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.
CHAPTER IX
THE MARCH OF THE MASTODONS
Almost two years to a day from the time that the sand-storm struck the caravan on its way home from Ghizeh, Mr. Hunt, the old merchant, looked up from his morning mail at the breakfast table and said to his son:
“Perry, your Uncle George is back from Patagonia. He writes me from Washington that he has had a marvelous trip in a long search for a still-living specimen of the giant ground-sloth and that he will come out here to pay us a visit.”
“When’s he coming, Father?”
“In about two weeks, he says.”
“My word! I wish I could get that Pteranodon mounted before he comes!”