Under the desert stars

MEANWHILE at sunrise on the day of his departure, Carl had gone to the market place to join the caravan. Among the crowd that gathered there, at the very time the caravan set out, he found Sana’s mother, who had come to bid him goodbye.

From one of the tourists he learned that the caravan would lead over Tandini and Tenduf to Mogador in Morocco. This, he recalled, was the route followed by the crusaders of Islam, when they wandered through the desert lands, to preach Mohammedism with fire and sword.

The caravan itself consisted of some twenty-five racing camels, the true ships of the desert, capable of making from sixty to eighty miles a day. Besides these there were four freight camels, each loaded with about four hundred pounds of food and water, the latter being especially important, as for days they would not pass any wells.

Carl had noted with a smile that the tourists as well as the guides were dressed in Berber outfits; wide skirts and the gaily striped burnus, with its big collar. He saw, too, that there were several French officers in uniform in the party.

Like himself, everyone in the party was well armed. The guides, as well as some of the tourists, were provided with bandoliers of cartridges and carried rifles, while he noticed several of the others, not so visibly equipped, adjust cartridge belts and holsters. Taking the hint, he saw to it that his own automatic was fully loaded and his spare clips readily accessible.

Such precautions were necessary, of course, to enable them to repulse the attacks of any wild animals that, through pangs of hunger, might become daring enough to attack the travelers. To be dreaded, too, were the attacks of the bandits roving the sand hills. The chieftains of the larger bandit tribes had already received the regular tribute from the famous sheik Tan Jajidani, who in turn would be doubly paid by the wealthy merchant who furnished the camel and ran the show. While these would be satisfied to let the caravan in peace, there might be others not so inclined.

At last, with a great hullabaloo, the caravan was under way.

At first Carl experienced much discomfort, but he found that by relaxing and allowing his body to sway with the jogging steps of the camel, it wasn’t as bad as he had expected.

Far ahead of the caravan rode two guides, whose duty it was to lead the way, and at the same time keep a sharp watch for unfriendly visitors.

Long before the main body of travelers would reach a village or camp, the inhabitants would swarm out to meet them, offering fruit or drink for sale, while at friendly camps water was offered to everyone. To refuse to drink was considered an unfriendly act, and the guides cautioned all to be sure to partake of the hospitality.

Otherwise the journey that day was uneventful. There was nothing, outside of a few tiny camps or villages, to greet the eye but sand, desert sand.

Tents were pitched that night under the desert stars. The campfire gave forth a grateful warmth, for the night air was bitter cold. Carl was sorry that he was not outfitted with a woolen burnus, but knowing he would have to be up at daybreak, was soon comfortable between his blankets.

With the first rays of the sun peeping over the horizon, the caravan broke camp. Carl was amazed at the speed with which the camels were saddled or loaded, the tents folded away, and the caravan gotten on its way, accompanied by the singing of the guides and the jingle of the lead-camel’s bells.

Thinking of Sana, he recalled of the manuscript he had taken with him.

He would have the whole day to himself, with nothing to do, so he took it from his pocket to read. The manuscript, written in a careful hand, was entitled, “The Conception of Our Universe.”

Two hundred years before Christ, the great mathematician Archimedes said, “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the earth!”

Our earth is a huge ball, about eight thousand miles in diameter and it weighs some six hundred trillion or sextillion tons. (To remember this place twenty-one ciphers after the six—6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.) It is composed of rock, sand and water. Seventy-three per cent., or about three-quarters, of the earth is water—the balance, twenty-seven per cent., or about one-quarter, is solid matter, that is, rock or sand.

The entire surface of the earth measures nearly two hundred million square miles and in contents the earth is about two hundred and sixty billion cubic miles.

The earth is covered with a thin envelope of air and clouds which travels with the earth. If such was not the case, a balloon rising in Europe could stay up three hours, and without moving from its position, land in North America. Furthermore, if the air blanket did not travel with the earth, it is probable that the earth would burn up, since the friction between the earth’s surface and the air would develop great heat, a heat in which nothing could live.

The earth traveling in a magnetic field like that of a huge dynamo, speeds around its own imaginary axis, which lies at an angle of 23½ degrees, once in twenty-four hours. This is at a speed, when one stands at the Equator, say in North Africa, of more than a thousand miles per hour, whereas a few feet from the poles, the speed is not more than nineteen feet in twenty-four hours.

As it whirls around itself, the earth rushes through space in orbital motion, in an easterly direction around the sun, at a velocity of eighteen and a half miles per second, or six hundred and sixty-six thousand miles per hour, a speed that is about fifty times as great as that of the swiftest cannon ball. We earth people are entirely unconscious of this motion, since it is perfectly steady and without a jar.

Once in a year, that is in a little more than three hundred and sixty-five days, we travel around the sun, but remain away from that planet at a distance of about ninety-two million miles.

As we look upward at the sky at night we see, in all directions, the countless stars. Most pronounced among them and looking much the same, though of a different nature, are the planets and once in a while a comet. A few faintly shining clouds are seen—the Milky Way and Nebulae.

The most striking, and yet the most insignificant of them all is the moon.

During that period known as “day” to us the sun alone is visible, flooding the air with its light and thereby hiding all other heavenly bodies from the vision of the unaided eye—a few of them being visible through a telescope.

These heavenly bodies, for the most part, are globes like the earth. They whirl on their axes and move swiftly through space. They are classified as the solar system, made up of the sun, the planets which move round the sun and the satellites, which, in turn, attend the planets in their motion around the sun. Thus the moon attends the earth when the earth travels around the sun.

The sun, ninety-two million miles away from the earth, is a hot self-luminous globe, with a diameter of eight hundred and sixty-six thousand five hundred miles, or one hundred nine and one-half times that of the earth. The temperature at the sun surface has been calculated to range between ten and fifteen thousand degrees Fahrenheit—a heat we cannot conceive.

Unlike the earth and the other planets, the sun, the center of our universe, is stationary; but it rotates on its own axis, inclined at seven and one-quarter degrees, once in twenty-seven and a half days. This motion has been established by observing the sun spots.

These sun spots vary in size from five hundred to fifty thousand miles in diameter and a group of such spots was found to be one hundred and fifty thousand miles across. They are short-lived phenomena, sometimes remaining only a few days but frequently a month or two. They appear in their greatest magnitude at periods of eleven years and are the cause of extreme drought on earth, with its resultant destruction of crops and vegetation, and consequent famines.

While until recently it was believed that the sun spots were eruptions on the sun, some astronomers now claim that, as the sun spots are cooler than the sun, they indicate the downpour of meteoric showers thrown by Jupiter and Saturn into the sun, thereby increasing the heat radiating from the sun.

The sun spots manifest themselves in world-wide heat waves, earthquakes, tidal waves, cloud bursts, floods, waterspouts, hailstorms and hurricanes in many widely separated parts of the earth. History has never seen the equal of the destruction caused by the last phenomena. A glance at a few of the recent disasters and natural phenomena shows the following:

The volcanoes Villarion, Liaima and Lanin spouted flames more than a thousand feet from their craters, while the activities of other volcanoes killed thousands of people. Six new craters opened in Mount Isalco, Salvador; the volcano Kilauea in Hawaii spouted mountains of lava, which darkened the sky and earthquakes shook many parts of the earth. During the last three thousand years thirteen million people have met their deaths by volcano and earthquake.

Cyclones, hailstorms and floods wiped out many towns in various parts of the world; in Pueblo alone they caused damage aggregating more than ten million dollars. Many lives were lost in waterspouts, which destroyed part of Tangier, Morocco, and in the Maia-Doura province in Spain.

Heat caused the glaciers of the Alps to melt and move at an alarming speed, while lakes in Switzerland dried up, exposing their bottoms and showing foundations of the homes of the lake-dwellers living there thousands of years ago.

While the sun is the nearest of the stars, the moon is the nearest of the heavenly bodies. It is about two hundred and forty thousand miles from the earth and has a diameter of about twenty-two hundred miles, or about one-quarter that of the earth. The moon, accompanying the earth in its movement around the sun, rotates on its axis once in twenty-nine and a half days and moves in a small orbit, once in twenty-seven and a third days, around the earth at a speed of nearly twenty-three hundred miles per hour. The moon shines merely by reflected light from the sun, whose light is six hundred thousand times brighter than that of the moon. The moon has a temperature of two hundred degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.

The surface of the moon structure, for the most part, is extremely broken. There are hills or mountains, but the surface is pitted all over with great “craters,” ranging from fifty to one hundred miles in diameter; there being a few with a diameter of more than one thousand miles. A counterpart of this is hardly to be found on our earth, yet it is believed that the moon was once part of this earth, becoming separated from the parent body by the tremendous centrifugal force of the earth; as it is likewise assumed that Jupiter will in time throw off its “great red spot” thus forming a new moon of Jupiter.

It is believed that the planet Mars, which has two moons, is inhabited and that it has great irrigation canals, which engineers say are far superior to any irrigation system on earth. During the last sun spot period wireless signals were supposed to have been received from Mars.

From time to time, bodies very different from the stars and planets appear in the heavens, remaining visible for some weeks or months and then vanish in the distance. These are the comets. The larger ones are magnificent objects, sometimes as bright as Venus and visible by day, with a head as large as the moon and having a train or tail extending behind it from the horizon to the zenith and which is in reality long enough to reach from the earth to the sun.

Such comets, however, are rare, and in ancient and medieval times comets were always regarded with terror—as an evil omen—and at times the people believed that they foretold the end of the world, causing veritable panics, like the “comet scare” of France in 1832. As a rule these comets reappear at intervals, such as do Halley’s, Euke’s and Donati’s comets. They travel at a tremendous speed, coming at times quite close to the earth. Quite often they cross the path of the earth, causing fear that a collision might take place. There are a few isolated cases of comets colliding with the earth and killing a few people. Some of the comets have been lost, that is we do not know what became of them. Such a lost wanderer of the skies is Biela’s comet; a comet of some forty thousand miles diameter. In its appearances, every sixth and sixteenth year, its course would come within a few thousand miles of the earth’s orbit.

Besides the luminous clouds we see in the heavens and which, under the telescope are shown to be but great groups of separate stars, there are others which no telescopic power has as yet been able to disclose individually. These are known as nebulae and are of varying shape and form and very beautiful in appearance.

Once in a while the earth passes through such a nebulae. Some years ago the Heidelberg Observatory reported that the earth was passing through some such nebulae, which report was confirmed by various other observatories. In that case there was no noticeable effect on human life, but it is believed by astronomers that some of these nebulae are composed of strong poisonous gases and that if ever the earth passes through such a nebulae all life on this planet will be destroyed.

Occasionally bodies fall upon the earth out of the sky. These are the meteors. They are not noticeable until they come within our air zone, when the friction between them and the air causes them to become red hot, often being entirely consumed by the heat before reaching the earth itself. They travel through the air zone at a speed ranging from ten to forty miles per second, accompanied by a heavy continuous roar, emphasized now and then by violent detonations. These meteors are solid bodies; containing a large percentage of iron and copper and single pieces have been found to weigh as much as seventy-five thousand pounds.

It is believed that these meteors are fragments which, ages ago, were shot out from now extinct volcanoes, with so great a velocity that they were thrown out beyond the attraction of the earth, and so becoming individual planets or heavenly bodies for the time being. Such being the case, they have traveled in independent orbits, until they at last encountered the earth at a point where her orbit crosses theirs. It may also be possible that these meteors were thrown from the planets or the stars, and as meteoric showers occur at intervals of thirty-three to thirty-four years, it is often believed that they are connected with comets and that therefore the comets, too, must be solid bodies like our earth. The number of meteors falling upon the earth adds continuously to the earth’s mass at a rate of about forty thousand tons per year.

Our earth is older than five hundred million years, according to Prof. Morean of Bourges Observatory, France, who holds that for half of that time, two hundred and fifty million years, some form of life has existed on its surface. Man, however, can boast of only some ten thousand years of ancestry in direct lines. In other words, in the life of this little globe he is, even in his most primitive form, a very recent arrival.

The earth was once a hot gaseous mass like the sun. Gradually the surface cooled, condensation took place forming the lakes and seas and after a great period of time vegetation appeared.

Water, entering the bowels of the earth, through cracks or some such opening in the surface, would evaporate into steam and under high pressure break through the earth crust and create a volcano, carrying with it great masses of molten rock. The hot geysers of Yellowstone Park, in America, are similar examples of such internal action.

In historic times there were lakes in the Sahara Desert and the so-called “Hopeless Desert” lying in the Rocky Mountains of North America, while in the Sierra Nevadas there was a time, not more than a million years ago, when all of the territory was well watered and vegetated. One of these lakes, in western Utah and extending over into Nevada, was one hundred and seventy-five miles wide, two hundred and fifty miles long and in places over a thousand feet in depth. Other evidences of this phenomenon, of tremendous masses of water entering into the bowels of the earth, are found particularly in the many caves among the Pyrenees and in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, the largest cavern in the world, in the upper galleries of which can still be seen the perforations through which the waters descended.

As we descend into the earth we observe an increase in temperature of one degree Fahrenheit for every fifty feet. At a depth of ten or twelve miles the earth is red hot. At a depth of a hundred miles the temperature is so great that if at the surface of the earth it would liquefy all solid matter.

Not only lakes and seas have disappeared, but whole continents, in much more peculiar ways. Where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, there was once, some four million years ago, a continent which we call “Atlantis,” connecting America with Africa, and believed to have been peopled with a race far more intelligent than any now existing upon the earth. They were one-eyed and had conquered the laws of nature; their airships flying by natural forces, such as do our sailboats. Their animals could speak and had great destructive powers. But this can be only hearsay, since now “Atlantis” lies at the bottom of the ocean, gone forever, like many mountains which have likewise gone down into the waters.

These surface changes, together with internal disturbances, created a wandering polar system and bodily displacement of both poles took place. With this came a great change in the climate of the earth. The lands of the present equator, which, only some twenty thousand years ago, were as cold as our present arctic zones, became tropical in climate, while the flourishing lands at the north and south poles grew desolate and cold, as they are today. The pole-axis of the earth has since changed considerably—Europe, only some twelve thousand years ago being covered with a great ice sheet.

The highest peak of the earth is Mount Everest, twenty-nine thousand feet above sea level, and the greatest depth of the sea is more than twenty-five thousand feet. Some of the earth’s surface lies below sea level, but it is not flooded on account of being surrounded by mountain ranges. A great part of the Sahara, for instance, is below sea level. The Sahara, less inhabited than any other area of the earth, covers one-twelfth part of the land surface of the earth, having an area of some four million square miles. It is by no means all sand; there are some plateaus and oases. In the days of Julius Caesar it was a fertile, well cultivated land, and was known as the “Granary of the Roman Empire.” With the fall of the old Roman Empire, however, the desert was neglected and the sands swallowed up the fertile lands.

Scientists and explorers have dreamed for generations of schemes not only to cultivate the desert, but to put such fertile lands within the reach of industry. It is estimated that the Sahara could easily support a population of two hundred million souls and in addition supply Europe with all her fruit, vegetables, cereals and cotton, in fact with all products that are at present produced in North America.

The government of France, some fifty years ago, wanted to build a fifty-mile canal and let the waters of the ocean flow in to submerge and flood a great part of the Sahara, so as to change the climate and produce vegetation. Such a plan, however, would not only change the climate of the Sahara, but would change the climates of all the countries of the entire world, with dire consequences, and to such an extent that the end of the world would be believed near.

As it concerns our world it is something in which every individual should be interested.

Let us have a look at the paradox of our universe or rather the theories of our astronomers.

The astronomers contend that our earth was millions of years in the process of evolution and that man has been on the earth but a comparatively short time. Religion tells us that the earth, seas, sun, moon and stars were all created in six days of twenty-four hours each. Which is right?

If the earth is a globe with a curvature of twenty-four feet in every six miles, how is it that the Mississippi River starting as it does, at a low level, travels at an incline and toward the equator, the largest diameter of the earth; that is traveling uphill and reaches the sea after twenty-seven hundred miles. Do astronomers overlook this fact?

Astronomers contend that our earth spins around an imaginary axis—a ball weighing six hundred trillion tons, and eight thousand miles in diameter spinning around an imaginary axis! What gave the earth the original momentum five hundred million years ago, and what keeps it up? Did the speed of the earth increase or decrease with the evolution of the earth?

These same men of high learning say that the earth, composed of rock, sand and water, travels at the equator at a speed of more than one thousand miles per hour or one hundred and fifty thousand feet per second. Yet any engineer knows that a spinning flywheel of solid iron will fly apart at a speed of from twenty to thirty thousand feet per second. By what power, then, is the earth held together?

Then again they say that the lands at the north and south poles spin around like a merry-go-round. Did the men who discovered the poles make any report of being made sea-sick?

If the sun is stationary and the earth moves around it, how could Joshua have commanded the sun to stand still and was obeyed, as the Bible says?

If the moon, as the astronomers contend, is a body thrown from the earth by centrifugal force, while the earth was still in a semi-fluid state, why was it thrown just that distance, two hundred and forty thousand miles, no further or no less; why did it then change its course and float in empty space, ever since accompanying the earth in its travels around the sun?

What becomes of the ocean waters at the high point of the equator? Do they flow by gravity, like the waters of a stream, toward the lower levels, the north and south poles? Who and what holds that water in place between the poles and the equator? Take a rough surfaced metal ball upon a spindle and speed it up to a surface speed of one thousand miles per hour, let us say; charge it with electricity as the earth is said to be charged, then pour water on the spinning ball. Will it adhere to the ball or does the centrifugal force throw it off in all directions?

If standing water has not a uniform level, let our astronomers build a tank, several miles long, such as the watering channels used by the railroads. Would the level of this standing water be higher at one end than at the other?

Or was Copernicus wrong as well as all other astronomers who blindly believe in him, like they blindly followed the theory of gravity until another came along and told us we were all wrong?

We believed, for years, that we could locate a star in a fixed position. Now we are told by Einstein that it cannot be done because the rays of the stars are bent when passing through the gravitational field of the sun.

These are but a few of the seemingly contradictory theories of our universe, which speculative science would have the unsophisticated public believe.

I often ask myself, is the universe a huge Fata Morgana, covered by a veil no mortal shall ever lift?

Truly the guesses of one generation are but the amusements of another. If it were possible to cruise the distant heavens some startling facts would no doubt be revealed. As yet it is all a dream.

Finishing the article, Carl folded it and put it away. To himself, half aloud he muttered, “Whew! That sets one to thinking. This is something I have been looking for for a long time—the universe in a nutshell. Too bad he didn’t live to finish and publish it. It would have given the world something to talk about.”

Once more his thoughts went to his beloved. “Poor Sana,” he murmured, “I miss you so. Just when my hopes were highest, just when the future looked its rosiest, you had to be taken away from me. Two days of happiness and then all is misery. Like a vision you came and went.”

His head bowed, he rode on in silence. Sana had been very dear to him and the hurt was great.

Suddenly, shots ringing clear in the desert air, roused him from his dreams. From behind a large sand hill rode a band of Arabs, shaking their rifles and crying loudly.

The caravan halted, and the travelers made haste to return the fire of the bandits. Unslinging his automatic Carl accounted for two of the attackers, while some of the others fell before the rifles of the guides and the army officers.

It was all over in a few minutes. The bandits, outnumbered two to one, rode off leaving half their number behind, dead or badly wounded.

Fortunately the caravan suffered little. One of the camels had been killed, while one of the travelers, an elderly Englishman, suffered a slight wound in the arm. This was immediately treated by one of the guides, and after the excitement had died down, the caravan again set out across the desert.