Tom’s chin dropped on his breast, and ’stead of being mad, as I reckoned he’d be, to hear me scoff at his tale that way, he seemed to be only sad; and he says: “Some people can see, and some can’t—just as that man said. Let alone a camel, if a cyclone had gone by, _you_ duffers wouldn’t ’a’ noticed the track.” I don’t know what he meant by that, and he didn’t say; it was just one of his irrulevances, I reckon—he was full of them, sometimes, when he was in a close place and couldn’t see no other way out—but I didn’t mind. We’d spotted the soft place in that tale sharp enough, he couldn’t git away from that little fact. It graveled him like the nation, too, I reckon, much as he tried not to let on. CHAPTER VIII. THE DISAPPEARING LAKE We had an early breakfast in the morning, and set looking down on the desert, and the weather was ever so bammy and lovely, although we warn’t high up. You have to come down lower and lower after sundown in the desert, because it cools off so fast; and so, by the time it is getting toward dawn, you are skimming along only a little ways above the sand. We was watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground, and now and then gazing off across the desert to see if anything was stirring, and then down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden almost right under us we see a lot of men and camels laying scattered about, perfectly quiet, like they was asleep. We shut off the power, and backed up and stood over them, and then we see that they was all dead. It give us the cold shivers. And it made us hush down, too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We dropped down slow and stopped, and me and Tom clumb down and went among them. There was men, and women, and children. They was dried by the sun and dark and shriveled and leathery, like the pictures of mummies you see in books. And yet they looked just as human, you wouldn’t ’a’ believed it; just like they was asleep. Some of the people and animals was partly covered with sand, but most of them not, for the sand was thin there, and the bed was gravel and hard. Most of the clothes had rotted away; and when you took hold of a rag, it tore with a touch, like spiderweb. Tom reckoned they had been laying there for years. Some of the men had rusty guns by them, some had swords on and had shawl belts with long, silver-mounted pistols stuck in them. All the camels had their loads on yet, but the packs had busted or rotted and spilt the freight out on the ground. We didn’t reckon the swords was any good to the dead people any more, so we took one apiece, and some pistols. We took a small box, too, because it was so handsome and inlaid so fine; and then we wanted to bury the people; but there warn’t no way to do it that we could think of, and nothing to do it with but sand, and that would blow away again, of course.