“About forty miles, you know. That’s in the Fayum.” “What?” “Yes, yes, Perry, that is a mirage. You don’t see the village at all, you only see the reflection in the sky.” There was an instant’s pause, and then the boy said slowly: “Well, I can see, now, how any one would get lost on the desert in a hurry. I’d have started off to walk to that village without even stopping to think.” “There are a jolly lot of skeletons of people who have done that, and the jackals have picked them clean,” the survey man replied. “Take my tip, Perry, and don’t start for any oasis that you don’t see clearly marked on a map. I’ve been puzzled many a time by seeing to my right or left a village that I knew by compass to be straight ahead. So, I think, instead of trying to reach that village you see there in the sky, we’ll keep straight on and be content with reaching Tamia to-night.” The afternoon march was a long one, five caravan hours, and when at last the camels reached the village which is the last source of water for the Libyan desert, Perry’s back felt as if it were a jig-saw puzzle that had been wrongly pieced together. So much had been said about Tamia as a base of supplies, the expedition had manifestly counted so much for its success on the utilization of its resources, that Perry had expected it to be quite a sizable town. Instead of that, he found Tamia to be a settlement of low flat-roofed mud-brick houses, situated on the edge of a green plain, dotted with palm-trees, while on the other side it faced the desert. It was late when the caravan halted, but no sooner had it come to a standstill and the tents pitched than it became the center of a vast amount of attention. Perry had disposed of a very satisfactory supper and was busily engaged in trying to find some particularly soft part of a rug to sit on, when, with a great deal of pomp and ceremony, an old Arab rode up, with ten attendants, and paid his respects to the party with much palaver. “Who was that, Mr. Wyr?” asked the lad, when the camp had settled down. “That’s Sheikh Harun Talasun,” the survey expert answered; “he’s one of the really big men of the village.” “What was wrong? Are we going to be held up?” “Not a bit of it. No, he just came to welcome us and to say he was sending a fat sheep as a present, for a feast.” “We’d think it queer,” put in the professor, “if the mayor of one of our western cities should send a fat sheep for a feast because some ‘bone-diggers’ or bug-hunters happened to come in his neighborhood, wouldn’t we, Antoine?” “It would seem strange,” the Belgian agreed. “But it is common here.” “Don’t you suppose it’s all a bluff,” queried Perry, “one of these ‘everything of mine is yours’ sort of businesses?” “I don’t think so,” was the reply, “but the morning will show.”