Explore "The Boy Fortune Hunters in Egypt" by L. Frank Baum on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Next morning I awoke at early dawn to see Abdul Hashim standing by the curb of the abandoned well and looking into its depths thoughtfully. His men joined him a moment later, and they conversed together in low tones in Arabic. Several times I heard the word "akareb" mentioned, which I knew to signify scorpions, and at times they would cast a pebble into the well and then peer after it curiously.
At first I could not imagine what the fellows were up to. I knew scorpions were thick in these foothills, and remembered that my friend Ketti had warned me of them as we passed through; but why should the Arabs be so interested in the fact that there were numbers of these vermin at the bottom of the abandoned well?