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They reached the Arkansas river, but from thence to the Cimaron there is no road, except the numerous paths of the buffaloes, which, intersecting the prairie, very often deceive the travellers. When the caravan entered this desert the earth was entirely dry, and, the pioneers mistaking their road, wandered during several days exposed to all the horrors of a febrile thirst, under a burning sun.
As with the Tsavo, the banks of the Sabaki are lined with trees of various kinds, affording most welcome shade from the heat of the sun: and skirting the river is a caravan road from the interior still used, I believe, for smuggling slaves and ivory to the coast, where dhows are in readiness to convey them to Persia or Arabia.
Then he fell to brooding upon his fate, while the night followed the day and the day the night, and still the dreary, groaning caravan dragged on, resting only during the heated hours.
But, suddenly, Caravan raised himself up, with his thin hair in disorder, and, looking very ugly in his grief, said: "But are you sure, doctor? Are you quite sure?" The doctor stooped over the body, and, handling it with professional dexterity, as a shopkeeper might do, when showing off his goods, he said: "See, my dear friend, look at her eye."
At every fair they visited she looked with eager eyes for the 'Royal Show of Dwarfs'; but they seemed to have taken a different circuit from that of the theatre party, for fair after fair went by without Rosalie's wish being gratified. But at length one afternoon, the last afternoon of the fair, Toby came running to the caravan with an eager face.
Mortimer saluted him. Rising from the steps of the caravan, he rubbed a hand down his trouser-leg and extended it. "Permit me to grasp, sir, the horny palm of self-improvement. A scholar in humble life! and as your delicacy in this small matter of the saucepan sufficiently attests one of Nature's gentlemen to boot! I prophesy that you will go far, Mr. Bossom. May I inquire what books you thumb?"
Shortly after this event another caravan was fallen in with and attacked by the savages, who carried off with them thirty-five scalps, two hundred and fifty mules, and goods to the amount of thirty thousand dollars.
How Ahmara had run shrieking to the village, and the men, still in madness, had stolen the camels and gone off into the desert; not the murderers only, but their friends who saw that it was well to disappear, that it might never be known who were the men that saw Richard Stanton die. Two months and more ago, when the caravan left Touggourt, there were over a hundred men who marched with it.
Once they came into the open, Royson counted on the superior shooting of his six sailors all marksmen of the Royal Navy to turn the scale unmistakably in his favor, while his Arabs had the confidence of knowing that each mile they gained in the retreat brought them nearer the powerful caravan in the rear. The scheme was excellent in every way.
In order to pass, therefore, we ourselves had to turn out and drive three quarters of a mile, or possibly a mile, through the deep soft snow on one side of the beaten track. This so exasperated our driver that he would give every horse and every sleeping teamster in the whole caravan a slashing cut with his long rawhide whip, shouting, in almost untranslatable Russian, "Wake up!"
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