Then to my looms, to my looms and out of emptiness and silence and
space and light to weave all mysteries of color and all illusions of
beauty."
"Lord!" cried Bob Flick to Seagreave, "he's playing the desert. I've
seen her look just like the music sounds. That's a sand storm; there's
no other sound in the world like it." He turned his eyes full of a
puzzled wonder on Seagreave. "How can he play all that so that you and I
can see it, when he can't see it himself?"
"But he does see it," insisted Seagreave; "never think that he doesn't,
and sees it through finer avenues of sight than mere material organs of
vision. He sees the mountains, too. Why, he can play the very shadows on
the snow for me."
During the Spanish dances Seagreave had not shared the excitement of the
audience, and thus had maintained his usual serenity. He had been
intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally
unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express
the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage
and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed. Dimly he
realized that should every desert on the globe finally be subdued by the
plow, the irrigating ditches and the pruning hook, they would still
remain as realities in the mind of man, forever clouding his aspirations
toward the mountain peaks and the stars. For the desert must ever remain
an unsolved enigma, never to be reduced to a formula, never to be
explained by any human standards; now whispering to man of the
mysteries of the soul and revealing to him more of the infinite than his
finite senses may grasp; and now mocking him with illusions, her
beautiful mirages wrought of airbeams and sunlight, and transforming him
into a beast of greed with her haunting intimations of hidden and
inexhaustible treasure.
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