I don’t understand what we've done wrong. We merely asked Lady Sarah to land us
on Snowlord’s Peak and she was instantly annoyed.
Apparently the only allowable way to get to the top is via some circuitously
esoteric pathway. Presumably it's a route fastidiously laid out by an ancient monk with too much time on his hands, probably spaced out from overdoing
the lapsang souchong and fancying himself as an extra in an Indiana Jones
film. No doubt there’ll be life-threatening tests of moral fibre at every
stage, taking out each of my companions one at a time in a variety of
unexpectedly gruesome encounters. Animated skeletons, probably. Giant chickens. Invisible ostriches.
- Sigh -
When a simple balloon trip could avoid all that. Obviously, we need to take control of the balloon.
As it turns out, perhaps this is not the wisest of plans. Smiling grimly, Lady Sarah tugs on a rope. And we find ourselves, once again,
plummeting. This is becoming a rather familiar sensation. Admittedly, this time it's a different
species of plummet. We’ve never fallen through cirro-stratus before, never had
ice crystals forming in our beards, never had our fall broken by a flock of
squabbling seagulls. Luckily, we land on warm sand.
This place is deserted. Clearly it was a hive of industry
once, for there are the shapes of buildings, now buried by sand, and, though we're miles from the sea, what might
have been a harbour or at least a dock. Buried by sand. There’s a great pyramid.
Buried in sand. And, everywhere we look, statues and carvings and leering
liths carved into the same sneering creatures. Many buried in sand, Clearly the
backwards inhabitants who once lived here had a limited world-view. Camels!
There’s a pillar of a
thousand carved camels. There's a giant stellar camel bearing the galaxy on its back. There are peculiar hump-shaped lumps, buried in sand. (We hope they're camels.) There’s a
camelophagus (the tomb of a mummified camel) decorated with winged camels, singing. There's a camel-shaped swimming pool. Buried by sand.
And, in fact, there are two real camels. Half-buried by – well,
you can probably guess. Staring at us, superciliously suspicious, as if we’ve
woken them from a cryogenic torpor, they consider whether to spit.
Luckily for
us, they’re yoked to a limber. Which, at a pinch, would also do as a cart.
The camels drool as if recently taken off a drip. Nevertheless, we all
clamber aboard and, with a cry of “Hi yo, Saliva”, our clumsy limber lumbers slumberingly
west.
---
This submission is a Perry Miniatures French Napoleonic camel limber, used in
the invasion of Egypt. One of my favourite
continuing projects is this conflict, although there's scope for many other models for
this theatre.
I think the scoring probably is: 2 camels, 10pts, 1 limber, 10 pts, Docherty’s Dock
30 pts = 50 pts total.
***
Ah, Noel - more divine dromedary delights for the Challenge participants to marvel at! And what animal would NOT charge off into the distance, at whichever speed it might muster, upon hearing "Hi yo, Saliva"? Well done!
That will indeed be another 50 points to your total - very nicely done.
GregB