CHAPTER VIACROSS THE DESERT ON CAMEL-BACK
The sun was high before Mad Quinward awoke, Perry staying beside him faithfully. The news of the great picture had spread, and when the artist roused himself, he found himself the center of a crowd. Many people pressed forward with congratulations, but the painter seemed dazed and silent. The boy urged him to come to the hotel for breakfast, an invitation warmly seconded by Dr. Hunt, for the professor, as fully as any one, had realized the wonder of that canvas, painted in an ecstasy during the first flush of an Egyptian sunrise.
But Quinward, never again to be called “Mad” Quinward, strapped up his little easel, took the canvas—which had been blank for twenty years, and now had blossomed into so marvelous a work, and with a word here and there, turned to the lebbek-bordered road and trudged back to Cairo. Though less than a day had elapsed since Perryfirst met him, the boy had a pang of loneliness when he saw the artist go.
“You’d better get a nap,” said the professor to Perry, when Quinward’s figure had disappeared along the sun-lit road. “We’ll be going soon.”
The boy shook himself into reality.
“What time do we start?” he asked.
“At ten-thirty,” was the reply, “so that you can get a bite of breakfast and forty winks, at least.”
The scientist had little sympathy with what he considered the lad’s foolishness in staying up all night with Quinward, but he knew that nothing would be gained by saying so, and, besides, he realized that this persistence on the lad’s part was a sign of character. To Perry, the whole night had been too wonderful even to talk about, and he tumbled into a sleep so profound that when his uncle wakened him, an hour and a half later, it took the lad a minute or two to decide whether he was in old Egypt or in the new.
Rubbing his eyes, and yawning, for he was still fearfully tired, as much from the reaction as the fatigue, he walked over to the window, to look out over the Pyramids. There, immediately in front of the hotel, was a caravan of fourteen camels,and among the drivers, directing operations, was Arnold Wyr.
“Oh!” cried Perry, “is that our caravan?” His uncle nodded.
“Say!” ejaculated Perry, and splashed cold water on his face, “we’re really off!”
“Just waiting for you,” the leader of the expedition responded. “I gave you the chance to sleep right to the very last minute.”
The rest of Perry’s dressing operations resembled a motion picture film run at full speed, and in little more than a minute he was in full kit and a-tiptoe with eagerness to be away. He took the stairs two at a stride, far too excited to wait for the elevator, much to the amusement of the residents of the hotel, enervated by the Egyptian climate.
“Oh, Mr. Wyr,” he cried, as he dashed out, “which is my camel?”
The Englishman turned to the head camel driver.
“Which is the wickedest, Michawi?” he said in English, for the boy’s benefit, and then translated into Arabic.
Michawi smiled, showing his strong white teeth, and said, in his broken English:
“The camel with a hurt on his neck, he is a bad one. He fights.”
He pointed to one of the camels which had a small wound on the side of his neck.
Perry would not have backed down for the world, but he had not bargained for this.
“All right, I’m game,” he answered.
His uncle laughed.
“Never mind, Perry,” he said, “that happens to be Mr. Wyr’s own beast. We’ll give you something easier for a beginning. This is yours here.”
“Do I get on him now?”
“I only hope you won’t be more anxious to get off than you are to get on,” was the answer. “Yes, you can mount now, if you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” the boy responded, and, as directed, clambered into the saddle, putting his feet on the cross-bar, and awaited the word to proceed. Michawi gave a shout, and the boy felt the great hump sway beneath him, giving him a queer feeling of insecurity.
“Look out as he gets up!” warned his uncle.
Not knowing what to expect, Perry curled his toes under the cross-bar, getting a grip as though a camel were a bucking horse. This was nearly his downfall, for Perry did not know that a camelrises on his hind-legs first. As the beast rose, it pitched the saddle at such an angle that the lad felt sure he was about to be thrown over the animal’s back. He had just time to uncurl his legs and put a foot on the cross-step to brace himself, when, after a distinct pause, the camel gave a muscular jerk and came up on its fore-legs also, and the boy settled back into his seat. The beast stood still for a moment, and then began to move.
“Is—is this camel double-jointed, Uncle George?” asked Perry, the words being jolted out of his mouth, as he ranged up beside the professor, who meanwhile had mounted his animal nonchalantly.
“I don’t suppose so,” was the answer. “Why?”
“The way he walks,” replied the boy. “It feels as though his nigh and his off sides had become unhitched, somehow.”
The leader of the expedition laughed at the description, although realizing that it did give an idea of the loose, racking gait of the camel.
“They all walk like that,” he said. “You get used to it, after a time.”
“It’s sure queer,” said Perry, “but it’s rather fun.”
WAITING FOR THE LOAD. (upper left)ROARING AT THE WEIGHT. (upper right)RISING, STILL PROTESTING. (lower left)READY FOR DESERT MARCH. (lower right)Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.A Camel Being Loaded With Half-Ton Fossil Cases.
WAITING FOR THE LOAD. (upper left)ROARING AT THE WEIGHT. (upper right)RISING, STILL PROTESTING. (lower left)READY FOR DESERT MARCH. (lower right)Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.A Camel Being Loaded With Half-Ton Fossil Cases.
WAITING FOR THE LOAD. (upper left)ROARING AT THE WEIGHT. (upper right)RISING, STILL PROTESTING. (lower left)READY FOR DESERT MARCH. (lower right)
WAITING FOR THE LOAD. (upper left)
ROARING AT THE WEIGHT. (upper right)
RISING, STILL PROTESTING. (lower left)
READY FOR DESERT MARCH. (lower right)
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
A Camel Being Loaded With Half-Ton Fossil Cases.
“Tell me, after the halt, if you think it’s as much fun,” the scientist warned him.
For the next half-hour the lad was silent, watching the caravan tune up to start. At last the long line was ready, Michawi took the lead, the soft-padded feet of the camel shuffled on the beaten road to the south, along the western bank of the Nile, and the trip toward the desert was begun.
In single file, there was little chance for speech, and Perry’s desire for questioning grew gradually less as the camel swung into that long, slouching walk, which at the never-changing pace of two and a half miles an hour, eats up the desert miles. So absolutely regular is this pace that distances on the desert are measured by caravan hours, and the average day’s journey is six caravan hours or fifteen miles. Racing camels, however, which are an Arabian breed, specially bred for speed, have been known to carry a traveler as much as a hundred miles a day, but these are seldom used in caravans.
Perry had not been in the camel-saddle more than about half-an-hour before he began to feel as though he were sea-sick. He choked down the feeling, but it made him miserable and unhappy. His back, too, was beginning to hurt from the motion,and when, after what seemed an age, the caravan halted for lunch, it was a stiff and weary lad who stepped off gladly from his camel when the beast knelt down.
“How are you feeling?” asked his uncle.
“I’m stiff,” confessed the boy; “that sideways wiggle seems to catch me in the small of the back.”
“It catches me, too,” the professor said, comfortingly, “and almost every one else in just the same way.”
“Doesn’t one ever get used to it?”
“The Arabs do, and people who travel in a camel-saddle a great deal. But one caravan trip won’t toughen you, my boy, and you needn’t expect it. Camels are not ideal beasts for riding, but they are so highly specialized for desert work that nothing can take their place.”
“I should think,” said Perry thoughtfully, “they could be useful on the alkali plains of our Southwest.”
“Especially since camels originated there,” said the professor.
“Camels did? In America? You’re joking, Uncle George!”
“Certainly they did. The camel is an American citizen.” The scientist smiled. “If comingover in theMayflowergives the right to be considered one of the old American families, how about the camel? We’ve found his ancestors in the Uinta formation in Utah. What period is the Uinta, Perry?”
“Upper Eocene,” the boy answered promptly.
“Right,” the professor answered. “And about how long ago?”
“Two million years, according to that scale you gave me on shipboard.”
“Well, about two million years ago, there were four different families of camelids in America which were destined to develop. The earliest of them seems to have been a small creature called Protylopus, about a foot high.”
“Weren’t there any of them in Africa or Asia?”
“None have been found. No, so far as we know, the camel family is pure American. All through the Eocene they remained quite tiny creatures, no bigger than a cat. They grew a little larger during the next period, the Oligocene, becoming about the size of a sheep-dog, but of course they were much more slenderly built. It was in the age after that, however, Perry, that the ancestors of the camels spread all over America. Duringthe first part of the Miocene, vast herds of long-necked camels, known as Alticamelus, or the giraffe-camel, roamed over the western plains, and their bones are found by thousands in the Miocene deposits of Colorado.”
“Why giraffe-camels, Uncle George?” asked Perry. “A camel hasn’t anything to do with a giraffe, has it?”
“Not a thing,” was the reply, “although the giraffe’s scientific name, Camelopardalis, seems to give color to the idea. No, Perry, in certain ways a giraffe is an intermediate between a deer and an antelope. Don’t forget that a giraffe always has horns, although they are only small bony growths which correspond to the bony core of a deer’s horns, and the giraffe’s male ancestors had long horns, as in deer. But the giraffe-camel of the American Miocene was just plain camel, or rather, he was on the road to cameldom. He was called a giraffe-camel because he had a long thin neck like a giraffe. He carried it straight, too, so far as we can determine, not in that bended loop effect of the modern camel.”
“What happened to them?”
“One branch turned into the llamas, which are now the beasts of burden in the Andes, and whichwere used by the Incas of Peru for the same purposes that we use horses. The llamas used to be in Colorado, too, and we have found their bones, fossilized. The other branch of the camelids crossed by the Behring Sea bridge, and developed into the modern camel in Asia, naturally reaching Africa in the latter part of that period before the coming of the European Ice Age.”
“But what happened to our American giraffe-camels?”
“They died out. In the late Pliocene Period they were all gone from the East and only browsed on the vegetation of California and the plateaus of the Southwest. Then the cold of the Ice Age struck North America and the North Pole ice covered half the United States. The giraffe-camels were not rugged enough for this, and as but one baby camel was born a year, they could not live.
“The llamas had found their way to South America, over which the ice-sheet did not creep; the true camels had found their way to tropical Asia and Africa. These species survived those thousands of years of terrible cold by hugging the equator and so passed on into modern life, hardy and secure, while their North American ancestors, the giraffe-camels, failed in the Battleof Life. So, you see, Perry, although we always think of the camel as a foreign animal, he really is an emigrant from our own United States.”
“We ought to get him back, then,” said Perry. “Why couldn’t we?”
“It was tried,” replied the professor, “during the California gold-rush of ’49. Some camels were imported for the purpose of carrying supplies to the army posts in the arid regions, but for some reason or other, they never flourished. I suppose the herd was not large enough to keep the animals from inbreeding. So the camels were turned loose.”
“Are there any still left?”
“I doubt if there are any, now. Once in a long while, there is a report of a camel having been seen in Arizona. But the Indians killed most of them during the first twenty years after they were set free, and mountain lions disposed of the remainder. After all, Perry, a camel is an inoffensive ruminant, depending only on his speed for escape from any powerful carnivore. He is protected in the desert, for no heavy creature, such as tigers, live there, and hyenas and jackals eat dead flesh. But a mountain lion would easily kill him in a fight, and a camel would have to cometo the wooded country for food and water. I don’t think camels will ever be plentiful in America again. The broncho and burro need fear no rival.”
“So far as that goes,” rejoined Perry, wincing as he rose up at the signal that the caravan was about to move on again, “I’d sooner try to sit the worst bucking horse that ever was foaled than have my back twisted like a double-back-action corkscrew by this queer-jointed beast.”
Past thirteen pyramids the caravan trod, following the ancient road beside the Nile, sometimes on the summit, looking over the broad cultivated region where the Nile had overflowed and left its deposit of fertilizing mud; at other times over the edges of the cotton fields themselves, always at that one unswerving rate of two and a half miles an hour.
Perry sat frontwards, then sideways, then put his whole weight on the cross-piece, then wriggled around to some other pose. But it made very little difference. No matter what position he assumed, that corkscrew-like racking walk from side to side nipped the base of his spine. Toward the end of the day, he got off and walked. His uncle did the same, but the Englishman, who had spentmonths at a time in a camel-saddle, seemed quite content. The road was firm at this place, lying in the valley of the Nile at the base of the sandstone terraces, peppered with graves, where for six thousand years Egypt has buried her dead, high above possible flooding from the waters of the Nile. The sandstone was laid down when the southern part of Africa was an island and all the Sahara desert was the bed of a great sea.
After five caravan hours of travel, the long line of camels halted near Sakkara, not far from the ancient step-pyramid. Though the day was still young, Perry was stiff and sore from riding, and tired from missing his sleep the night before. None the less, under Antoine’s suggestion, he walked two miles to the ruins of the ancient city of Memphis, the capital of Egypt in the dawn of history. Wonderful and impressive as were the old temple of Ptah and the colossi, it was with readiness that Perry turned his steps homewards to the caravan, and when he reached his tent he fell asleep without even realizing the fact that this was his first night on a caravan halt.
It was almost a different lad, however, who jumped up briskly when the call to wake the camp was made at sunrise. He was out and busy withhis camera half an hour before breakfast was ready, and when he sat down, his appetite whetted by the open air, he tucked away a meal that made a serious inroad on the provisions.
“You’ll have to go easier on the grub than that when we get out on the desert,” his uncle warned him jokingly, “or we’ll have to build a railroad as we go to keep you in supplies.”
Perry grinned appreciatively.
“I wish I could eat enough at one sitting to make me so fat that I wouldn’t feel the camel,” he said, “but as I can’t, I suppose I’d better quit now.” He winced as he got up from his cross-legged position on the floor. “I just feel like one big bruise.”
“Cheer up,” said Antoine, “you’ll feel worse to-night.”
The caravan started past Sakkara, following the same general character of road as the day before. To the left, lay the Nile, flowing between the cultivated fields, and beyond, the high, bare, rocky escarpment of the eastern plain; to the right, frowned the sandstone bluffs, from the top of which to the westward stretched the interminable leagues of desert.
“That’s really the plan of all Egypt, isn’tit, Antoine?” asked Perry, at the evening halt, pointing across the cultivated stretch. “Desert on either side, and that two-mile strip between. I hadn’t ever thought of Egypt merely as a single narrow strip of land, at least, not as narrow as that.”
“That is just what it is,” Antoine replied. “Except for the delta and Lower Egypt, for the Fayum, where we are going, and for the oases in the desert, that narrow valley is all. Yet Egypt has played a great part in the world.”
“I don’t see that it does now,” declared Perry, with American opportunism. “It’s all tombs. We’ve seen the tombs of Ptah-hotep, Ti, Mera, and a whole lot of others to-day and yesterday. Those chaps seem to have done big things. They sent out armies all over the map. They built huge temples and pyramids. I don’t see that modern Egypt is doing anything at all. What’s the matter?”
“Nations die out, like people,” said Antoine. “There is no longer any Egypt. It is England, and England only, that lives in the present, here. Yet, Perry, you must not forget that the great dam at Assouan, which was built less than ten years ago, is a much bigger work than the Pyramids anda million times more useful. Egypt now grows two crops instead of one, doubling the wealth of the entire country.”
“Good,” said Perry emphatically; “that’s worth while. But, Antoine, why don’t the English modernize the entire business? Look at that chap over there, raising water with a shadouf. Instead of swinging that pole and that weight, just to bring up a small bucket full of water, he could put in a force-pump and get as much water in ten minutes as he can get now in half a day.”
“Perhaps,” said his friend. “But what would he do the rest of the day? Sleep in the shade? To save his time would only increase his idleness.”
“I don’t wonder that he sleeps,” said Perry, stretching himself. “I notice I want to sleep just as soon as the caravan stops.”
“That’s the strong sunlight on your eyes,” declared Antoine. “You’d better turn in now.”
“I guess I will,” the boy replied, and in a few minutes he had curled up on the rugs within his tent, looked up sleepily at the Arabic quotations from the Koran sewn in colored strips to the inside of the canvas walls, and, rightly judging these to be piously designed to bless his slumbers, he blinked twice and fell asleep.
The next day was very similar to the two that had preceded it. Another short day of five caravan hours brought them past the pyramids of Dashur to the excavations at Lisht where there was a large party at work securing old vases and objects of art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
There, next morning, with the old crumbling pyramid of Usertesen I in the distance, a half an hour was spent in securing a series of photographs of the entire caravan and then the party turned its face to the west and struck out across the desert. Loaded with heavy fantasses or steel tanks of water, the baggage camels brought up the rear, the line, strung out in the customary single file, reaching an eighth of a mile in length.
Now, Perry thought, for the great sand waste of the Sahara. He had expected billowing sands, like huge waves, vast hillocks and dunes. Yet he saw nothing of the sort. The ground over which they were traveling was not sand-color at all, but like a mosaic of brown and black, level and hard. The whole surface of this part of the desert was paved with small pebbles, quartzites, the boy afterwards found them to be, weather-worn and absolutely sunburnt by the terrific and pitiless blazeof the desert sun. It was very different footing from the level beaten road beside the Nile, which they had traveled for the past couple of days, but that seemed to make no difference to his camel, for it swung along at the same even two-and-a-half-mile-an-hour pace, as disregardful of the pebbles as it was of the twinges of pain that its every motion caused the boy.
The noon halt was made clear out on the desert, without a tree in sight. To the westward stretched the blackened and pebbly waste, far as the eye could see, to the east could be seen the outlines of the Lisht pyramids, small, but clear against the sky, and Perry knew that below them lay the valley of the Nile. The meal, of which dates formed a principal part, was washed down with tepid water from one of the fantasses, and already the boy found himself aching for a good glass of iced water in the American fashion. Ice-cream would have seemed like a fairy wish, and, indeed, it would take a fairy godmother or a genie from the Arabian Nights to materialize ice-cream on the Libyan Desert.
Suddenly Perry turned to his friend.
“Antoine,” he said, “what’s the idea of camping here?”
His friend sleepily turned over on one elbow.
“Why shouldn’t we camp here?”
“I should have thought,” Perry retorted, “that it would be better to camp near water.”
“Yes, yes, but we are near water. Tamia is only ten miles away.”
“There’s water not half a mile away,” declared the boy. “What’s the use of fooling that way?”
“How do you know there is?” queried Antoine, still failing to betray any real interest.
“I can see it!”
“How far away?”
“Less than half a mile, I should say.”
“Mr. Wyr,” called Antoine, “how far away is that village that the lad sees?”
“To the southwest, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“About forty miles, you know. That’s in the Fayum.”
“What?”
“Yes, yes, Perry, that is a mirage. You don’t see the village at all, you only see the reflection in the sky.”
There was an instant’s pause, and then the boy said slowly:
“Well, I can see, now, how any one would getlost on the desert in a hurry. I’d have started off to walk to that village without even stopping to think.”
“There are a jolly lot of skeletons of people who have done that, and the jackals have picked them clean,” the survey man replied. “Take my tip, Perry, and don’t start for any oasis that you don’t see clearly marked on a map. I’ve been puzzled many a time by seeing to my right or left a village that I knew by compass to be straight ahead. So, I think, instead of trying to reach that village you see there in the sky, we’ll keep straight on and be content with reaching Tamia to-night.”
The afternoon march was a long one, five caravan hours, and when at last the camels reached the village which is the last source of water for the Libyan desert, Perry’s back felt as if it were a jig-saw puzzle that had been wrongly pieced together.
So much had been said about Tamia as a base of supplies, the expedition had manifestly counted so much for its success on the utilization of its resources, that Perry had expected it to be quite a sizable town. Instead of that, he found Tamia to be a settlement of low flat-roofed mud-brickhouses, situated on the edge of a green plain, dotted with palm-trees, while on the other side it faced the desert.
It was late when the caravan halted, but no sooner had it come to a standstill and the tents pitched than it became the center of a vast amount of attention. Perry had disposed of a very satisfactory supper and was busily engaged in trying to find some particularly soft part of a rug to sit on, when, with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, an old Arab rode up, with ten attendants, and paid his respects to the party with much palaver.
“Who was that, Mr. Wyr?” asked the lad, when the camp had settled down.
“That’s Sheikh Harun Talasun,” the survey expert answered; “he’s one of the really big men of the village.”
“What was wrong? Are we going to be held up?”
“Not a bit of it. No, he just came to welcome us and to say he was sending a fat sheep as a present, for a feast.”
“We’d think it queer,” put in the professor, “if the mayor of one of our western cities should send a fat sheep for a feast because some ‘bone-diggers’or bug-hunters happened to come in his neighborhood, wouldn’t we, Antoine?”
“It would seem strange,” the Belgian agreed. “But it is common here.”
“Don’t you suppose it’s all a bluff,” queried Perry, “one of these ‘everything of mine is yours’ sort of businesses?”
“I don’t think so,” was the reply, “but the morning will show.”
Next morning, sure enough, the Sheikh returned with a donkey, led by a slave, and bearing on its back a fine fat sheep. Suitable greetings were exchanged and, a couple of hours after sunrise, the caravan was off. Tamia was left behind, the last point of civilization was broken with, and during the rest of the stay in the desert only a constantly moving line of camels could keep the expedition in water and supplies.
“It’s like the commissariat of an army,” said Perry, when he realized this; “if our line of communication was cut, we’d be starved out.”
“Yes, yes,” Antoine agreed, “it is a serious matter to be out of reach of water, but we can depend on Mr. Wyr; he knows all that is necessary to do in Egypt.”
The march out from Tamia was over very differentcountry than the road over the small stretch of the Libyan desert passed on the westward march from Lisht the day before. It was low and shingly, with little scattered tufts of vegetation; and seemed to be part of a huge saucer-like depression.
“Is this the Fayum?” asked Perry.
“This is the very site of Lake Moeris,” the professor answered, “an artificial lake made by Amenemhat III. It used to be quite a famous resort in Greco-Roman times, Perry, and almost anywhere around you might find Roman coins if the Roman boys used to play pitch-and-toss, as Juvenal and some of their writers say the urchins did.”
“Right here?”
“Right on this very spot.”
“But where has the lake gone?”
“Dried up,” was the answer. “A great deal more land is irrigated in the Fayum than used to be the case, so that the water from the old canal of Joseph, the Bahr Yusuf, has more work and less overflow. That canal, by the way, Perry, was made so long ago that even tradition has forgotten about it, and it was supposed to be a natural river until recently.”
“Who do you suppose made it, Uncle George, was it Joseph?”
“It must be much older than the Joseph you mean, the Joseph of the Bible,” his uncle replied. “It may be almost as old as the Pyramids. Lake Moeris has shrunk to that lake you see in the distance, the Birket-el-Qurun. We’re going to camp on the other side of it to-night.”
“But I thought there was no water in the desert!” cried Perry, feeling in some way that the trip would not have to be as heroic in endurance as he expected.
“You’re welcome to all of that water you can drink,” was the reply. “Even a thirsty camel won’t drink it, not on the northern side, at least. And what a thirsty camel won’t drink must be mighty bad water, you can make quite sure of that.”
“Does anything drink it?”
“Some of the wild life of the desert comes down,” was the reply. “I’ve seen gazelle, quite often, the little Dorcas Gazelle, especially. That’s a tiny beast, Perry, not more than three feet high and usually even smaller.”
“With horns?”
“Pretty lyre-shaped horns a foot long. Youoften see them around the western end of Birket-el-Qurun, and occasionally at this end.
“I’d like a head for a trophy!”
“Can you reach your rifle easily? If you can, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get a gazelle if you have a chance. I’m not much of a believer in mere shooting for the sake of shooting, but I don’t go to extremes, and a gazelle more or less won’t make much difference to the desert fauna. There is such a thing as sport. What I hate is the kind of so-called sportsman who takes a delight in seeing how many he can ‘bag.’”
“I can get at my rifle in a second, Uncle George,” said the boy eagerly, “but we’re not going near the shore of the lake, are we?”
“Not so very close,” the professor replied. “The road keeps well to the east.”
“Could Antoine and I break away from the trail, on the chance of getting a shot?”
“I’ll see,” his uncle replied, and called Michawi. With Wyr as interpreter a few minutes of animated conversation occurred and then the scientist said:
“Very well, Perry, as long as you promise not to go along the shore to the south at all, I don’t see that you can get lost. We’ll be on theledge above, and probably can see you, any way.”
“Bully!” cried the lad, and went to get his gun.
Branching away from the main caravan, Perry and Antoine turned their camels’ heads away from the upward slope out of the valley of the Fayum and turned westwards towards the lake. They scared up a large pale-colored Egyptian hare, but with his uncle’s warning against unnecessary slaughter, the lad did not shoot it. He asked just one question:
“I suppose we have a specimen of that rabbit in the museum, Antoine, haven’t we?”
“Oh, yes, yes, quite common,” said the other, and the hare was allowed to jump away unmolested. A little desert fox, or fennec, which had been lurking near by, evidently with designs upon the hare, also was frightened by the approach of the camels and darted away in a different direction. But Perry was after gazelle and nothing else would serve.
At last, towards the end of the afternoon, when already they had reached the reedy edge of the Birket-el-Qurun, Perry heard a low whistle from Antoine, and saw a small object streaking like the wind along the shore. He jumped off thecamel, without waiting for it to kneel, nearly falling on his nose as he did so, and though the gazelle was going so fast that it seemed foolish to try, raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired.
“By jiminy, I hit him,” cried the lad, as he saw the little creature roll over and over in the sand.
He ran up to it. The shot had been well placed and the gazelle had died without pain and without a struggle.
“Yes, yes, good shooting,” said Antoine, as he came up. “Good horns, too.”
There was regret as well as triumph in the boy’s glance as he looked down at the graceful, slender creature, which a moment before had been full of life. But he was no sentimentalist and recognized the difference between shooting for a definite purpose and wanton slaughter.
Short though the digression had been, it had led Antoine and Perry a little distance from their course, and had taken up time. Perry’s camel, too, had gone on walking without his rider and had to be overtaken and turned. The ground skirting the edge of the lake, was rougher, and the sun was sinking toward the horizon.
“We’d better hurry,” said Antoine, after hehad helped Perry to secure the little gazelle on the camel saddle beside him, “I don’t know this country well enough to travel in the dark.”
“But it doesn’t really get dark,” said the boy, remembering his night before the Sphinx with the artist, “one could almost read by the stars here, they’re so bright.”
“You think so,” was the other’s reply. “But I’ve tried finding desert trails before. How about it, Perry; are you feeling all right?”
“Fine,” answered the boy, “if my back didn’t hurt so. You know, Antoine, when I fired, the kick of the rifle made me think I’d got the bullet in my own spine, it gave such a jolt.”
“You’ve only got one more day’s riding,” his friend assured him, as he walked over to his kneeling camel, “and on the way home you’ll be toughened up a bit.”
Passing from the northern border of the lake, the camels started to climb. Then it was that Perry realized that no matter how good a camel may be on sandy level, or for that matter on undulating sand dunes, a really sharp slope, such as the first hundred foot pitch from the lake level up to a ledge on which stood the ruins of an old temple was more than his beast could manage.Following Antoine’s example, he slipped out of his seat, none too sorry to get a change, and, taking the camel’s rope, led the animal up the slope. It took an hour’s scrambling, and Perry was almost breathless when they reached the first of the ledges.
“Stiffish pull,” he remarked, as Antoine halted beside him.
“Yes, yes,” the other answered. “But I think that one is the worst.”
The light was falling in long slanting shadows over the ledge and Perry, kicking idly at a white object in the sand with his feet, saw that it was a bone. More in curiosity than with any other idea, he scooped the sand from around the bone with his foot.
“Some poor camel foundered after the climb—” he began, then stopped suddenly.
“Antoine,” he said, with a curious note in his voice, “hasn’t a camel got sharp teeth on the lower jaw?”
“You would think they were sharp if they nipped you,” was the answer. “Why?”
For answer Perry dropped down on the sand and began scooping away the sand from around the bone he had uncovered as if he were a terrierdigging for a rat. Antoine watched him with growing interest.
“What have you got there?” he queried.
“I don’t know,” replied the boy, stuttering in excitement, “it looks like the skull of a seal!”
“Whatever it is, I’m ready to wager that it isn’t a seal,” said Antoine, but hurrying over, none the less. “If you thought for a minute, Perry, you’d see that it couldn’t be a seal. It’s more likely—”
He had reached the lad and looked down. He gave a long, low whistle.
“Let’s get it out!” cried the boy and reached down to grab the bones.
His hands were just closing on them when Antoine’s grip caught him by the shoulder and hurled him backwards.
“What the—” began the boy.
But Antoine paid no heed. His head was down in the hole that the boy had made, and he was blowing the sand away with his breath as though the bone were made of feathers. Then he looked up.
“I think it’s an Eosiren,” he said. “If it is, Perry, it’s a bully find.”
“Let’s take it to camp!”
“How?” queried the other. “Pick it up the way you were going to?”
“Why not?”
“You haven’t learned the first thing about fossil-collecting yet,” the other replied. “In the first place, before a bone is moved, it must be studied just in the position in which it lies. Quite often the position of the bones may be of tremendous help in restoration. For example, Perry, the legs of the great fossil swimming bird Hesperornis were supposed for years to be attached to the skeleton in a way that we now know to have been entirely different. And, for another thing, you can’t tell just how fragile fossilized bones may be. You might smash them all to pieces, just by picking them up the way you started to do.”
“That’s why you collared me,” exclaimed Perry, “I was wondering.”
“Of course. Now hurry, Perry, and gather a lot of stones. We’ve got to make a heap so that we can easily find the place again, and get Dr. Hunt to come down to-morrow. I’ll take the bearings.”
Pulling from his pocket a note-book and pencil, Antoine noted with extreme care the exactbearing of as many different points as he could. Meantime Perry, first alone, and afterwards with Antoine’s aid, built up a small heap of pebbles, on the top of which they spread a white handkerchief, weighting this down by a stone at each corner. It was nearly dark when they were finished, and Perry clambered back into his camel-saddle eagerly.
Along the ledge they traveled, not knowing just where the rest of the caravan might be, and, as time went on, Antoine began to look a little troubled.
“How do you hurry up a camel?” Perry shouted to his companion.
“You don’t,” was the reply. “A camel can’t be taught to hurry. He’ll walk and carry a load. That’s about all.”
Perry clucked to his beast, reached over and slapped it on the hump, and did everything he could to suggest speed. He might as well have tried to influence the desert sand, the camel went walking steadily along, not changing its double-jointed walk by a hair’s-breadth.
Just as the sun was disappearing on the edge of the horizon, one of its last rays caught andillumined a spot of color on the ledge just a little above them.
“No chance of getting lost now,” called Perry, cheerily, “there’s the Stars and Stripes.”