There is water in the desert this time of year and some feed, but it will be a hard, a terrible march. We shall lose a great deal of our stock, one in ten, perhaps; the Wolf thinks it may be as high as five in ten.
We shall start to-morrow an hour before sunset, making a short march of about ten miles to a place where there is a spring along the trail the ancients used. It is strange to see all across the desert evidence of the great work they accomplished. After five hundred years the location of their well graded trail, with its wide, sweeping curves, is plainly discernible. It is a narrow trail, but there are signs of another, much wider, that we discover occasionally. It follows the general line of the other, crossing it and recrossing it, without any apparent reason, time and time again. It is almost obliterated by drifting sand, or washed away by the rain of ages. Only where it is of material like stone has it endured.
The pains those ancients took with things! The time and men and effort they expended! And for what? They have disappeared, and their works with them.
As we rode that first night Rain Cloud was often at my side, and as usual he was gazing at the stars.
“Soon you will know all about them,” I said, laughing, “for you are always spying upon them. Tell me some of their secrets.”
“I am learning them,” he replied seriously.
“Only the Flag, who put them there to light our way at night knows them all,” I reminded him.
He shook his head. “They were there, I think, long before the Flag existed.”
“Hush!” I admonished him. “Speak no ill of the Flag.”
“I speak no ill of it,” he replied. “It stands for all to me. I worship it, even as you; yet still I think the stars are older than the Flag, as the earth must be older than the Flag.”
“The Flag made the earth,” I reminded him.
“Then where did it abide before it made the earth?” he asked.
I scratched my head. “It is not for us to ask,” I replied. “It is enough that our fathers told us these things. Why would you question them?”
“I would know the truth.”
“What good will it do you?” I asked.
This time it was the Rain Cloud who scratched.
“It is not well to be ignorant,” he replied at last. “Beyond the desert, wherever I have ridden, I have seen hills. I know not what lies beyond those hills. I should like to see.
To the west is the ocean. In my day, perhaps, we shall reach it. I shall build a canoe and go forth upon the ocean and see what lies beyond.”
“You will come to the edge of the world and tumble over it, and that will be the end of your canoe and you.”
“I do not know about that,” he replied. “You think the earth is flat.”
“And who is there that does not think so? Can we not see that it is flat? Look about you-it is like a large, round, flat cake.”
“With land in the center and water all round the land?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“What keeps the water from running off the edge?” he wanted to know.
I had never thought about that, and so I returned the only answer that I could think of at the time.
“The Flag, of course,” I said.
“Do not be a fool, my brother,” said Rain Cloud. “You are a great warrior and a mighty chief; you should be wise, and the wise man knows that nothing, not even the Flag, can keep water from running down hill if it is not confined.”
“Then it must be confined,” I argued. “There must be land to hold the water from running over the edge of the world.”
“And what is beyond that land?”
“Nothing,” I replied confidently.
“What do the hills stand on? What does the earth stand on?”
“It floats on a great ocean,” I explained.
“With hills around it to keep its water from running over its edge?”
“I suppose so.”
“And what upholds that ocean and those hills?” he went on.
“Do not be foolish,” I told him. “I suppose there must be another ocean below that one.”
“And what holds it up?”
I thought he would never stop. I do not enjoy thinking about such useless things. It is a waste of time, yet now that he had started me thinking, I saw that I should have to go on until I had satisfied him. Somehow I had an idea that dear little Rain Cloud was poking fun at me, and so I bent my mind to the thing and really thought, and when I did think I saw how foolish is the belief that we all hold.
“We know only about the land that we can see and the oceans that we know exist, because others have seen them,” I said at last. “These things, then, of, which we know, constitute the earth. What upholds the earth we do not know, but doubtless it floats about in the air as float the clouds. Are you satisfied?”
“Now I will tell you what I think,” he said. “I have been watching the sun, the moon, and the stars every night since I was old enough to have a thought beyond my mother’s breast. I have seen, as you can see, as every one with eyes can see, that the sun, the moon, and the stars are round like oranges. They move always in the same paths through the air, though all do not move upon the same path. Why should the earth be different? It probably is not. It, too, is round, and it moves upon its path. What keeps them all from falling I do not know.
I laughed at that, and called to Nallah, our sister, who rode near by. “Rain Cloud thinks that the earth is round like an orange.”
“We should slip off if that were true,” she said.
“Yes, and all the water would run off it,” I added.
“There is something about it that I do not understand,” admitted Rain Cloud, “yet still I think that I am right. There is so much that none of us knows. Nallah spoke of the water running off the earth if it were round. Did you ever think of the fact that all the water of which we know runs down forever from the higher places? How does it get back again?”
“The rains and snows,” I replied quickly.
“Where do they come from?”
“I do not know.”
“There is so much that we do not know,” sighed Rain Cloud; “yet all that we can spare the time for is thoughts of fighting. I shall be glad when we have chased the last of the Kalkars into the sea, so that some of us may sit down in peace and think.”
“It is handed down to us that the ancients prided themselves upon their knowledge, but what did it profit them? I think we are happier. They must have had to work all their lives to do the things they did and to know all the things they knew, yet they could eat no more or sleep no more or drink no more in a lifetime than can we. And now they are gone forever from the earth and all their works with them, and all their knowledge is lost.”
“And presently we will be gone,” said Rain Cloud.
“And we will have left as much as they to benefit those who follow,” I replied.
“Perhaps you are right, Red Hawk,” said Rain Cloud; “yet I cannot help wanting to know more than I do know.”
The second march was also made at night, and was a little longer than the first. We had a good moon, and the desert night was bright. The third march was about twenty-five miles; and the fourth a short one, only ten miles. And there we left the trail of the ancients and continued in a southwesterly direction to a trail that followed a series of springs that gave us short marches the balance of the way to a lake called Bear by our slaves.
The way, of course, was all well known to us, and so we knew just what was ahead and dreaded the fifth march, which was a terrible one, by far the worst of them all. It lay across a rough and broken area of desert and crossed a range of barren mountains. For forty-five miles it wound its parched way from water hole to water hole.
For horsemen alone it would have been a hard march, but with cattle and sheep to herd across that waterless waste it became a terrific undertaking. Every beast that was strong enough carried hay, oats or barley, in sacks, for we could not depend entirely upon the sparse feed of the desert for so huge a caravan; but water we could not carry in sufficient quantities for the stock. We transported enough, however on the longer marches to insure a supply for the women and all children under sixteen, and on the short marches enough for nursing mothers and children under ten.