Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/394

 "We cannot stop, we cannot descend," he said; "there is not a tree to be seen, not a mound; we are about to pass over the Sahara. Surely Heaven is against us."

He spoke thus with the energy of despair, when he perceived in the north the sands of the desert whirled up in the midst of a blinding dust, and gyrating under the influence of opposing currents.

In the midst of this whirlwind—scattered, and broken, and overturned—was a caravan, which was disappearing in this avalanche of sand; the camels, hurrying hither and thither, uttered lamentable sounds—the cries and shouts ascended from this suffocating sand-fog. Sometimes a striped garment would display its bright colors in the chaos, and the roaring of the tempest added to this scene of destruction.

The sand quickly fell into dense masses, and there, where but lately stretched a level plain, was now a mound, still moving, the immense tomb of the buried caravan.

The doctor and Kennedy turned pale at the sight, they could not manage the balloon, which turned round and round in the contrary currents, and would not obey the expansion or contraction of the gas.

Caught in these eddies of air the "Victoria" whirled about giddily, the car oscillated fearfully, the instruments suspended in the tent were shaken almost to pieces, the tubes of the serpentine bent as though they would break. The travelers were deafened, and they were obliged to hold tightly to the cordage to keep their positions during the fury of the storm. Kennedy, with hair disheveled, sat still, and did not speak a word. The doctor had resumed his old courage at the approach of danger, and no trace of his emotion was now apparent, not even when, after a last somersault, the "Victoria" suddenly was left in an unexpected calm, the wind from the north seized it and drove it back upon the course it had been taking since the morning, and at an equally rapid pace.

"Where are we going?" cried Kennedy.

"Where Providence wills, my dear Dick. I was wrong to doubt whatever happens is for the best, and we are now returning towards the places we never hoped to see again."

The ground so flat, so level, when they first passed over