“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.