Bill Barnes Air Adventurer, July 1935 — page 57: what you’re looking at

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

AIR ADVENTURER 55 As far as they could see ahead of them nothing could be seen but the bril- liant yellow sand of the desert, hot and sizzling, over which the air quivered and danced. Along the bed of the railroad, which Bill intended to follow as far as Atbara, the rails were inclosed on each side by fences and barriers to keep off the drift- ing sand. The desert sands stretched away in a dead level, covered with a desolate gray brush, like sage. Skele- tons of camels and an occasional gazelle were the only things that met their eyes, except the desert and the sky. Heat rolled in on them until they felt that they were about to smother. Then the fifth cataract of the Blue Nile flashed below and the desert -cities of Berber and Atbara. Now the shadows were beginning to lengthen and the sun lost some of its fierce directness. The winds from the Nile and the mountains of Abyssinia fanned their faces, cool and delicious, as Bill took his bearings and left the Nile and the railroad, to follow the Atbara River across the Sudan, and the corner of Eritrea, and the northern portion of ancient Ethiopia to Djibouti, in the Somali coast protectorate of France. They set the three planes down on the field at Djibouti with aching bodies and red-rimmed, burning eyes. A cool wimd off the Gulf of Aden revived them long enough to allow them to eat a hurried dinner and fall into their hotel beds ut- terly exhausted. Not even the heat of twelve degrees from the equator could keep them awake. “We don’t need any turret,” Sandy said. their legs now, and going faster every minute!” “They have their tails between GoOMmicdoo CO