It was
dark in this interior space, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots.
Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the
first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching
on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out
through the entrance at the desert shimmering through the heat haze.
The mist wreaths were dissolving, every line and color glassily clear.
Her eyes rested vacantly on it, her body inert, her heart as heavy as a
stone.
David made no movement to follow her. He had clung to his hope with
the desperation of a weak nature, but it was ended now. No
interference, no miracle, could restore her to him. He saw--he had to
see--that she was lost to him as completely as if death had claimed
her. More completely, for death would have made her a stranger. Now
it was the Susan he had loved who had looked at him with eyes not even
indifferent but charged with a hard hostility. She was the same and
yet how different! Hopeless!--Hopeless! He wondered if the word had
ever before voiced so abject a despair.
He turned to the back of the plateau and saw the faint semblance of a
path leading upward to higher levels, a trail worn by the feet of other
emigrants who had climbed to scan with longing eyes the weary way to
the land of their desire.
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