Perry, of course, could not understand a word, but, knowing the subject under discussion, he was able to follow a good deal of that long conference. It lasted for three hours under the black and starlit sky of Egypt, a battle between capital and labor, out in the naked desert, a day’s journey away from water. Inside the tent, reading by the light of one candle, the professor sat, in full view of the native bargainers, immovable. At last the men began to waver, and with a look of satisfaction as he turned to the members of the expedition, but which the contestants did not see, the Egyptian Government expert announced that the laborers had agreed to accept a contract of eight piastres a day, with the promise of a holiday once a fortnight at which there should be given a present of a fat-tailed sheep.
The professor was a man with a great deal of dignity and presence, but this was equaled by the gravity and poise of the leader of the laborers, Ibrahim Salim. When at last the agreement was made, the Arab drew a seal from the inner folds of his robe and signed a contract for his laborer gang with an air that suggested the signing of a treaty to decide the destinies of nations.
With this added number of laborers, the work of excavation went more rapidly, and prizes began to appear. On the tenth day, in the pit which was supervised by the professor, an excellent skull of a young Arsinotherium was found, a curious creature with four horns, two of them huge, and which, as Perry was told, is a puzzle to paleontologists, for it was the lord of its age in Egypt and yet its ancestry is quite unknown. Four days later Antoine had the honor of unearthing the first skull of a paleo-mastodon discovered by the expedition.
It was at the very close of the next day’s work that Perry, overseeing the work of the men in the pit to which he had been assigned, saw part of a skull exposed. He called away the workmen to another corner of the pit, for he knew that only two or three minutes of the working day remained. No sooner were they gone than he jumped into the pit himself and began to scoop away the sand with his hands.
Gradually the particles of sand began to fall away, little by little the white gleam of bone became more and more apparent, and a skull, such as the boy had never seen in his life before, seemed to stare through its eyeholes at him out of the reddish sand and gravel that had been the sand bar of that ancient river millions of years before.
What could the strange skull be?
Only the day before, when Antoine had found the paleo-mastodon, Dr. Hunt had said:
“If only we could find a Moeritherium, now!”
Could this be the Moeritherium?
Summoning to his help every scrap of his knowledge, Perry scanned the skull eagerly for something that would seem to remind him of an elephant. If only there had been tusks! But there were only two large cutting teeth. Still, no one yet in the expedition had found a skull like the one before him and his hopes for a Moeritherium would not down.