2.
“You can call this fairyland, if you want,” Laura remarked, gazing around her; “I call it a nasty, damp, oozy spot.”
“It seemed very beautiful when we first came,” Lenora sighed, “but that was after the heat and glare of the desert. There does seem something a little unhealthy about it.”
“I’m just about fed up with Mongars,” Quest declared.
“We do nothing but lie about, and they won’t even let us fire a gun off.”
“Personally,” the Professor confessed, holding up a glass bottle in front of him from which a yellow beetle was making frantic efforts to escape, “I find this little patch of country unusually interesting. The specimen which I have here—I spare you the scientific name for him—belongs to a class of beetle which has for long eluded me.”
Laura regarded the specimen with disfavour.
“So far as I am concerned,” she observed, “I shouldn’t have cared if he’d eluded you a little longer. Don’t you dare let him out, Professor.”
“My dear young lady,” the Professor assured her, “the insect is perfectly secure. Through the cork, as you see, I have bored a couple of holes, hoping to keep him alive until we reach Port Said, when I can prepare him as a specimen.”
“Port Said!” Lenora murmured. “It sounds like heaven.”