Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 69: what you’re looking at

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

FORTY DAY ROAD 69 { had seen it marked on the map and asked about it, but no one knew very much. One of the Egyptians had volunteered that it was the ancient slave route from Africa, used by the big caravans in the old days, but not for the last hundred years. Like everything else, it appeared first in the mirage. At the edge of the yellow bowl in front of us dark jagged spikes hovered, some in line, like the ribs of a wrecked ship. They cleared to bones: low heaps of bones, so white that the sand between them seemed to take on a darker hue. Scattered at first, but closer and closer together as we came nearer the Road itself. Then we were on it. There was a strip of desert, an avenue as wide as a block, stretching out in each direction and flanked with the white bones to vanishing point: down the centre, clear in the hard ground, sometimes blotted out in drifting sand, but always reappearing farther on, was a row of parallel grooves. They were twenty feet apart and thirty to the row, as if someone had drawn a giant rake over the desert—on and on, until they became one line and then vanished. ‘They had been made by the shuffling feet of countless camels that had walked the Road. We turned north and followed it. When the grooves faded under the sand the way was still clear, for there was never a break in the white heaps that slid by on either side. The sun was low when we came up to the blockhouse. It was perched on a mound. Square, built of stone slabs, very old. ‘There were no doors or roof left. I wanted to camp there, but the Egyptians said, ‘“‘ No. Scorpions,” so we moved the trucks down to the hollow where the well had been before the sand had swallowed it up. That incident was typical. The Egyptians had stuck together like glue all through the party; they had been civil but unfriendly, and on anything except navigation had given the orders. I didn’t mind—I was thinking of the firm—but I could see it irked Hank more and more each day we had been travelling. I liked him, that bug doctor. He was young to have such a string of degrees after his name, and he’d a grand sense of humour on all subjects except this. By the time I had checked the trucks and plotted the next day’s course, the sun’s rim had bitten into the western horizon. This is the time when the desert is the most beautiful: when you can watch the shadows snake and flow, like purple water, into every ripple of the sand: when the arch of the sky shades clear through every tone of pink and lavender to the black night sliding up from the east. comiclooks.comn