was successful.
He fell twice more in the next half hour, and each time it took him longer to rise. Yet he knew the sun was past its noontime high, and somehow he must last out the day. He started on but his mouth was dry, his tongue musty, and the heat waves seemed all around him. He seemed to have, at last, caught up with the mirage, for it shimmered around him and washed over him like the sea but without freshness, only heat.
A man stood in the trail before him.
An Indian. Jacob Almayer tried to cry out but he could not. He started forward, but the figure of the man seemed to recede as he advanced ... and then the Indian's arm lifted and pointed.
Almayer turned his head slowly, looking toward the ridge of up-thrust rock not far off the trail. Almayer tried to speak, but the Indian merely pointed.
Jacob Almayer leaned back and tried to make out the looks of the Indian, but all he could see was the brown skin, breech clout and some sort of a band around his head. Around his shoulders was some sort of a fur jacket.'' A fur jacket? In this heat? Almayer looked again at the rocks; when he looked back, the Indian was gone.
The rocks were not far away and Almayer turned toward them, but first he stopped, for where the Indian had been standing there was a pile of stones. He walked toward it and added his stone to the pile. Then he picked up another and turned toward the ridge. There was a trail here, too. Not quite so plain as the other, but nevertheless, a trail.
He walked on, hesitating at times, reluctant to get away from the one possibility of safety, but finally he reached the ridge where the trail rounded it, and he did likewise, and there in a corner of the rocks was white sand overgrown with thin grass, a clump of mesquite, a slim cottonwood tree, and beneath it, a pool of water.
Jacob Almayer tasted the water and it was sweet; he put a little on his lips, and it had the coolness of a benediction. He put some in his mouth and held it there, letting the starved tissues of his mouth absorb the water, and then he let a little trickle down his throat, and felt it, all the way to his stomach. After a while he drank, and over his head the green leaves of the cottonwood brushed their green and silver palms in whispering applause. Jacob Almayer crept into the shade and slept. He awoke to drink, then slept again, and in the paleness of the last hours of night he awakened and heard a faint stir upon the hillside opposite the ridge beside which he lay. He squinted his eyes, then widened them, trying to see, and then he did see.
