One by one the cries were stopped as the fire swept across the Desert of the Dead. The general, who had been watching it all from the rock beside me, walked to the edge and looked down. Then he leapt straight out, praying as he fell! The fire reached up hungry fingers to clutch at him and his figure vanished in the flames.
Still lost in this avalanche of horror I turned my gaze back to that charred figure, burned beyond human resemblance, which clung to the opposite wall. It oscillated gently in the currents of air generated by the heat of the fire—that heat I could not feel. The oscillation loosened the grip of those dead fingers and the sodden figure fell back into the huge inferno, flinging high a shower of sparks as it struck with a thud that came plainly across to me.
I was all alone above the Desert of the Dead!
Morning came and I did not realize it until I felt the heat of the sun upon my uncovered body where I sat upon that rock. Had I dreamed it all? No! For up to my nostrils from the desolated Desert of the Dead came the unmistakable odor of burned flesh! But the desert was just as I had seen it before lying down to my sleep the night before. The morning breezes carried that elusive odor, which I shall never forget, up and out of the amphitheater, and bore it away to some unknown valley of winds, back in the heart of the Cordilleras.
Two days later, dazed, broken, burning up with fever and weird imaginings, I once more entered the main trail near El Jamey. I was met there by the alcalde of Madrigal. He hurried toward me with gladness shining in his eyes.
"Ah, my friend," he said, "I thank God that you have returned safely from that place of horrors, the Desert of the Dead!"
I looked dully, vacantly, into his kindly eyes. Something he read in mine caused him to retreat a step or two. Then he turned and fled!
For with his mention of that name, scarcely realizing what I did, I stooped down and made the sign of the cross in the marks left by his bare feet!
The Third story in this remarkable series of "Strange
Tales from Santo Domingo" by Lieutenant
Arthur J. Burks will be printed in WEIRD
TALES next month. It is called "Day-
light Shadows." Later Stories in the
same series will narrate the
weird exploits of the no-
torious Dominican
bandit, Jose
Espinosa
