Reply Paid by H. F. Heard Read Free Book Online Page A

within which we had been introduced into this inhuman desert world, now snorted, jerked itself violently out of its temporary torpor, gave a sad wail and drew off. We might have been marooned on the moon, at full-moon midday. I’d tried to give Mr. Mycroft the impression that I knew this country. But in fact I had never been actually dipped into the full desert before. I had just passed through it in the train, which is really like taking a short trip in a submarine—you peer out into another element but you are never actually in touch with it. And of course I had made a trip or two in favorable weather to one or two of the desert parks. Now, I felt I was far from home.
    Mr. Mycroft was, however, in careful conversation with a man who had emerged from the shadow of the shack. As I, having pulled myself together, came up to him, he turned to me.
    â€œMr. Silchester, this is Mr. Kerson,” and, the introduction over, “Step one is taken, and, as far as I can judge, in the right direction. Now for step two.”
    He, Kerson, and I, when I saw their drift, lugged our parcels in the heat and glare to the other side of the shack. There a car was waiting. By now the train had diminished to a black spot with a dark blur above it, both shrinking as you watched. How one used to hate soot and smoke and soot-stained iron. Yet now that I was surrounded by a world of hard clear color—an earth of fawn-yellow, framed by mountains of amethyst and lapis and shut in by a sky of unflawed sapphire—I looked longingly after the one rapidly shrinking stain on the whole vast landscape. Now nothing was left but the frail parallels of the tracks stretching away until they became a fine black thread—all that united us with anything human.
    â€œEverything’s in,” said Mr. Mycroft’s voice; and, irritatedly ashamed that I hadn’t helped, and at my own misgivings toward the desert. I followed him into the car.
    â€œWhere are we going?” I could not help asking. For now I noticed that there was no road and we were pointed away from the railway line.
    â€œMr. Kerson is right,” Mr. Mycroft replied. “The surface is excellent and he tells me that it is so for many miles. We shall be running along the edges and floors of a chain of dried-up lakes.”
    The heat was terrific, but after the first shock of it—like standing in front of an open oven—I found that I began to adapt. It was absolutely dry and that, I understand, keeps you going, though, I must say, after a while, I began to feel round the nose and lips rather like a lizard. I don’t know how far we drove; pretty fast going it was, on those flat floors of hard sand. At last I noticed the shadows rimming hills or mountains (you couldn’t judge their scale without a living thing to help the eye form a judgment) beginning to make big bays of blue cut out of the fawn-yellow. As we crossed the next rib of rougher ground, which separated these fossil lakes, I heard Kerson say to Mr. Mycroft, “Back of that tumble of stone to the left I’ve made a dump.”
    We drove up to it. He switched off the engine, and a silence, which one guessed had hung above our little buzz of self-made sound, suddenly swooped. I suppose it wasn’t more than a few seconds, for neither Mr. Mycroft nor Kerson—a man who looked as desiccated as the desert itself—seemed to pause. They got out and I followed. It seemed a second step out and down—the first out of the train, and now out into something more distant and deeper. After a few steps Kerson turned sharp to the left and disappeared. So clear was the air in that place that he might have stepped right through the flat painted sheet of scenery which seemed to have no depth. When I came up I saw that there was quite a fair-sized ravine at one’s feet; but, though it was some fifty yards across, one had, till one stood on the brink, no idea that there was this gap in