When she saw this, she displayed the most lively and childish interest about his rifle. Pointing to a great vulture in the sky, she signed him to shoot it.
While he was taking aim, she put her fingers into her ears; then, when she saw the bird drop headlong, she cried with wonder. He had raised her admiration in a new direction.
All through that night and the best part of the next day they raced. They only took three or four half-hours’ rest during this time, while they ate a few dates and drank a mouthful of water.
As for the leopards, they got nothing except a few small cakes during those short breathing spaces. Our heroes were forced to own that for swiftness and endurance the trained leopard beats both horse and dromedary for desert travel.
At midday the distant city and lake appeared on the horizon, and by four o’clock they had passed between the first of the palm trees, and left the desert behind.
Ned, Fred, and Clarence had by this time become somewhat used to their uncommon and ancient surroundings. The biblical and archaeological chariots, armour, costumes, and features had startled them when first seen. Now they were only driving toward, what they expected to find, a specimen page of prehistoric illustrations, preserved in the heart of that Africa from which those decayed nations had sprung.
Luxury and corruption caused the fall of Rome, Carthage, Greece, Assyria, Egypt, and the countless races that preceded these chronicled nations. When Melchizedek walked the earth, and Lot pleaded with the angels, mankind was old and worn out with self-indulgences. When Noah vainly preached to the sons of men, they had become dilettante, idle, cynical, and luxurious; refined in art, cruelty, and callous vice; enervated to the last degree, and barren of all impulse. This has always been and always must be the results of ultra-civilisation. The second step from utter barbarism which deals with conquest and cruelty, is but the beginning of the end of all nations, ancient and modern. The implacable order of nature is to grow and decline. Matter must change, although its constituents are immortal.
The road from the desert to the city was broad and straight. Fifty chariots could drive abreast through the centre, leaving the side paths for the pedestrians.
A double line of huge palm trees fringed this wide highway, and cast violet shadows on the side-walks. Between the trunks they could see rich and carefully irrigated fields of grain and vegetables—maize, rice, manioc, wheat, pulse, yams, and pine-apples, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic, with shady groves of sugar cane and bananas at the corners, and hedges all around of vines.
The glistening of water in the regularly cut canals and lotus-covered ponds, with the fringes of papyrus reeds and varied-tinted blossoms and flowers, made a delicious picture of rural prosperity and radiance. Regular symmetry and mathematical order were the predominant features of these fertile plains, with their straight canals and square ponds. Not a foot of soil was wasted nor left to run wild. It was all under cultivation, like a carefully tended garden.