“Good,” said Perry emphatically; “that’s worth while. But, Antoine, why don’t the English modernize the entire business? Look at that chap over there, raising water with a shadouf. Instead of swinging that pole and that weight, just to bring up a small bucket full of water, he could put in a force-pump and get as much water in ten minutes as he can get now in half a day.”
“Perhaps,” said his friend. “But what would he do the rest of the day? Sleep in the shade? To save his time would only increase his idleness.”
“I don’t wonder that he sleeps,” said Perry, stretching himself. “I notice I want to sleep just as soon as the caravan stops.”
“That’s the strong sunlight on your eyes,” declared Antoine. “You’d better turn in now.”
“I guess I will,” the boy replied, and in a few minutes he had curled up on the rugs within his tent, looked up sleepily at the Arabic quotations from the Koran sewn in colored strips to the inside of the canvas walls, and, rightly judging these to be piously designed to bless his slumbers, he blinked twice and fell asleep.
The next day was very similar to the two that had preceded it. Another short day of five caravan hours brought them past the pyramids of Dashur to the excavations at Lisht where there was a large party at work securing old vases and objects of art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
There, next morning, with the old crumbling pyramid of Usertesen I in the distance, a half an hour was spent in securing a series of photographs of the entire caravan and then the party turned its face to the west and struck out across the desert. Loaded with heavy fantasses or steel tanks of water, the baggage camels brought up the rear, the line, strung out in the customary single file, reaching an eighth of a mile in length.
Now, Perry thought, for the great sand waste of the Sahara. He had expected billowing sands, like huge waves, vast hillocks and dunes. Yet he saw nothing of the sort. The ground over which they were traveling was not sand-color at all, but like a mosaic of brown and black, level and hard. The whole surface of this part of the desert was paved with small pebbles, quartzites, the boy afterwards found them to be, weather-worn and absolutely sunburnt by the terrific and pitiless blaze of the desert sun. It was very different footing from the level beaten road beside the Nile, which they had traveled for the past couple of days, but that seemed to make no difference to his camel, for it swung along at the same even two-and-a-half-mile-an-hour pace, as disregardful of the pebbles as it was of the twinges of pain that its every motion caused the boy.
The noon halt was made clear out on the desert, without a tree in sight. To the westward stretched the blackened and pebbly waste, far as the eye could see, to the east could be seen the outlines of the Lisht pyramids, small, but clear against the sky, and Perry knew that below them lay the valley of the Nile. The meal, of which dates formed a principal part, was washed down with tepid water from one of the fantasses, and already the boy found himself aching for a good glass of iced water in the American fashion. Ice-cream would have seemed like a fairy wish, and, indeed, it would take a fairy godmother or a genie from the Arabian Nights to materialize ice-cream on the Libyan Desert.
Suddenly Perry turned to his friend.