ACROSS 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 Perry first
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 camel
rises 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.”
[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE LOAD.
ROARING AT THE WEIGHT.
RISING, STILL PROTESTING.
READY FOR DESERT MARCH.
_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 coming over in the _Mayflower_ gives 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. During the 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 which were 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 Battle of 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 come to 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 spent months 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
with his 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’t it, 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 and a 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 blaze of 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 get lost 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-brick houses, 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 different country 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. You often 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
the ledge 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 the camel, 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 he had 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 terrier
digging 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 exact bearing 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 and illumined 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.”