It was the voice of the desert full of a savage exultation in its own loneliness and forsaken isolation, and through it rang a cry of deep, disdainful triumph, as if it said:  “All puny races of men, come to me; embroider my vast surfaces with the green of your fields and gardens, build your houses upon my quiescent sand and dream that you have conquered and tamed me.  And I abide, I abide.  Silent, brooding, unwitting of your noisy incursions, I lie absorbed in my dream under my own illimitable skies.  But soon or late, when the moment comes, I wake, I rouse, I see my inviolate desolations invaded.  Then I gather my strength, I drown you with my torrential rivers, I torture you with my burning sun, I obliterate you with my flying sand.  So shall my cactus bloom once more, my jeweled lizards crawl unmolested and the cry of the coyote echo again through the vast, soundless spaces of my desolation.  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.

Thus Hughie’s music; and presently Pearl floated out.  She had changed her Spanish costume for the one of scarlet crepe in which Hanson had first seen her, a crown of scarlet flowers on her dark hair.  Her very expression, too, had changed, her eyes were elongated, her features seemed delicately Egyptian; the brooding sphynx look was on her face.