On a day in July, they started for Zuara at six o'clock in the morning; and the higher up they went the hotter it grew. The operators, returning to camp, refused to make the trip as the thermometer registered 60 centigrade at five hundred meters, stating a ghibli was raging at a higher altitude. Five hours later Tripoli and the whole desert country south, suddenly and without warning, became a blast furnace of heat and a place of dust and torture.
Those familiar with the hot winds which at times devastate the crops and make life miserable southwest of the one hundredth meridian in Oklahoma and Texas would consider them the cool breeze of a summer twilight in comparison with the ghibli or Sahara sandstorm.
Some writer tells that "a geologist has estimated that a single windstorm across the Sahara once carried nearly 2,000,000 tons of dust from Africa and deposited it over Italy, Austria, France and Germany."
At the end of four months spent in Tripolitania, John Cornwall's contract for a year's service with the Y expired and he asked for transportation to America. He made the trip across the sea from Tripoli to Syracuse, from Syracuse to Bologna by rail except across the strait of Messina, and then in a day or so to Genoa, where he took passage on the Giuseppe Verdi for America.
As he journeyed second-class, which was the way the Y men were sent home, his fellow-passengers were in the main Italians on their way to labor in the vineyards and orchards of California. While he spoke Italian, it was too laborious and incomplete for general conversation. He had much time to study the ways of the sea, and the infrequent ships they passed were cause for reflection.
He thought how trite from use and yet how true, truer than any of us even dream, is the comparison that life is a great sea and we who journey through, as ships, that at distant intervals dot the surface.
A ship at sea, as life to many, appears a lonely and desolate thing. How much room there is for ships, more ships, bigger ships, for great convoys of ships, yet ships as a rule travel alone and not in convoys.
What of the ships?
Just now, there is passing a corporation-owned oil tanker, greasy and uninteresting. Yesterday we passed several scheduled freighters, carrying fixed cargoes to fixed ports; the day before a passenger liner, sailing by the clock, in Naples or New York on Friday, pouring out its never-ending tide of those going and returning.
But let us not waste time or thought on commercial or mercenary craft. Here is not interest or adventure or much real return on the investment, unless your aim in life is to die merely a sea captain or a ship owner. Let us cruise where the currents are strong, where the rocks are dangerous: in the frozen North or in sight of coral island or low beach and palm trees, where there is an uncertainty of return in gold, but a wealth of interest and adventure and experience.