II
Dan felt that at last the wilderness itself was speaking to him. He had waited a long time to hear its voice. His thought went back to the wise men of the ancient world, waiting to hear the riddle of the universe from the lips of the Sphinx, and how he himself—more in his unconscious self, rather than conscious—had sought the eternal riddle of the wilderness. It had seemed to him that if once he could make it speak, if he could make it break for one instant its great, brooding silence, that the whole mystery and meaning of life would be in a measure revealed. He had asked questions—never in the form of words but only ineffable yearnings of his soul—and at last it had responded. The strange rising and falling song was its own voice, the articulation of the very heart and soul of the wilderness.
And because it was, it was also the song of life itself,—life in the raw, life as it is when all the superficialities that blunt the vision had been struck away. Dan had known that it would be thus. It brought strange pictures to
