The desert is a fantasy.

The three horses sized me up from three feet away. I stood perfectly still.
Mason slid up to my side, boulders on both sides of us, greasewood and creosote up to our knees.

"They smell our water," he said softly

"They're big," I answered.

"You said you'd seen 'em in here before."

"Never this close."

Mason eased past me, and stared into the lead horse's eyes, stared right through the beast.

After awhile, the tan dusty mare snorted, turned and meandered away on unshod hooves. The others followed. They rambled out of sight, around the pile of boulders we were camped up against. We stood a long time, quietly staring where the horses had disappeared.

"If they want our water," Mason answered blandly, "they can pretty much come in here and take it."

I blinked.

"So, we're going to be mugged by wild horses?"

Mason didn't answer, studying the now empty landscape. Still staring, he stepped back into camp.

"Grab your bladder."

I got to my backpack and pulled the two-and-a-half gallon water bladder out, then turned to where Mason had crawled into the mouth of the Cave from Hell. I stood there for a second. He looked out from the jaws of the cave, one hand reaching out to me.

"Hello?" Mason asked. I looked back at him.

"I'd never have picked this spot if I'd known the Cave from Hell was here," I answered. Mason lowered his hand a bit and waited.

"From the Garden of Earthly Delights," I continued gamely. "The right side panel is Hell, and that's the cave from it."

Mason leaned back out of the stone cave and looked up the spiraling boulder. A single rock fifteen feet across, rising twenty, thirty feet, it hid its cave until you looked out of the campsite. Then it was suddenly there, its twisted mouth gaping at you. Wind and rain had eaten out the cave, big enough to hold two people comfortably, just above the ground. If not exactly like the craven cave in Bosch's Hell, it's the first thing that sprang to my mind. Mason turned back to me.

"The water please?"

I handed him the bladder and my spare canteen. Mason stuck them on a granite ledge in the back of the cave.

"Horses can't get in there."

"If they can, we're going home," I answered.

Mason pulled at his pack. He looked across the valley, at the long melancholy shadows stretching across the barren landscape. "Lights failing fast. Gotta eat."

"We ought to look at the map some more, too."

Mason sighed as he pulled out his little propane stove.

"That map is worthless, 'Cowboy."

I snapped my head up.

"How's that?"

Mason lit a match, a hollow blue flame burst on the stove. He looked at me like he'd looked at the horse.

"Because it says we can't do what you want to do."

Valley of the Moon, south of I-8, just before you plunge down into Imperial Valley County, sits right against the Mexican border. To the west is Smugglers Cave, the old marshal's cabin, the Elliot Mine, Blue Angel's Peak. Moon Valley is at about 3800 feet. Its name is apt. It looks like the surface of the moon. A wall of stone rises up straight and rugged, and defines the southern boundary, except for a break at the western end. There a fence of barbed wire wrapped around boulders and pieces of pinyon pine limbs and occasional weathered wood posts make up a fence. This is the Mexican/American border. The northern side of Moon Valley has its own wall of stone, no breaks. It tapers off as you head east. Inside the valley, there is a large sandy flat with stone monoliths shooting up like ragged teeth, from thirty to a hundred feet tall.

To the north and east of Moon Valley is Myer Valley. Due east is Pinto Canyon, no more than three miles away, at 1200 feet. A 2600-foot drop within half a mile, most of it less than that.

In Pinto Canyon, with multi-colored walls rising up two to four hundred feet on both sides that close in as they tower over you, there are, in fact, two sources of water. Year round water.

The upper spring was our goal. Once there, the plan was to set up camp and explore the area around the pools. After five days, we'd hike to the mouth of Pinto Canyon, where a friend had agreed to come fetch us.

The contour lines between Moon Valley and Pinto Canyon on the topo map compress tightly together. Intriguing little flats break up the contours a little, but are isolated islands of horizontal in the ever-descending wall between us and our goal.

There was no passage that we could see on the map.

My plan was simple. We'd find a way.

We ate a lousy meal of dehydrated dreck, washed it down with Gatorade.

"We want to get an early start," Mason offered, his face in stark shadows with the sun hanging on the western horizon, "Might as well hit the sack."

The sun set on Moon Valley, and the hard cold came. I pulled off my boots and crawled into my sleeping bag, pulled a cap with eye and mouth slits down over my face, put on gloves, pulled a space blanket over the whole thing. I might have well been naked on the sand. Cold seeped into my bag, my flesh, my bones. I'd never been so cold, before or since.

No Moon. I'd never seen the sky so clear, the multitude of stars a crystal blizzard. Time blurred.

Half asleep, something caught me eye. I thought we were alone in the valley, but apparently someone was camped behind us over by the border fence, building a bonfire. It shimmered off the towering stone wall to the north.

We could hear wild horses snorting, stumbling just outside our camp, restless, anxious.

"They probably like to bed down here," Mason said.

"We would pick here to camp," I answered thickly.

"You picked," Mason countered.

Despite the cold, mosquitoes started tormenting me. I could feel them land on my eyelids, the only exposed part of my flesh, and I'd swat them away, torturing my sleep.

The flames of the silent bonfire kept catching my eye. It never stopped, never seemed to run out of wood, playing eerily on ghostly crags and haunted shadows in the stone. Yet in the deepening silence, I never heard wood popping, or murmuring voices.

Then all hell broke loose. Where before restless horses milled around, now urgent snorts, otherworldly screeches rose up from the floor of the valley. Defiant, angry bellows, a chorus of protesting whinnies. Screaming, howling, satanic thunder rolled across the Valley of the Moon. A horrible battle was being waged in the cover of darkness.

Mason was up, knelt down with his flashlight in hand. I crouched beside him, but we waited, oblivious to the cold, as the crescendo of the struggle reached a fevered pitch. Dull thuds jarred the horrible bellows. In the moonless night we could only see occasional silhouettes on the star-washed horizon. Finally, we snapped on our lights.

Two stallions were up on their hind legs two hundred feet off, smashing away at each other with their front hooves, nostrils flared, wild manes flying, madness in their eyes. Mares circled the battle in some crazed ritual dance as the two giants struck, the dull sound of the blow coming a second later; merciless, brutal, hypnotic. The mares grew wilder with panic as they watched the stallions uncoil their deadly drama.

Our flashlights cut back and forth across the scene through the layer of dust that hugged the ground, kicked up by the giants. Savage eyes glowed fierce red when our light beams fell across them.

Suddenly, they became aware of us, non-members of the tribe. The circling stopped, the stallions backed off, and all of them slipped away, north and east.

Lights off. We crouched in silence. Mason's voice shivered as he whispered.

"If we went home right now, it would've all been worth it."

I nodded, and we both stared into the darkness, the cascade of stars filling everything above the horizon. I leaned toward Mason.

"Think our neighbors saw it?"

"Hm?"

The guys with the bonfire."

Mason stirred.

"What bonfire?"

Incredulously I looked back at him. Mason followed my motions, to the flickering light on the northern stone wall, to where the bonfire had to be to reflect so clearly, then his face swiveled back to me. I could not see his face, only something of his silhouette.

"There is no bonfire, Cowboy. We're all alone out here."

I snorted my protest, kicked my boots on and started west, picking my way around the Cave from Hell, stumbling over plants and shrubs, always looking south to see the bonfire. I'd gone twenty yards before I stopped and stared.

There was no bonfire, no other campers. I looked around me and saw the throbbing light on everything, on the northern wall of stone, on our own campsite, the monoliths beyond to the east, to Tahe' Peak where the Elliot Mine is. I spun around and everywhere I looked, pulsing blue light danced on the empty landscape.

Mason silently glided up.

"I thought there was a fire." I spun to the west. "Am I going crazy? There's light washing all over everything."

Mason stuck his hand into the jacket he'd pulled on.

"For pity's sake, 'Cowboy, that's the light from the stars."

(Part II and III appears at this site, with a version of Part III appearing at DesertUSA.com, Desert Sprite: http://www.desertusa.com/mag99/oct/stories/sprite.html