Rojas fell backward and plunged sheer. The bank of white choyas caught him, held him upon their steel spikes. How long did the dazed Gale sit there watching Rojas wrestling and writhing in convulsive frenzy? The bandit now seemed mad to win the delayed death.
When he broke free he was a white patched object no longer human, a ball of choya burrs, and he slipped off the bank to shoot down and down into the purple depths of the crater.
Grey always posited the notion that if one were to write honestly about the west, then it was dishonest to back away from the violence and the depravity of mankind routinely manifested on the evolutionary battlefield of the frontier. Rojas is a Mexican bandito. Gale is a Yaqui tribesman. The clash between these two men extends to represent in a symbolic way how this evolutionary fight to be declared the fittest pitted culture and culture, creating strange bedfellows as associations of urgency would be made along the way.
This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set in with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged with memories of a time long past—of a home back in Peoria, of a woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector for gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed infinitude, because he wanted to be alone to remember.
The second paragraph of the novel situates information about its protagonist that was quite common for such characters in such novels. It is easily possible to forget that for a generation or more, there were almost no people living on the western frontier who were actually from the western frontier. Few with white skin anyway. The movies have created this idea of the western hero as being sprung fully formed from the almost untrampled soil. (Butch Cassidy, for instance, was born in the Utah territory but the Sundance Kid hailed from Pennsylvania!) The greater majority of those who settled in the west and gave rise to its myth came from back east with a substantial accounting from themselves native westerners at the time because they were born in what is today the middle of the country. Such as, for instance, this man from Illinois gone looking to find his fortune in mining gold.
"I found her, Dick, and when I saw her—I went stark, staring, raving mad over her. She is the most beautiful, wonderful girl I ever saw. Her name is Mercedes Castaneda, and she belongs to one of the old wealthy Spanish families. She has lived abroad and in Havana. She speaks French as well as English. She is—but I must be brief.”
Important to remember is that this novel features a subtitle, though it is generally referred to simply as Desert Gold. That the story is a kind of exciting treasure hunting adventure is not to be denied, but there is another treasure at stake. And that is where the subtitle, “A Romance of the Border.” For George Thorne, desert gold means something entirely different from those who went west to prospect in the ground and water for their riches. His riches appear in the much more shapely and organic form of Mercedes and their love story binds the other elements of the novel together.
He came at length to realize that the desert was a teacher. He did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale of a man's values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More of desert experience, Gale believe, would be too much for intellect. The desert did not breed civilized man, and that made Gale ponder over a strange thought: after all, was the civilized man inferior to the savage?
The gold to be found in the desert can mean different things to different people and that is also true of the desert part of the title. The desert serves not merely as topography on which is played out the excitement of the old west; it also fulfills a role as metaphor. The topographical aspect of the desert is inextricably and irrevocably linked to the psychology of the desert—the incessant heat slowly massaging madness into the brain, concern intensifying into paranoia over access to water , the mind-numbing monotony of simply traveling from one point to another always accompanied by the threat of distraction from surrounding danger. And then there is the combination of the inhuman silence, the incomprehensible vastness of the geography and loneliness beneath a million stars. It is in this capacity that for men like Gale, the dull lead of the desert’s psychological tricks can be transformed into the glittering beauty of philosophical gold.
