The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt by William Nothdurft

Author:William Nothdurft [Nothdurft, William]
Format: epub
ISBN: 1588361179
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-08-12T22:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

SAND, WIND, AND TIME

The radio message came from Ken Lacovara, who was high on the slope of Gebel el Dist: “Listen, you guys, it looks like there’s a sandstorm coming up from the south; better batten things down!”

A few minutes later the storm arrived. It began with an almost imperceptible shift in the normal direction of the wind in the oasis, swinging around to the south from the usual northwest. Then it rose. And as it rose, dust clouds swirled around the paleontologists working on the desert floor. Within only a few minutes the wind was gusting higher and lifting ever larger particles off the desert pavement. Sand devils snaked across the ground, twisting and curling like live things. The colors of the oasis floor, never particularly rich to begin with, gradually turned a nearly uniform light tan, the color of flying bits of quartz. The distant features of the landscape, including the cliffs of the oasis escarpment, softened as if wreathed in smoke, then vanished altogether.

At the foot of Gebel el Dist, the diggers turned their backs to the wind. Wearing ski goggles, with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths, they kept working, picking away at the rock upon which they were sprawled. In what seemed like no time, however, the blowing sand accelerated, rose like a curtain over their heads, and blasted their exposed skin.

“This is nuts,” Josh Smith yelled over the wind and the hiss of the sand racing across the desert floor, “I uncover something and in three seconds it’s covered again!”

“You’d stand up,” Jason Poole explained later, “and you’d be afraid to walk anywhere because you didn’t want to step on anything someone had been working on, but you couldn’t open your eyes to see. And when you walked, it was like walking through sandpaper. If we’d had shorts on, our legs would have been blasted raw.”

Up on the side of el Dist, where Lacovara was trying to work, it was the wind, not the sand, that was the hazard. “It was definitely blowing near hurricane force up there,” says Lacovara. “There were several times when I just felt buoyant—which is not a good thing when you’re standing on a cliff.”

“At one point,” recalls Jennifer Smith, who was working with him, “Ken stepped behind me and I nearly tumbled over. I’d been leaning into the wind so hard that when he created a wind shadow, it was as if someone had pushed me from the other side.”

Though it came from the right direction, the south, the storm was probably not an early harbinger of the dreaded khamsin, the sometimes fifty-day-long season of frequent sandstorms that typically lasts from March to May. The giveaway was the temperature. The khamsin is a hot wind; this one was cold.

Though the dig had just begun and they’d stuck it out as long as they could, Josh felt he had no alternative but to call off work for the rest of the afternoon. He was as frustrated as Stromer had been when forced to spend two days in his tent for the same reason ninety years earlier.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.