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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Cameron is a gold prospector who cannot forget the wife he hurt long ago, and he keeps seeing her face in the campfire. His friend Thorne, a soldier, falls in love with Mercedes, a girl running away from a bandit chief. Soon everyone is racing across the hot Arizona desert, past cactus and lava rocks, hunting for a lost gold mine. Zane Grey makes the desert feel alive, beautiful, and dangerous.
The novel is a chase built out of interlocking pursuits. Cameron, a prospector haunted by the wife he wronged, rides the Arizona border country; his friend George Thorne, a cavalry lieutenant, loves Mercedes, who is fleeing the rebel raider Rojas; and both threads are pulled through bandit country toward a lost gold mine.
Grey's real subject, though, is the desert itself. The Sonoran wastes are described with a poet's patience: waterholes, lava beds, cactus forests, and light that changes the moral weather of a scene. The themes are guilt and the wish for redemption, love tested by flight and pursuit, and a landscape so powerful it decides who lives and who dies.
Desert Gold lasts as a prime example of the Zane Grey Western at full stretch: published in 1913, when Grey was defining the form, it combines romance, pursuit, and landscape writing of real grandeur. Later Westerns on page and screen inherited its grammar, the lonely rider, the haunted past, the desert as judge. Read it for the chase, and stay for the sunsets, which Grey writes like scripture.
A haunted prospector named Cameron keeps seeing a woman's face in the campfire, the face of the wife he wronged and lost, and rides the Arizona border country trying to outrun it. Zane Grey published Desert Gold in 1913, and it packs his whole art into one long chase: a cavalry lieutenant, a Spanish girl fleeing the rebel raider Rojas, border bandits, revolution, and a lost gold mine. Grey writes the Sonoran desert like scripture.
This shelf keeps Desert Gold because it is Zane Grey in full command of the form he did more than anyone to create. Published in 1913, it weaves his signature elements into one long pursuit across the Arizona border country: Cameron, a prospector haunted by the face of the wife he wronged, appearing to him in the campfire; his friend George Thorne, a cavalry lieutenant in love with Mercedes, a Spanish girl fleeing the rebel raider Rojas; and, drawing every thread tight, the rumor of a lost gold mine. Expect the desert to outwrite the plot. Grey renders the Sonoran wastes, their waterholes, lava beds, cactus forests, and killing light, with a patience that turns landscape into the book's real protagonist, deciding who escapes, who repents, and who dies. Readers should know the novel carries the period attitudes of its day toward the peoples of the border. What lasts is the machinery and the atmosphere together: a chase that never quite releases its grip, a guilt that rides beside the hero, and sunsets written with the confidence of scripture. It earns its place as a prime specimen of the classic Western, the book to hand anyone who asks why Grey's name still commands a shelf.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 502.
The first chapter
Prologue
I.
Old Friends
II.
Mercedes Castaneda
III.
A Flight Into The Desert
IV.
Forlorn River
V.
A Desert Rose
VI.
The Yaqui
VII.
White Horses
VIII.
The Running of Blanco Sol
IX.
An Interrupted Siesta
X.
Rojas
XI.
Across Cactus and Lava
XII.
The Crater of Hell
XIII.
Changes at Forlorn River
XIV.
A Lost Son
XV.
Bound In The Desert
XVI.
Mountain Sheep
XVII.
The Whistle of a Horse
XVIII.
Reality Against Dreams
XIX.
The Secret of Forlorn River
XX.
Desert Gold
D E S E R T G O L D
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1913. Author died 1939. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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