With the Egyptian Survey expert as translator, greetings were exchanged, and then the Sheikh called certain of his escort to come up with a sheep and some turkeys, which were formally presented to “El Mudir.” In return, the Arabs were invited to a banquet, which was prolonged far into the night. In the course of the conversation, El Mudir happened to speak in terms of praise of the Arab horses, and the next morning, to the surprise of every one in the camp, three were sent as a gift, with the Sheikh’s compliments. [Illustration: _Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._ CLIMBING TO THE FOSSILS. Advance members of the Museum expedition arriving at one of the broad “benches,” where three-million-year-old bones were found.] [Illustration: _Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._ FINDING A SEA-COW SKELETON. A broad bench in the Fayum, Egypt, with a fossil exposed. The top of the butte in the distance is the level of a later geologic period.] “Antoine,” said Perry to his friend later in the day, for it was one of the fortnightly camp holidays, “I’ve never been up on the level of the desert. Let’s go!” “Yes, yes,” his friend answered, and soon after breakfast the 600-foot climb began. As they climbed higher and higher, the whole saucer-like depression of the Fayum spread before them, and the bed of the old Lake Moeris could be clearly seen. Perry realized to the full why this, of all places on the desert, should be the point for fossil-finding, for six hundred feet of modern deposits lay above the exposed strata in which the fossils lay. At last, the final bench was surmounted, and Perry looked over the blackened pebbly waste. In spite of his former experience, the trip over the dunes to Gar el Gehannem had made him think that the heart of the desert might really prove to be the mass of billowing sand familiar to him in pictures, and he was again disappointed. In the far distance, however, a golden light glinted across the wind-swept pebbled waste. “Are there sand dunes over toward the horizon, Antoine?” he asked. “Yes, yes,” was the reply. “That is a fearful place. How many miles of sand dunes it is, no one knows.” “You mean it has never yet been crossed?” cried the boy, with a sudden hope that there might be a piece of exploration work that sometime he might do. “It has been crossed many times by caravans, but only from north to south. There is an oasis at Kufra and camel trains reach there from the north and from the hills to the south—from east to west, never. No one has dared that journey.” “But from here, Antoine; if a chap should try to go straight across there from here?”