“I’ve already made a start,” answered Kazim. “I sent my personal brigade to round up, shoot, and bury any victims of contamination sickness.”

“You’d slaughter your own people?” Massarde’s voice was ironic.

“I’m only doing my patriotic duty to stamp out a national plague,” replied Kazim with more than a hint of indifference.

“Your methods are a bit extreme.” A worried crease appeared in Massarde’s face. “I caution you, Zateb, do not provoke an uproar. If the world accidentally discovers what we truly do here, an international tribunal will hang us both.”

“Not without evidence or witnesses, they won’t.”

“What about those freakish devils who massacred the tourists at Asselar? Did you make them disappear too?”

Kazim gave a callous smile. “No, they killed and ate themselves. But there are other villages suffering the same maladies. Should Dr. Hopper and his party become overly annoying, perhaps I can see they witness a massacre firsthand.”

Massarde didn’t need an illustrated explanation. He’d read Kazim’s secret report of the slaughter at Asselar. His mind easily pictured disease-crazed nomads literally swallowing up the UN investigators as they had the tourist safari.

“A most efficient means of eliminating a threat,” he said to Kazim. “It saves the expense of a burial party.”

“I agree.”

“But if one or two of them should survive and attempt to return to Cairo?”

Kazim shrugged, the thin bloodless lips under the moustache parted in an evil smile. “Regardless of how they die, their bones will never leave the desert.”

<<9>>

Ten thousand years ago the sand-dry wadis of the Republic of Mali ran full to their banks with water while the barren flatlands were blanketed with forests filled with hundreds of varieties of plant life. The fertile plains and mountains were home to early man long before he rose out of the stone age and became a pastoral herdsman. For the next seven thousand years vast tribes hunted antelopes, elephants, and buffaloes as they herded their long-horned cattle from one grazing ground to another.

In time, overgrazing along with the decreasing rains caused the Sahara to dry out and become the barren desert it is today, ever expanding, ever creeping into the lusher, more tropical lands of the African continent. The great tribes gradually abandoned the region, leaving behind a desolate and nearly waterless area to the few nomadic bands who have lingered on.

By discovering the incredible endurance of the camel, the Romans were the first to conquer the desert wastes, utilizing the beast to carry slaves, gold, ivory, and many thousands of wild animals for shipment to the bloody arenas of Rome. For eight centuries their caravans plodded across the nothingness from the Mediterranean to the banks of the Niger. And when the glory of Rome faded, it was the camel that opened the Sahara frontier to the invading, light-skinned Berbers, who were followed by the Arabs and the Moors.