The
irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and an
intolerable brightness was with him. He was in the throes of that
intense visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet
apart from the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing
normal. He had a call to go hence, and he must go. Minute after minute
passed, hours passed, and the fight of the soul to maintain itself
against the disordered mind went on. All his past seemed but part
of a desert, lonely and barren and strange.
In the previous year he had made a journey to Arizona with Jowett, to see
some railway construction there, and at a ranch he had visited he came
upon some verses which had haunted his mind ever since. They fastened
upon his senses now. They were like a lonesome monotone which at length
gave calm to his torturing reflections. In his darkness the verses kept
repeating themselves:
"I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still
There was Winter in my world and in my heart:
A breath came from the mesa and a message stirred my will,
And my soul and I arose up to depart.
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