Port Hope High School - Blue and White Yearbook (Port Hope, Ontario Canada)

Page 63 text:

EDITOR: KATHLEEN WALDIE C cwwmks1

Page 65 text:

SHORT STORIES THERE, IN THE DESERT SANDS Never had the desert sun been so hot. Like an attack from the entrails of hell it poured its wrath down deep into the parched sands. Minute grains of crystal caught its flame, shimmered in a torment of colour in its ferocity, and beamed its fire to everything living and everything dead. Only a hardy desert native had ever dared to appear and absorb the heat and disappear. Only the lonely cactus had ever stood sentinel in that great white way. Nothing else had ever been. Only this. Then they had come: dark, pitiful, furtive figures that couldn ' t bear to suffer long in this inferno; small figures that left prints in the wasteland floor for only minutes. In this strip of white hell they were insignificant. Pitiful and yet powerful, furtive and yet bold, insignificant and yet moment¬ ous. They had created change which was one thing the desert had never realized. Always there had been the sun and the rats and the lizards and the cactus. Al¬ ways it had been the same monotonous, and seemingly-unending desert. Now it changed. At first the change was little in the form of a strange mass of silver-grey metal. Yet this thing which stretched high above the cactus caught the shimmering ferocity of the sun and beamed it with an even greater fury at everything living and everything dead. This thing which was a tower stood for the lizard and the sand and the sun and God. Then it was quiet again and the desert had felt the first a p p e a r a n c e of the men. The desert night brought with it cold. It was cold to the desert because in the bowels of the sun it had been hot. In the night the figures came again. They came and they shivered in the cold and they cursed because it was cold just as they had cursed because it had been hot. Sounds from the men broke the quiet spell of the desert but as their marks had been only fora moment in the hot sand in the day so their voices were only for a moment in the night. Then in the cold stillness of the dark night came the strange sounds that had never been heard before. At first the sounds were drips in the sea that was change and mortal. The voice of man dealt like a carrion peal in the stillness. It reverberated off the group of men huddled and shivering behind the concrete that was of man and off the far away silver-grey tower that too was of man. n One minute 1 til blast. Then the drips became a syncopated beat, and the men huddled and sweated because inside of them it was hot and their sweat poured out and bounced like spit off the steel that was of man into the sand that was of G o d and the sweat dis¬ appeared. The beat that was a drip became a stream and the voice kept on and suddenly there came out of the ground small spurts of smoke and the voice stopped and suddenly the desert was alive. No day had ever been that was like that night. The tower came alive and the desert came alive and for moments all that was on the desert was a great white all-enveloping and all-destroying and all-powerful light which blinded the desert and was like one million of the hottest suns that ever were; but then, it was gone and the desert saw again and it saw that where the tower had been and the light had been was now a great cloud that was a bruiting, rushing turmoil of colour It rose high into the night, which was still light, and took some of the desert with it. The light had blinded the desert and it trembled and erupted, and it was not until days had passed that the desert became still again. Days later it was hot. The sun poured its wrath down on the parched sands like an attack from the entrails of hell. Where the tower had been was a great 57