|22|When the following March came, Adam had been a week plodding southward over the yucca plateaus of the Mohave.
The desert had changed its face. Left behind were the rare calico-veined ranges of mountains, the royal-purple porphyries, the wonderful white granites, the green-blue coppers, the yellow sulphurs, and the ruddy red irons. This desert had color, but not so vivid, not so striking. And it had become more hospitable to the survival of plant life. The sandy floor was no longer monotonously gray.
Adam loved the grotesque yucca trees. They were really trees that afforded shade and firewood, and they brought back no bittersweet memories like the palo verdes. The yuccas were fresh and green, renewed in the spring from the dusty gray sunburnt trees they had been in the autumn. Many of
