Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 68: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

63 CHRISTOPHER LANDON conscience that, given maps and a compass, experience and un- limited confidence, one stretch of desert is much the same as another, I said, ‘“‘ Yes—slightly,”” and found I had bought the leadership of an expedition to the oases of the Shebb group. It was partly a matter of. demonstrating our vehicles to the Egyptian Government, since there was a big contract in the ofing—and partly a matter of locusts. ‘There had been reports of big swarms in the Sudan; then they had disappeared to the north, but no one knew where. If the danger had turned west, it was the worry of Libya and then the French; if it was lurking, ready to descend on the Lower Nile and the Delta, the Egyptians must know. There was only one chain of living green spots in the blank space between. They had to find out if there was any sign of eating or egg-froth there, at Shebb, Safsaf, Bir Mirr, and the rest; also, they wanted to get that information for nothing. In view of the contract, it had been suggested that the firm should find the transport, and a navigator who was an expert—in fact, they had fallen back on me. There was nothing to the trip, though it was virtually unex- plored, unsurveyed country. We had two of the latest trucks and every possible bit of equipment to help. We—myself, two Egyptians from the Ministry, and an American bug doctor who had been lent as the bloodhound—moved for day after day over the great smooth sand-sheets, while the mirage stretched up and up all around the horizon until there was nothing left but a little circle of blinding blue sky straight overhead. The truck itself did not seem to move; it was stationary, float- ing in the centre of a yellow bowl, while the sand rushed by, soundless, beneath it. Once or twice we crossed other tracks of wheels, looking as fresh as if they had been made that morning, although we knew no one had been there for at least fifteen years. Nothing was real; we would float for ever in the middle of this bowl of unreality. Only the map-board on my knee and the needle of the compass pulled me back to the present. We found all those dots on the blank—I would not call them oases, for they were far from the idea of sheltering palms, grass, and cool clear water. They came to us as straight black rods dancing on the edge of the mirage, cleared to high cones of sand interlaced with dark dead tamarisk, one living plume blowing from the top in the wind. There was no egg-froth anywhere, no eaten foliage, not even a dead locust. Painstakingly, we went from one to the other, but they had not been there. They must have turned west, or back into the Sudan. The job was done and we started back for the Nile. It was then that we crossed the Forty Day Road. comiclooks.comn)