He took off his hat, baring his brow to the air, and drew long breaths,
unpleasantly conscious of an increasing heaviness and sultriness in the
air, according well with the oppression of his thoughts. When he arrived
at the San Gorgonio, he was glad to take refuge in his room and there,
to relieve the tension of nerves strung almost unbearably high, he
walked back and forth and, after his fashion, swore volubly and
unintermittently.
At last, having exhausted his vocabulary as well as his breath, he
turned to the window, struck by some impending change in the atmosphere
which had now revealed itself by a slight obscuring of the light in the
room. He looked out curiously, half fearfully, dimly but rebelliously
aware that the world, his human world of personal desires and
activities, as well as all external nature was threatened by vast,
unseen, menacing forces. The great, gray desert lay in crouching
stillness, a silence which filled the soul of man with horror. The sun,
crimson as blood, hung in a sky over which seemed to have been drawn a
veil of golden mist.
"Must be something doing," muttered Hanson, and even as he spoke his eye
was taken by a movement on the horizon line, a billowing as if the
desert were rising like the sea. And truly it did. It lifted in waves
that mounted almost to the sky and swept forward with a savage eagerness
as if to bear down upon and engulf and obliterate the little oasis of a
village with its green productive fields, and reduce it again to the
wastes of desolation from which it had been so painfully redeemed by
man.
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