Then, without the slightest warning, with a screech the sand-storm struck. Perry went down like a nine-pin and rolled over and over, as a tumble weed rolls upon the prairies, until he fetched up against one of the kneeling baggage camels. To the screech of the storm overhead was added a deep vibrant tone from the sand-dunes ahead. Perry remembered that Mr. Wyr had told him that in a sand-storm all the dunes begin to move, and he knew the noise was caused by the rapid action of the particles of sand grinding over each other. The wind was terrifically hot. Sand was in the boy’s eyes, his nose was so full of sand that he could not breathe through it, and he scarcely dared to open his mouth for fear that he would choke. Following the Arabs, he grabbed his linen pocket-handkerchief, and breathed through the folds of it. In an instant he felt better. He was breathing air that was not full of the particles of sand. But, with his nostrils choked and with the air coming but slowly through the linen, he felt that he would burst. Once he took away the handkerchief to get a deep breath, but as soon as he began to inhale, he stopped. The air felt as though it were full of needles and pricked at his lungs like living fire. Straightway he put the linen back, almost to suffocate again. Then—silence. The Arabs rose from the ground, the camels opened their nostrils, and in the second it took for Perry to get on his feet again, the storm was gone, gone so absolutely that there was not a trace of it on the horizon. Only, in the distance, the peaks of the Pyramids of Ghizeh which marked the end of the Egyptian expedition, glinted nearer than before. CHAPTER IX THE MARCH OF THE MASTODONS Almost two years to a day from the time that the sand-storm struck the caravan on its way home from Ghizeh, Mr. Hunt, the old merchant, looked up from his morning mail at the breakfast table and said to his son: “Perry, your Uncle George is back from Patagonia. He writes me from Washington that he has had a marvelous trip in a long search for a still-living specimen of the giant ground-sloth and that he will come out here to pay us a visit.” “When’s he coming, Father?” “In about two weeks, he says.” “My word! I wish I could get that Pteranodon mounted before he comes!” “Well, can you?” The boy thought for a moment. “I might be able to, at that. You know, Father, that Pteranodon of ours is going to be far and away the best Pteranodon in any museum in this country. The American Museum of Natural History in New York will envy us. I wondered, when you bought the specimen from that Kansas chap, that you didn’t send it to New York.” “I wanted to give our own little museum a start,” the old merchant replied, “and it seemed to me that if it had on exhibition at least one thing that was the best of its kind in the world, that exhibit would help its reputation more than anything I knew. I figure that the Pteranodon will put our local museum on the map.”