If you're going to cross with one of these caravans (or just pretend to cross) I must tell you one thing:
You've got to look out for lions!
From what you have learned in your geography about African lions, where would you say you were likely to come across them?[35]
[35] Have you read Roosevelt's "African Game Trails"? or his "Life Histories of African Game Animals"?
What do these caravans bring back from Central Africa? (What is produced in Central Africa that the civilized world wants?)
The ostrich is a most interesting citizen of the desert that I didn't have room to talk about. There's enough for a whole chapter in your notebook just about ostriches and their ways.
Among other things, I wish you'd find out for me if the ostrich really does bury its head in the sand and imagine that it is thereby hiding itself. (I'll warrant you it's only book ostriches that do this; not real ostriches.)
One of the most curious things about Mrs. Ostrich is how she and her neighbors work together. It's like an old-fashioned quilting bee, for all the world; although, to be sure, the ostriches don't make quilts—they make nests.[36]
[36] "Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts."
Speaking of ostrich nests naturally suggests eggs—and very big eggs, of course, including the roc's egg in the "Arabian Nights." They do have real rock's eggs in the desert, only this kind of a roc's egg is spelled with a "k." You just turn to the chapter on deserts in Hobb's "Face of the Earth," and you'll find not only that there are such eggs, but how the desert sun uses salt in cooking them and what the crystal people have to do with it; and how, like a cat in a hen-house, the desert winds suck these eggs, leaving only the hollow shell.