From NoelW: Dropped off at Docherty’s Dock (50 Points)

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.

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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.

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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