Towards morning the sky appeared in all its warmth and light. The balloon rose, and after many failures it encountered a current less rapid than before, which carried it towards the northwest.
"We do not make much progress," said the doctor.
"If I do not mistake, we have accomplished the half of our journey in ten days, but at the rate we are now going it will take months to finish. That is so much the more to be regretted, as we are threatened with a scarcity of water."
"But we shall find some," replied Dick; "it is impossible that we should not fall in with some river, stream, or pond in this enormous stretch of country."
"I hope so, I'm sure."
"Don't you think it is Joe's baggage that keeps us back?"
Kennedy said this to tease the lad, and did so the more willingly that he had himself for a moment experienced the hallucinations of Joe; but not having let it appear, he assumed a stern countenance, laughing in his sleeve all the time.
Joe gave him a piteous look. But the doctor did not reply. He was thinking, not without secret terror, of the vast solitudes of the Sahara. Three weeks pass without the caravans meeting with a well where they can slake their thirst. So the travelers watched most anxiously for the least depressions of the ground. These precautions and the late incidents had had a sensible effect upon the spirits of all. They spoke less, and retired more into themselves.
The worthy Joe had not been the same man since his thoughts had plunged into the ocean of gold. He was silent, and thinking deeply about those stones heaped up in the car—to-day worthless, to-morrow, priceless.
The appearance of this part of the country was really alarming. The desert was opening up by degrees. Here were no villages, not even a collection of huts. Vegetation was gradually disappearing. A few stunted bushes as on Scotch moors, a whitish sand, flint stones, some mastic trees, and brushwood, that was all. In the midst of this sterility the primary formations of the world could be distinguished in the faces of the high and sharp-edged rocks.
These tokens of barrenness supplied Doctor Ferguson
