“I wonder what the matter with me is,” remarked Kyle, as he woke one morning and sat up in his tent. “I’m tingling all over.”

“Same here,” said Brick. “Little prickly feeling going over me, and this red hair of mine won’t lie down. Keeps standing up on end as though I were scared about something. I wonder what makes it.”

“Perhaps it’s just excitement,” conjectured Kyle, “Or maybe a little more sand than usual has got inside our clothes.”

“It isn’t that,” remarked Professor Bruce, who in passing the opening of their tent had overheard the conversation. “There’s an unusual amount of electricity in the air, as though something were brewing. Probably a storm of some kind is coming up.”

“I wish it were a rainstorm,” said Kyle.

“You said it!” observed Brick. “Gee, wouldn’t it be great to sit out on the sand and get soaked? Wouldn’t catch us putting up umbrellas.”

“We may have that experience before we get through,” replied the professor. “Sometimes there are rainstorms in the Sahara that are almost like cloudbursts. But I don’t think it’s that kind of storm that is threatening to-day. Alam thinks that more likely it will be a sandstorm, and that won’t be so pleasant.”

Traveling was difficult that day, for they found themselves in what had evidently been a region at one time rent by earthquakes. The ground was seamed with great fissures, some of them narrow and shallow, others deep and gaping.

The drivers of the cars had to exercise the greatest care and make so many semicircles and detours that Brick declared that before long they would meet themselves coming back.

The captain and Kyle were fortunate enough to escape the traps that nature had laid for them, but the professor was not so lucky. Shortly before the hour when they had planned to stop and pitch camp, there came a loud crash in the rear and a frenzied tooting of a horn.

“His car’s gone into one of the cracks!” exclaimed Kyle, as he shut off the power and applied the brakes.

The captain also halted abruptly, and the inmates of the first two cars rushed back to help their comrades. They found the professor and Abdullah making frantic efforts to jack up their car, one side of which lay at an acute angle in one of the cracks.

“Either of you hurt?” asked the captain, as he hurried up to them.

“No,” answered the professor. “But I don’t know how badly the car may be damaged. It sounded as though something smashed when it lurched in.”

“It’s the water tank!” shouted Kyle, in dismay, as he saw a stream pouring out over one side.

They hurried about and got all the receptacles they could find, but were able to save only a slight quantity of the precious fluid.

The loss would have been serious at any time, but was doubly so now, as the supplies in the others cars had already been exhausted and practically all their surplus had been in the third car.

“Bad business,” muttered the captain, his brow furrowed with anxiety.

They worked like beavers, and finally, by their united efforts, got the car out on level ground. Luckily, it was not badly damaged, sufficiently so, however, to detain them a considerable time while they made the necessary repairs.

And now for the first time the Americans learned what thirst in the desert really meant. What water was left in the container was barely sufficient to moisten their parched lips. They dared not drink it all and the very knowledge that they could not made their thirst more acute.

Everything depended on their getting quickly to the next water hole, about eighty miles away. If their cars should break down! They did not dare think of the fate that would await them then.

As soon as their repairs were completed they went on—on under that terrible, scorching sun. They did not dare stop, even in the hottest hours of the day. Their throats were parched, their tongues swollen. Water! Water! How they longed for it, as they kept on grimly, spurred by their terrible need and torturing apprehension.

Fifty—sixty—seventy miles were covered. Now they were nearing their goal. Hope began to revive. Five, six, seven more—and then, while Kyle was feverishly peering ahead for the coveted oasis, Brick touched his arm.

“Look at that yellow cloud out there,” he said, pointing toward the distant horizon.

Kyle looked and was appalled.

“See how it’s coming whirling toward us!” he exclaimed. “That means business. It looks like pictures I’ve seen of the beginning of a Kansas cyclone.”

A loud blast from the car in front showed that its occupants also were alive to the menace concealed in that twisting, lowering cloud. The captain slowed up, and in a moment the other cars stopped close behind him.

“Alam says that a sandstorm is coming,” explained the captain hurriedly. “We’ve got to hurry and park these cars together as a bulwark against it. Then we’ll lie down on the lee side of them with blankets over our faces to keep out the sand and wait for the storm to blow over.”

Under the direction of Alam and Abdullah, the cars were arranged in a line, their sides in the direction from which the storm was approaching. It was coming now with terrible rapidity.

None of the party was ignorant of the danger. More than once entire caravans had been covered by mounds of sand and had left only their bleached bones to tell of the tragedy.

First came an exceedingly hot wind, which made everyone feel, as all lay at full length in the shelter of the cars, as though a blast had come from the open door of a red-hot furnace. This carried with it innumerable particles of flying sand, scouts, as it were, coming before the real storm, as though to search out and mark the weak points of the prey to be attacked. The sand penetrated everywhere, finding every crevice, working its way even through the texture of the blankets like the points of so many needles. It was irritating, torturing in the extreme. But it was only a preliminary. The real storm was yet to come.

Then, suddenly, it was upon them, coming with a roar like thunder, blinding, smothering, overwhelming! It seemed as though a giant hand had reached into the sand of the desert and flung the handfuls in tons down on the tortured travelers.

All cowered in their blankets before the storm’s fury, so unlike what any of them except Alam and Abdullah had ever known before.

“Sounds like the howl of a wild beast, doesn’t it?” asked Kyle of Brick.

He had to shout at the top of his voice to make himself heard, but he did not mind this in his instinct for companionship.

“Sure does,” Brick shouted back. “But we can stand its howling if it doesn’t sink its teeth into us.”

There was a sound like that of ripping canvas.

“There go the curtains of the car,” surmised Brick dolefully. Then both boys fell silent, and each wrapped himself more closely in his own blanket.

For a brief time after this the cars acted as a bulwark against the worst fury of the storm. But only for a time. Before long the sand had heaped up against their sides in drifts many feet high. The cars themselves were invaded. The sand covered the wheels, the sides, and finally the tops of the machines. Then it reached over the tops and began to search out the crouching travelers, for all the world like a monster groping about with hot fingers for its victims.

They, in the meantime, were suffering intensely, not only with apprehension of their possible fate, but from keen physical pain.

For a period that seemed endless the torture continued. Kyle’s eyes were smarting with the sand that forced itself between his closed lids. His lips were cracked. His mouth was sore and his nose was bleeding. He felt as though he were smothering. The mound of sand that had formed above him seemed to be pressing the breath out of him. He had never endured such suffering.

He moved backward a little in the hope of dislodging some of the intolerable weight. As he did so, the ground beneath him suddenly gave way and he felt himself falling.

He made a desperate effort to save himself, but his hands were so tightly enfolded in the blanket that he could grasp nothing. Down he went, falling, falling!

[Chapter 12 Maze: Help Kyle Escape]