“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.”