CHAPTER I

LOST Golden sand and copper sky; copper sky and golden sand; and nothing else. Nothing to relieve the aching human eye, in all that dreadful boundless waste of blistering earth and burning heaven. To the bright tireless eye of the vulture, an infinite speck hung motionless in the empyreal heights of cosmic space, was something else--the swaying, tottering, reeling figure of a man. The vulture watched and waited, knowing, either from marvellous instinct or from more marvellous mental process, that he would not have …