the desert. Earth passed out
of sight and they were in a private world of much space and no
substance, as might have been before land and sea were formed. Far below
on the cloud-like surface of the fog a circular rainbow preceded them
and when the operators, thinking the camp near, descending, drew near
the fog, in the white center of the rainbow-circle, ghost-like, appeared
a perfect silhouette of their airplane.

Then through the fog, as cold as a winter mist, they came in sight of
earth; much too close for comfort, where a little dip or swerve might
land them in the palm tops, and the edge of the landing field a quarter
of a mile to the right, then up into the fog again and to a safe
landing.

On a day in July, they started for Zuara at six o'clock in the morning;
and the higher up they went the hotter it grew. The operators, returning
to camp, refused to make the trip as the thermometer registered 60
centigrade at five hundred meters, stating a ghibli was raging at a
higher altitude. Five hours later Tripoli and the whole desert country
south, suddenly and without warning, became a blast furnace of heat and
a place of dust and torture.

Those familiar with the hot winds which at times devastate the crops and
make life miserable southwest of the one hundredth meridian in Oklahoma
and Texas would consider them the cool breeze of a summer twilight in
comparison with the ghibli or Sahara sandstorm.

Some writer tells that "a geologist has estimated that a single
windstorm across the Sahara once carried nearly 2,000,000 tons of dust
from Africa and deposited it over Italy, Austria, France and Germany."

At the end of four months spent in Tripolitania, John Cornwall's
contract for a year's service with the Y expired and he asked for
transportation to America. He made the trip across the sea from Tripoli
to Syracuse, from Syracuse to Bologna by rail except across the strait
of Messina, and then in a day or so to Genoa, where he took passage on
the Giuseppe Verdi for America.

As he journeyed second-class, which was the way the Y men were sent
home, his fellow-passengers were in the main Italians on their way to
labor in the vineyards and orchards of California. While he spoke
Italian, it was too laborious and incomplete for general conversation.
He had much time to study the ways of the sea, and the infrequent ships
they passed were cause for reflection.

He thought how trite from use and yet how true, truer than a