Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 5 (1925-05).djvu/63

254

Although less than five hundred miles as the crow flies, the trip as human beings must make it is a long and tiresome journey, and before it was finished Isabel had begun to feel almost lonesome for the strenuous and omnipresent personality of Henry Kopp, of whom she had seen nothing since leaving New York. It was with a curious reaction, however, that upon landing at the city of Tripoli the first familiar face that showed in the multi-colored throng at the docks was not Walter Frey's but Henry's ruddy and beaming physiognomy.

Henry was more than usually pleased with himself at having found her, and explained his presence there with great gusto.

"Got in communication with your aunt by wireless," he cheerfully announced, "and planned things just exactly right to be here a day or two ahead of you. Got a place for you to stay at an Englishman's home, which was no easy job, and an Italian army plane to take you down to the mountains.""

"Well, Henry, it's awfully good of you to fix things up for me this way, but don’t you suppose Walter made provisions for about everything? It's too bad to disappoint him, after all his months of work down in that awful desert."

"Well, I like that!" Henry's voice began to take on the proprietary air that had always irked Isabel more or less. "A wildcat explorer makes a date with my fiancée to go down in the middle of the Sahara desert with him, and if I take it on myself to provide some of the comforts of life, he might be disappointed!"

Whatever turn the discussion might have taken was prevented at this moment by the arrival of Walter Frey; and through the sweating, crowding, chanting throng of mixed black and brown people the three made their way together.

Of the two nights and a day spent in that black man's town making ready for the trip to the interior, the less said the better. Henry had, as he said, engaged an Italian airplane with which to make the trip to the valley of the wonderful rock, piloting the machine himself and intending, of course, that Isabel should accompany him. But when the three arrived at the sun-baked landing field, one look at the two specimens of aircraft was sufficient. The Caproni triplane Henry had hired would have drawn attention almost anywhere because of its size, but when compared to Walter's huge English machine it looked like a toy. Accustomed to frequent flights in the desert, Walter had further equipped the plane with innumerable safety devices and small conveniences, so that travel by that means was not only quite safe but more like a trip in a Pullman car than a fighting machine.

Henry was game enough to see the light and to abide by it. Certainly, he wanted Isabel to travel in the greatest possible comfort. But, just the same, having engaged the Caproni, he was coming along to have a look at that rock.

semi-desert plateau a few square miles in extent, down in the French Sudan, Walter turned his airplane for a landing, and Henry in his machine followed suit, both making the stop without mishap. It was late afternoon and, coming down from the comparative coolness of the upper air to the choking heat of Mother Earth, Henry and Isabel began to realize for the first time something of the terrors of work for a white man in such a country.

Walter led the way along the plateau and down a rocky trail into