The professor was a man with a great deal of dignity and presence, but this was equaled by the gravity and poise of the leader of the laborers, Ibrahim Salim. When at last the agreement was made, the Arab drew a seal from the inner folds of his robe and signed a contract for his laborer gang with an air that suggested the signing of a treaty to decide the destinies of nations. With this added number of laborers, the work of excavation went more rapidly, and prizes began to appear. On the tenth day, in the pit which was supervised by the professor, an excellent skull of a young Arsinotherium was found, a curious creature with four horns, two of them huge, and which, as Perry was told, is a puzzle to paleontologists, for it was the lord of its age in Egypt and yet its ancestry is quite unknown. Four days later Antoine had the honor of unearthing the first skull of a paleo-mastodon discovered by the expedition. It was at the very close of the next day’s work that Perry, overseeing the work of the men in the pit to which he had been assigned, saw part of a skull exposed. He called away the workmen to another corner of the pit, for he knew that only two or three minutes of the working day remained. No sooner were they gone than he jumped into the pit himself and began to scoop away the sand with his hands. Gradually the particles of sand began to fall away, little by little the white gleam of bone became more and more apparent, and a skull, such as the boy had never seen in his life before, seemed to stare through its eyeholes at him out of the reddish sand and gravel that had been the sand bar of that ancient river millions of years before. What could the strange skull be? Only the day before, when Antoine had found the paleo-mastodon, Dr. Hunt had said: “If only we could find a Moeritherium, now!” Could this be the Moeritherium? Summoning to his help every scrap of his knowledge, Perry scanned the skull eagerly for something that would seem to remind him of an elephant. If only there had been tusks! But there were only two large cutting teeth. Still, no one yet in the expedition had found a skull like the one before him and his hopes for a Moeritherium would not down. “Uncle George!” he cried, “can you come here a minute?” The ring in his voice suggested a discovery, and the professor hurried over. In the evening light he cast a look at the protruding skull and leaped down in the pit to make sure. Then, suddenly, he cried: “It is a Moeritherium! By the powers, Perry, you’re the luck boy of this expedition!” CHAPTER VIII THE VALLEY OF FOSSIL WHALES Triumph beamed from every corner of the boy’s face at dinner that evening, as the professor, usually so subdued, fairly gloated with delight over the finding of the Moeritherium skull. Together with the paleo-mastodon skull, discovered only the day before by Antoine, the principal object of the expedition was secured.