Since the desert air was so dry the bread quickly turn stale. in the sentence which word serves as a clue that there’s a cause-and-effect

the anwser is went creeping down the river again, across the wide lonely marshes to the sea.

i longed to go with them out into the world to seek my fortune in foreign lands—africa, india, china and peru!

and, dreaming of the lands i had never seen, i'd sit on there, watching till they were out of sight.