THE VALLEY OF FOSSIL WHALES
Triumph beamed from every corner of the boy’s face at dinner that
evening, as the professor, usually so subdued, fairly gloated with
delight over the finding of the Moeritherium skull. Together with the
paleo-mastodon skull, discovered only the day before by Antoine, the
principal object of the expedition was secured.
“I couldn’t tell exactly what beast it was,” said Perry, in the
course of the conversation, “because I couldn’t see that the skull
looked anything at all like an elephant’s.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” his uncle agreed.
“I couldn’t see how it was an ancestor, then. I don’t quite see, even
yet. An elephant has tusks and a trunk. This little Moeritherium
hasn’t either, so far as I can make out.”
“That’s because the animal is so far back in the line of
development,” the scientist reminded him. “He isn’t in a direct line,
but more like a first cousin of what the ancestral elephant must
have been, although we haven’t found any specimens of him yet. As
for the trunk—well, it’s true there isn’t any sign of that, the eyes
are too far forward. But the tusk question is interesting. Do you
know, Perry, which are the teeth that the elephant has developed into
tusks?”
The boy thought for a moment.
“No, Uncle George, I don’t,” he said. “Until this minute I never
stopped to think that an elephant’s tusks were teeth.”
“What did you think they were? Horns?”
“I—I hadn’t ever thought,” stammered Perry, confused. “I just thought
of them as tusks.”
“They are the incisors,” the scientist replied. “Now, in
Moeritherium, you can see that the second incisors are developed both
in the upper and lower jaws.”
He held out the skull to the boy.
“Yes,” Perry answered, “that’s easy enough to see.”
“Now in the skull of Paleo-mastodon, as I explained to you fully last
night, there were rudimentary first incisor teeth. You remember that?”
“Yes,” answered the boy.
“And the elephant hasn’t any first incisors at all.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Perry, “I’m beginning to get hold of the idea. The
Moeritherium shows how the tusks started.”
“In a way, though not directly. Moeritherium never developed tusks
from his teeth. Now you get Antoine, sometime, to show you the
details of the teeth of a typical mammal. You’ll find that there
ought to be forty-four. Although he had little tusks, Moeritherium
kept a fairly complete set of teeth, while Paleo-mastodon, in order
to get real solid tusks, was compelled to sacrifice all his incisors
but four. You’ll find that the important things in paleontology are
teeth and feet.”
“That’s what I always strike in books. Just why is that, Uncle
George?”
“Think a bit, and figure it out for yourself.”
Perry stared at the Moeritherium skull, and tried to picture the
development of life in primitive times, millions of years before the
first man walked the earth.
“I suppose,” he said, after quite a long pause, “it’s because the two
main things an animal had to do was to eat and to avoid being eaten.
Animals with weak teeth had to give place to animals with better
teeth when the food got harder to chew, and animals that were likely
to be eaten had to find ways of escape. The ones with poor feet were
caught and eaten, the swift ones got away.”
“You see the importance of slight differences in teeth, then?” the
scientist said. “Some of these days, when you think that the details
of an animal’s bones or teeth are dry learning, remember how here, on
the Libyan Desert, you saw for yourself the dawn of the elephant’s
tusk suggested in the slight extension of the second incisor of the
Moeritherium, or the beast of Lake Moeris.”
“And were his feet like elephants’ feet, too?”
“Yes, in a measure, but with one great difference.”
“What was that?”
“Moeritherium was a marsh animal, Paleo-mastodon was not.”
“How can we tell, Uncle George?”
“By the feet. Then, the later animal had a trunk and the former did
not.”
“How does that show up?”
“By the length of the legs and the neck. There is reason to think
that the legs of Moeritherium were fairly short and his neck long
enough to reach the ground, certainly long enough, when he was
standing in water, to enable him to eat marshy vegetation. There is
no sign of a long upper lip, like that of a tapir, nor a trunk like
that of an elephant. Now in Paleo-mastodon, his legs were longer and
his neck shorter. Therefore, even if we had no other signs, we could
be sure that he must have had a trunk.”
“Oh, I begin to see now,” said Perry. “If an elephant had a long
neck, he wouldn’t need a trunk. A trunk is a scheme used by a
long-legged and short-necked animal to get food to its mouth. But I
always thought a tapir was on the way to an elephant because of the
long upper lip.”
“And now you see that the upper lip of the tapir and the trunk of
the elephant are the result of the same principle operating on two
entirely different kinds of animals, for if you just looked once at
the feet of a tapir and at those of an elephant you’d never make the
mistake of supposing them to be even distantly related. The teeth are
different, too, everything’s different, except the lengthening of the
lip. It never occurred to you to think that an ostrich and a giraffe
were related because they both have long necks?”
“Of course not.”
“Or a hump-backed salmon and a camel because of the hump?”
Perry laughed.
“Then don’t get led astray by superficial resemblances. Remember the
importance of the feet as a means of telling on what kind of soil an
animal lived, and the teeth in telling what kind of food he ate, and
that will help you more in paleontology than anything I know. You’ll
trace some queer relationships by feet and teeth, Perry, between pig
and hippopotamus for example, and between goats and oxen.
“I suppose that every man thinks his own line is the best, but I
tell you, my boy, I’ve never found anything one-half so interesting
as the piecing together, bit by bit, bone by bone, of a life that
was lived a million years ago, on a world on which no human eye has
ever looked. Books of travel will give you pictures, Perry, of things
that there are in this world only a few hours’ or a few days’ journey
away, but the books of travel that you and I are reading, my boy,
will give pictures of scenes that no railway train can reach, and
will reveal oceans that no steamship or sailing craft can cross.”
That evening when they were sitting around the tent, vainly trying
to keep away the flies that buzzed perpetually around their heads,
Perry asked suddenly:
“Uncle George, how far back in geology did flies begin?”
“Carboniferous Period,” the professor answered. “We find their wings
in the seams of coal, but probably early forms lived long before
that. Those flies, however, belonged to the group that have an
imperfect metamorphosis, such as the dragon-flies and cockroaches.
Cockroaches, you know, Perry, are very ancient. But the house-fly,
the kind that seems to be annoying you, my boy, isn’t so very old,
certainly not much before the middle of the Age of Reptiles.”
“I wish their teeth or feet or something hadn’t developed properly,”
the boy replied savagely, swatting at one that persisted in trying to
settle on his nose. “Something ought to happen to make them die out.”
“Not much chance, I’m afraid,” the scientist responded wearily, “the
fly isn’t particularly likely to die out soon. He squats on a baking
rock in the equator and he perches on an ice-floe in the Arctic
Circle. There’s not an inhabited island—no matter how far from all
other land, that hasn’t got some kind of a fly on it. He’s been on
the job for fourteen million years, and there are over two hundred
thousand different species of fly still. I believe that when the last
man lies down for his last sleep on some summer evening, there will
be a fly buzzing around to settle on his nose.”
“One wouldn’t think there was much attraction to bring flies out to
this desert place,” put in Perry, “but they’re like a plague here
now.”
“Flies were one of the ten plagues of Egypt, weren’t they,” suggested
Antoine, “and I suppose they will plague Egypt to the end of time.”
“There are no mosquitoes here, at least,” Perry’s uncle reminded
him, “not unless you bring some up from Birket-el-Qurun. There are
plenty of them around the lake. But as long as the only water we get
is what is carried here in fantasses by the camels, we’re safe from
mosquitoes, because, as you know, those pesky little insects have got
to have stagnant water in which to breed.”
“I’d almost be willing to swap this swarm of flies for a few
mosquitoes,” declared the boy, waving his arms around him
frantically. “They’re in the sleeping-tent; they’re everywhere.”
“Well, my boy,” his uncle said, “if you’re planning to go with me
to Zeuglodon Valley to-morrow, you’d better cheat the flies and take
a good long sleep. You think your backbone—over which you made such
a howl—is sufficiently straightened up to tackle a long camel-back
ride?”
“It’s a little sore still, even after two weeks’ rest,” the boy
admitted honestly, “but I’d want to go if it were twice as sore.”
“No use reasoning with a lad when he’s set,” his uncle commented,
shrugging his shoulders. “All right, then, be ready early in the
morning.”
An hour after sunrise the party of three started off, Dr. Hunt,
Perry and the chief camel-driver, with two camels carrying water
and provisions. It was not until the party was well on its way that
Perry realized that this was no idle and easy jaunt. The best and the
fastest camels had been picked for the trip. Seventy-six miles had
to be covered, thirty-eight each way, and there was nothing remotely
resembling a trail.
By lunch-time the party had descended over the various benches and
declivities to the level of the lake of Birket-el-Qurun and the
noon-day halt was made near the western border of the lake. Rough
stony country with numerous sand dunes then confronted the party.
Traveling at forced speed, one of the camels dropped and had to be
sent back. This reduced the amount of water that could be carried on
the trip and made it necessary to put every one on short rations.
Somehow the very knowledge that the supply of water was scant seemed
to make Perry all the thirstier. His tongue got thick and seemed to
fill up the whole of his mouth. As the afternoon wore on, the torment
from thirst became so great that the lad actually forgot the pain
in his back, due to the racking, staggering gait of the camel. The
slightly cooler air of evening helped him a little, but his tongue
was far too swollen for him to be able to speak clearly when at last
camp was pitched for the night on a rock waste flecked with patches
of sand.
“How do you feel, Perry?” said his uncle.
“Bully!” answered the boy.
“Don’t want to take up camel-driving as a profession, eh?”
“Not quite, Uncle George,” was the response. “Still, this isn’t a
fair sample of a trip, is it? It’s harder than most caravan routes,
surely.”
“Not to a true son of the desert. Michawi, there, seems perfectly
content. So far as I’m concerned, I’m willing to admit that it’s
about all I care for and I think the natives were wise to name this
region what they did.”
“What is its name?”
“The Gar el Gehannem, or, as we should call it in the States, Hell
Butte.”
“Have we much more of it?”
“The worst is still ahead, Michawi says. But we’ll strike the valley
before noon.”
An hour’s travel the next day brought them to what was undoubtedly
“the worst of it.” The entrance to the valley was blocked with high,
sharp-ridged dunes, of a loose shifting sand. Even the camels with
their soft cushiony feet had much ado to keep from sinking deeply
into it, and as there was no possibility of getting them over with
the riders remaining in the saddle, Perry had to get off and lead his
beast over the ridges. Into the blistering sand he sank, even more
deeply than the camel. There was a light but hot wind blowing, and
as this breeze topped the crest, it blew what might almost be called
a thin spindrift of sun-heated sand into the faces of the travelers.
The effect was like that of putting one’s face on a heated emery
wheel. The camels didn’t like it, either, and said so, their harsh
bubbling roar being most rasping to the temper.
“Keeping up all right, lad?” his uncle asked him once, after they had
crossed a particularly vicious bit.
“Oh, sure, I’m all right,” Perry answered cheerily. “But I think they
hit it off when they named this place.”
At a few moments after eleven o’clock, the party topped the last of
the ridges and looked down into Zeuglodon Valley below.
Bones, bones everywhere.
Skull, ribs, and the backbones of the Zeuglodons or primitive whales
lay scattered on every side. Clear to the horizon, the gleam of white
here and there amid the sun-burned rocks and patches of sand, told
of the world’s greatest burying place of fossil whales. Ten thousand
monsters lay around them. A day’s search would have produced enough
skeletons to supply all the museums of all the countries in the world.
“The sea must have swarmed with Zeuglodons, Uncle George,” said
Perry, breaking silence when at last the sand-dunes were crossed and
they were in the famous valley itself.
“Apparently it did,” was the reply, “for Zeuglodons had a wide
distribution. Thousands of specimens have been found in our Southern
States, showing that, in those times, the Gulf of Mexico was a great
deal larger than it is to-day. So thickly scattered were these bones
on southern farms that foundations—for example like those of corn
cribs—have been made of the vertebræ of Zeuglodons.”
“They must have been whacking big,” said Perry, looking at the
section of a backbone that protruded above the ground. “Bigger than
anything we’ve got to-day.”
“No, not as big as whales,” the scientist corrected him. “Few
Zeuglodons were more than fifty feet long.”
“Still, fifty feet isn’t bad.”
“Fifty feet is a good length,” the professor agreed. “And Zeuglodon
was a queer-looking beast. It’s hard to realize that he could have
had so large a proportion of tail to so small a body and head. The
Zeuglodon’s head was only about four feet long, the body wasn’t over
ten, and it lugged forty feet of tail behind.”
“Regular sea-serpent,” commented the boy. “I don’t suppose the tail
was very big through?”
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
ZEUGLODON, THE PRIMITIVE WHALE.
The masters of the ocean in Eocene times, whose skeletons are found
in many parts of the world, America included.]
“Even the body was only about seven feet thick,” the scientist
replied. “With those sharp teeth,” he stopped and picked one from
the ground, “yoke-shaped, as you see; with powerful paddles like
those of a fur seal and with that tremendous tail, Zeuglodon must
have been able to get around pretty lively.”
“Mammal, of course?”
“Certainly.”
“How about its hind feet, then?” asked the boy. “I know the whales
have lost theirs; did their great-great-great-grandfather who left
his bones here have any hind legs?”
“He did,” said the scientist, “but they were rudimentary and he kept
them tucked away under his skin. Some skeletons show them plainly. In
the still earlier form, Prozeuglodon, these rudimentary forms are a
little more distinct.”
“Why do you suppose the Zeuglodons died out?” queried the lad.
“Hard to say,” his uncle replied; “possibly because they had too much
tail for the head. So big a tail needed a lot of feeding and so small
a head made it necessary for him to dine off small fish. He may have
dived deep for squid, the way whales do, but, even so, the Zeuglodons
seem to have been driven out by the fossil sharks.”
“Were they bigger than modern sharks?”
“They were,” answered his uncle dryly.
“One of these sharks, who has been christened the _Carchadodon
Megalodon_, or the great-toothed shark, may have been over a hundred
feet long, and certainly was not less than seventy-five, and his
teeth were three times as big and as long as the teeth of the biggest
man-eating shark in the seas to-day. They had a few score of these
teeth each.”
“I should think they would have made it hot for the Zeuglodons.”
“They probably did. Those shark teeth are found everywhere. They must
have made the seas a terror during Miocene times.”
“And then what happened?”
“Who knows? Probably, like the Kilkenny cats, after they had eaten
everything else in sight they started to eat each other up, and
either were eaten or perished for lack of food. At least it is sure
that after the Miocene sharks came on the scene the Zeuglodons
disappeared. And their greatest burying-ground is here.”
“I’ll take a bunch of their teeth home,” said Perry, filling his
pockets, “but what are you going to do about full-sized specimens,
Uncle George?”
“I shall not try to take any,” the scientist answered him. “This is
a difficult place from which to transport a large complete skeleton.
There is no need. The National Museum at Washington has a very
perfect example of Zeuglodon. We’ve already got a few score tons of
fossil material imbedded in plaster and strongly boxed for shipment
at the camp, and I hardly feel like bringing a caravan here to try
to transport an entire Zeuglodon away. I shall be satisfied to make
sure that there is not some species showing up above the ground,
heretofore unknown to science.”
For three long hours in the very midmost heat of the day, in that
broiling valley, the scientist and his young follower worked hard
examining the thousands of skeletons that littered the expanse, and
then Dr. Hunt gave the word to return. Perry was tired, the heat had
made him dizzy, and his back felt as if he had a sore on each and
every vertebra, but his pockets were full of Zeuglodon teeth, and he
gloated over the fact that he had been one of the very few people
in the world to visit the great Zeuglodon Valley where the bones of
ancestral whales lie buried, and he was well content. Exactly three
hours after the halt, the party started home for the camp.
Back they went over those sand dunes, with the camels slipping and
sprawling in every direction, back against the hot flying sand; back
with the perspiration oozing at every pore and the tongue so parched
that it licked up greedily such sweat as ran into the corners of the
mouth; back with the lungs aching and the breath coming in quick,
short gasps; back through the hot afternoon and until the great
globe of fire dipped below the horizon, and darkness and coolness
had come. On, then, still over the rough and stony approach to the
Gar el Gehannem, or Hell Butte, using a slightly different route,
until at last came camp, near the village of Qasr Qurun, where water,
indifferent but possible to drink, was to be had.
A score of village dogs barked as though each had a score of throats,
yowled in loud welcome, and bayed the whole night through. It
mattered little to Perry. He was tired to exhaustion, and lay asleep
completely happy, while in the pockets of the coat that lay beside
him in the tent, were a couple of dozen Zeuglodon teeth, that he had
brought from Zeuglodon Valley with his own hands.
The next day saw the party climbing homewards, up again to the
raised beaches far above the ancient lake, up past the level where
the Eosiren was found, up past the level of the ancient temple,
up the great cliffs which marked the ages during which the sea had
rolled over them, up to the levels of the ancient river deposits and
then over the long miles to where the peaked outline of the distant
tents held out the promise of a welcome. Yet it was the evening of
the third day before they reached it, fifty-eight hours since they
had left the camp, of which thirty hours had actually been spent on
camel-back.
“You’re a seasoned traveler now, Perry,” his uncle said, as the camel
sank to its knees and the boy clambered painfully out of the saddle,
“seventy-five miles in fifty-eight hours is quite a feat.”
“It was great,” said Perry, “and I wouldn’t have missed it for the
world. What’s a little ache in one’s bones compared to doing a stunt
like that!”
“After the work comes the fun,” put in Antoine. Then, turning to the
leader of the expedition, he continued:
“Dr. Hunt, Mahmud Abd-el-Baqui, one of the chief Arab Sheikhs, is in
the neighborhood. He sent a messenger this morning and when I told
him that you were expected home to-night, he said that he would
call. Mr. Wyr says that he is quite an important chieftain and that
we ought to receive him with some ceremony.”
“I feel more inclined for a rest than for ceremony,” the scientist
replied frankly, “but of course we’ll do whatever is the proper thing
on such occasions. Will you do me the favor of giving me your advice,
Mr. Wyr? I am quite uninformed as to the procedure in such matters in
Egypt.”
The Government Survey expert smiled.
“I jolly well knew you’d want me to look after such questions in your
absence,” he answered, “and I’ve made arrangements for a feast.”
“Do you suppose he will bring a party, then?”
“Rather!” the other answered. “Mahmud Abd-el-Baqui wouldn’t stir
without an armed escort. He’s a Bedouin, remember.”
“One of the chaps who rob caravans?” queried Perry excitedly.
“I haven’t a doubt in the world,” said the Englishman, smiling, “that
the very gentleman who is coming to see you has plundered many a
caravan in times past.”
“Then he’s a real robber chief!”
“I fancy he wouldn’t call it robbery,” was the reply. “I was
talking with one of the most noted Bedouins once, when we were on a
punitive expedition into the desert, and he said that the occasional
plundering of a caravan was just the same as the actions of civilized
nations in taking customs duties on all cargoes coming into their
ports. He jolly well took the ground that the Sahara belonged to the
wandering tribes and that they had a right to levy tribute.”
“There’s something in that idea,” admitted the boy. “Is that why the
chief never travels without an escort?”
“Not only that, but one Bedouin tribe is very often at war with the
other. See, Perry, here they come now!” He pointed with his finger.
“Wouldn’t you rather that they came in peace than in war?”
The boy looked over the wide ledge and there, sharply outlined
against the evening sky, was a small band of horsemen, all armed
with lances and dashing along at a speed which could be compared
to nothing but a charge. Long white cotton mantles covered the
Arab horsemen, each had a striped cloak made of camel’s hair cloth
floating behind him in the wind, and a yellow and black striped
handkerchief, folded somewhat turbanwise over their heads. The chief
was accompanied by two of his brothers and the whole party came on at
a full gallop.
It seemed as though they were going to charge straight through the
tents, and Perry prepared to jump. But he kept his eye on the Survey
expert, and seeing that Wyr remained motionless, the boy did not
stir. The Bedouins were within ten feet of the party when they halted
suddenly, so suddenly that the boy expected to see the fine-drawn
legs of the Arab horses snap under the sudden shock. Such magnificent
horses the boy had never seen.
With the Egyptian Survey expert as translator, greetings were
exchanged, and then the Sheikh called certain of his escort to come
up with a sheep and some turkeys, which were formally presented to
“El Mudir.” In return, the Arabs were invited to a banquet, which was
prolonged far into the night.
In the course of the conversation, El Mudir happened to speak in
terms of praise of the Arab horses, and the next morning, to the
surprise of every one in the camp, three were sent as a gift, with
the Sheikh’s compliments.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
CLIMBING TO THE FOSSILS.
Advance members of the Museum expedition arriving at one of the broad
“benches,” where three-million-year-old bones were found.]
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
FINDING A SEA-COW SKELETON.
A broad bench in the Fayum, Egypt, with a fossil exposed. The top of
the butte in the distance is the level of a later geologic period.]
“Antoine,” said Perry to his friend later in the day, for it was
one of the fortnightly camp holidays, “I’ve never been up on the
level of the desert. Let’s go!”
“Yes, yes,” his friend answered, and soon after breakfast the
600-foot climb began. As they climbed higher and higher, the whole
saucer-like depression of the Fayum spread before them, and the bed
of the old Lake Moeris could be clearly seen. Perry realized to the
full why this, of all places on the desert, should be the point for
fossil-finding, for six hundred feet of modern deposits lay above the
exposed strata in which the fossils lay. At last, the final bench
was surmounted, and Perry looked over the blackened pebbly waste. In
spite of his former experience, the trip over the dunes to Gar el
Gehannem had made him think that the heart of the desert might really
prove to be the mass of billowing sand familiar to him in pictures,
and he was again disappointed. In the far distance, however, a golden
light glinted across the wind-swept pebbled waste.
“Are there sand dunes over toward the horizon, Antoine?” he asked.
“Yes, yes,” was the reply. “That is a fearful place. How many miles
of sand dunes it is, no one knows.”
“You mean it has never yet been crossed?” cried the boy, with a
sudden hope that there might be a piece of exploration work that
sometime he might do.
“It has been crossed many times by caravans, but only from north to
south. There is an oasis at Kufra and camel trains reach there from
the north and from the hills to the south—from east to west, never.
No one has dared that journey.”
“But from here, Antoine; if a chap should try to go straight across
there from here?”
“Over the Libyan Desert?” The other shook his head. “Never! Most
of the Sahara is stone and rock, as here, but the Libyan Desert is
sand, sand like the pictures you see of the desert, dunes from fifty
to two hundred feet high, no water, no life, no vegetation. It is a
waste as large as France and Germany together, where not a blade of
grass grows, and where the only living things are creatures like the
jerboas that have learned to do with so little water that a really
good drink might kill them, and even they only live on the edges of
that desert. No, Perry, you cannot explore that place, there would be
no way to live.”
The boy looked longingly at the southwestern horizon.
“I’d awfully like to try,” he said.
A slight and very hot puff of wind reached them, and, shading his
eyes, Antoine looked anxiously at the distant dune hills. A thin curl
of dust was rising from them.
“The sand is blowing,” he said warningly; “we’ll go back.”
It was a false alarm, however, for the wind died down, and before
Antoine and Perry reached the camp again, the slight orange light
that had overspread the sky had died away. The boy’s uncle greeted
him with relief.
“Glad to have you back,” he said, “I thought we were going to have a
sand-storm, and that’s a thing it’s best not to be compelled to face.
We’ve escaped so far; I hope our luck holds.”
To himself Perry thought differently, he felt that he would not have
had a real taste of the desert unless he had a chance to see one of
the sand-storms of the Sahara, but, as the time drew near when the
expedition was scheduled to return, he almost lost hope.
The very week before the day set for leaving, Perry’s laborers
unearthed the skull of a second Arsinotherium, a young bull, that
must have stood nearly six feet at the shoulders, carrying four
horns, one pair a foot in diameter at the base and three feet long.
“Must have had some neck-muscles to carry those horns,” exclaimed
Perry, gloating over his find, and watching the long and difficult
job of packing the bones in plaster and huge wooden cases so that
they might be loaded on camels and so that they might withstand
transhipment across the sea.
“Not only to carry them, but to use them,” commented his uncle.
“Even Arsinotherium, big as he was, didn’t have everything his own
way. There were Creodonts, such as the Pterodon, to worry him. They
traveled in packs like jackals and the sharpest horns would be none
too sharp for defense against a pack of those.”
“Were they bigger than jackals, Uncle George?”
“Yes, a little. But of course the biggest of the Creodonts were not
as large as the great ‘sabre-tooth’ tigers of America and of Europe.
Those are not found in this ancient African fauna. But you’ll have
a chance to get acquainted with the sabre-tooths, Perry, when you
come to do fossil-work in the States. There’s no lack of fossil beds
there.”
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
THE FOUR-HORNED GIANTS AT BAY.
The rhinoceros-like Arsinotheres of Egypt in the Eocene Period,
attacked by a pack of hyena-like Pterodons.]
“I hate to leave here, Uncle George,” said the boy, looking around
him regretfully, “it’s all been so jolly and everything has seemed so
new. But,” he added, with the action of brushing insects away from
his eyes which had become habitual after the weeks spent on the edge
of the desert, “I admit I’ll be glad to get away from the flies.”
Two days later, the caravan was once more upon the move. Back again
over the trail to Tamia they went, passing by the ruined temple of
Qasr el Sagha, seeing the ruins of Dine in the distance; not far
from the place where Perry had found the Eosiren, and on through the
little village of Kom Mushim, a mere cluster of huts on the edge of
an ancient Egyptian city. Thence through fields of roses, from which
the famous attar of roses is made, the camels passed and on to the
headquarters of the expedition at Tamia, where an Arab entertainment
was given by the Mamour of the district in honor of the expedition.
Next day the homeward journey was begun. Up through the Fayum hollow,
again, the camels climbed and out on the desert beyond. Not skirting
the edge of the Nile this time, but striking boldly over the waste,
Michawi led the caravan, and the noon halt came in the open blaze of
the sun, the pyramids of Ghizeh showing faintly in the distance.
The party had hardly traveled more than an hour’s journey after
the halt, when a queer hot whiff of air reached Perry’s nostrils.
He remembered the smoking sands that he had seen from the crest of
the cliff above the camp, when looking over the Libyan desert, and
glanced over his shoulder. The camel drivers had noted it, too, but
there was no gain in urging the camels onwards, even if the animals
could have been persuaded, safety was too far away.
In front of them was a line of low sand-dunes, and before they
reached this, Michawi halted the caravan. The camels knelt down,
laid their necks along the ground and closed their nostrils with the
special protection Nature has given them. Every one dismounted, and
the Arabs threw themselves upon the stony ground, to leeward of their
camels, covering their faces with their garments.
“Lie down, Perry,” said his uncle, who was following the Arabs, “you
can’t stand up and defy a Sahara sand-storm that way!”
But the boy wanted to see all that there was to see, and stood
upright, facing the quarter from which the storm was coming.
Imperceptibly the wind seemed to grow hotter and still more hot, and
the fine particles of sand tingled against the lad’s face. The sky
slowly turned gray with a tint of orange-color, but as yet the breeze
was not strong. A moaning sound was in the air, very faint, like the
whine of the sea in a shell.
Then, without the slightest warning, with a screech the sand-storm
struck. Perry went down like a nine-pin and rolled over and over, as
a tumble weed rolls upon the prairies, until he fetched up against
one of the kneeling baggage camels. To the screech of the storm
overhead was added a deep vibrant tone from the sand-dunes ahead.
Perry remembered that Mr. Wyr had told him that in a sand-storm all
the dunes begin to move, and he knew the noise was caused by the
rapid action of the particles of sand grinding over each other.
The wind was terrifically hot. Sand was in the boy’s eyes, his
nose was so full of sand that he could not breathe through it, and
he scarcely dared to open his mouth for fear that he would choke.
Following the Arabs, he grabbed his linen pocket-handkerchief, and
breathed through the folds of it. In an instant he felt better. He
was breathing air that was not full of the particles of sand. But,
with his nostrils choked and with the air coming but slowly through
the linen, he felt that he would burst.
Once he took away the handkerchief to get a deep breath, but as
soon as he began to inhale, he stopped. The air felt as though it
were full of needles and pricked at his lungs like living fire.
Straightway he put the linen back, almost to suffocate again.
Then—silence.
The Arabs rose from the ground, the camels opened their nostrils, and
in the second it took for Perry to get on his feet again, the storm
was gone, gone so absolutely that there was not a trace of it on the
horizon. Only, in the distance, the peaks of the Pyramids of Ghizeh
which marked the end of the Egyptian expedition, glinted nearer than
before.