“The angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed.
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still.”
Torrents of burning sand sweep before it, a thick veil of darkness envelopes the firmament, and the sun assumes a blood-red hue.
“That crimson haze
By which the prostrate caravan is awed
In the red desert when the wind’s abroad.”[58]
When the Simoom rises, says M. Martins,[59] the air is filled with dust of such extreme fineness that it makes its way through objects hermetically sealed, penetrates into the eyes, the ears, and the organs of respiration. A burning heat, like that which breathes from the mouth of a furnace, possesses the air, and paralyzes the strength of men and animals. Seated on the sand, with their backs turned to windward, the Arabs, wrapped in their burnous, wait with fatalistic resignation the end of the torment; their camels crouching, exhausted, panting, stretch their long necks upon the scorching soil. Seen through this powdery haze, the sun’s disc, shorn of its beams, shows pale and ghastly as that of the moon.
Fortunately, the phenomenon never prevails over any very considerable area, and beyond its limits the atmosphere remains serene and calm; so that travellers who have watched it approaching in the form of a reddish cloud, without being able to calculate on its direction, have often escaped with no worse result than a panic, and have only witnessed its terrible effects at a distance.
It must not, however, be confounded with the sand-storms which the pilgrim encounters in the Arabian Desert, and which seem confined to that region. Dean Stanley, on his route from Suez to Sinai, met with one which prevailed the whole day. “Imagine,” he says, “the caravan toiling against this,—the Bedouins each with his shawl thrown completely over his head, half of the riders sitting backwards,—the camels, meantime thus virtually left without guidance, though from time to time throwing their long necks sideways to avoid the blast, yet moving straight onwards with a painful sense of duty truly edifying to behold. Through the tempest, this roaring and driving tempest, which sometimes made me think that this must be the real meaning of ‘a howling wilderness,’ we rode on the whole day.”[60]
A French cavalier, M. Trémaux, while crossing the Desert of Korosko, had the good fortune to witness the course of a Simoom, while himself in a position of safety.
It was the 8th of February 1848. The horizon in the south-west wore a hue of the evillest augury. Gusts of wind, which seemed to have issued from some red-hot brazier, beat in the face of the travellers. The camel-drivers, accustomed to interpret these sinister signs, and assured that a tempest was at hand, felt themselves called upon to give M. Trémaux a few counsels, which were by no means reassuring.
“As soon as the storm darkens the air,” said one of them, “by surrounding us with a cloud of sand, we must throw ourselves prone on the ground, wrap our heads in our finest stuffs, to protect our respiration from this sand, which burns the throat. It will be useless to trouble ourselves about the camels; they will lie down of their own accord, bend their head against their burden, and never stir so long as the tempest lasts. If the sand accumulates by our side, we must move in such a manner as to prevent it from covering us, making it roll under itself, but without exposing our heads. Remember these things carefully; and the will of God be done!”
“That is not all,” added another; “when the water-bags are partly shrunken, as are ours at this moment, and the Khamsin blows for some time, it finishes by completely drying them up.”