"T'samma!" There might be t'samma there to the right where the dunes were higher, and the sand redder, certainly a little dark vegetation appeared to show in the hollows.
And so I staggered to my feet again, and leaving the horses I made my panting, laborious way across to the dunes I had marked, on the eastern shore of the lake. They were about half a mile away, and it seemed as though I should never reach them, but at length I entered the hollow between two of them, and found a few stunted bushes covered with red berries the size of cherries, and the like of which I had never seen before. I hesitated to eat them, for many of the desert berries are poisonous, and almost all are bitter and acrid, but I could see no t'samma, and so I bit one, hesitatingly at first, but as the sharp, delicious flavor penetrated my scorched palate, ravenously.
Cool, full of juice, and of a flavor something like a black-currant, they tasted to me the most delicious morsel that had ever passed my lips, and all thoughts of their being poison left me, as I plucked and ate them greedily. Most grateful they were, and soon I felt a new being, though some poisonous properties they must have contained, for within a few minutes I felt a rush of blood to my head, a buzzing in my ears, and was soon staggering as though drunk. I ate no more then, and in a short time the effects passed off, and wonderfully refreshed and invigorated, I made my way back to the horses; who, the image of despair, stood where I had left them.
I literally dragged them to the little bushes, which to my delight they ate greedily; fruit, foliage, and even the bare twigs. So, again I was respited; but I knew it to be only a respite, for the bushes were few, and I could find no sign of others or of t'samma.
And so for days I wandered, finding a few of the berries here and there, often half maddened and stupefied by them, my head awhirl too with fever, alternately hoping and despairing, my sense of direction almost gone, striving, whenever possible, to work north in my lucid moments, but finding often by crossing my own spoor that I had been wandering in a vain circle.
Then one afternoon, as I lay in a sort of semi-stupor beneath one of the bushes that had yielded me a fair number of berries, a sharp gust of wind aroused me, and looking around me I saw, whirling across the bare dunes towards me, a huge cloud of thick opaque dust, gathering up the loose sand as it sped, whirling high in the air and blotting out the whole sky with its dense volume, snatching up, carrying away, and burying deep again, all that came in its path. It was a sandstorm, and I was in its path, here amongst the loose dunes, where escape seemed impossible. I must fly or be buried! The horses, snorting with fear, would have bolted had I not caught them quickly; and tired as they were, they needed no urging on from the destroying monster that sped relentlessly after them. The dunes were here low and open, and the red berries on which the horses had lived of late, seemed to have maddened and stimulated them, for they seemed to fly on the very wings of the wind. Right before the storm they sped, the first advance gusts eddying around us, the sky overhead already thick with the flying sand.
And now, maddened with fever, intoxicated with the strange stimulation of the berries I too had been eating, I no longer fled in fear, but in its place came a wild exhilaration, and I shouted aloud as I flogged the panting horses to further efforts.
Now, to my disordered brain, the sandstorm was a legion of pursuing fiends, that snatched at me from every gust and eddy; now, too, they were gaining on us, and I shrieked and fought with the imaginary demons as, in spite of the speed of the horses, the storm gained on us and enveloped us more and more at every stride. And so for an eternity I seemed to fly, now hemmed in with blinding sand, seeing nothing, knowing nothing but an overpowering desire to escape from the clutching fiends around, tortured with thirst maddened, screaming. Dark now, as at midnight, except when a flash of forked lightning burst through the driving chaos; now I had burst free again, as the storm veered in another direction, yet still it threatened me and still I galloped on. Then a snort of fright from the horses, a wild plunge forward that almost threw me from the saddle, a sense of falling, a stunning crash that seemed to me to be the bursting asunder of the world's very foundations and then a merciful oblivion.