But though her eye brightened and his soul rejoiced, because of the boundless waste and the free desert air, there was death in his right hand. The poor ungainly ostrich lay bleeding at his feet, her legs broken by his skill, her wings despoiled of their precious tufts, to make a gift for the woman he loved.
The sun was yet high when he turned bridle towards his home, and peering about him in search of those scarce perceptible inequalities on its surface, which form the landmarks of the wilderness, he found cause to remember Ishtar's warning, while for a moment his heart stood still, with a sense of coming danger, such as braces the brave man for mortal conflict, and bids the coward tremble with mortal fear.
Where the palms that nodded above his tent should have broke the level sky-line, there was no horizon now. Only shifting misty shadows, dull, dim, and tawny, a fusion of earth and heaven. He could bear to look on the sun too, glowing yonder like a ball of burnished copper, and he knew what that rim of violet foretold—a cruel portent—beautiful exceedingly.
There was a falling glitter in the air, as if it were raining gold, and his horse snorted violently, betraying symptoms of restlessness and alarm. O for Merodach now! Merodach, whose bones were bleaching far away, where the dead lay in heaps under the wall of Ardesh.
He pressed into a gallop, nevertheless; for a dun cloud-like column, growing in height and volume as it approached, was moving steadily towards him, in many whirls and gyrations, yet, fast as he rode, gaining on him with every stride. The sky had darkened, and the fine particles of sand with which the air was filled blistered his skin, choking his nostrils and penetrating into his very lungs.
Then the mighty rush of the whirlwind roared in his ears, turning his linen head-dress over his face, driving man and horse before it in an opaque, impenetrable cloud of sand.
He had once dreamed of such a death. Could this be his fate, and had it indeed overtaken him at last?
He thought of Ishtar at the tent-door, looking for one who never came; he thought of the other woman who had loved him—his temptation, his evil spirit, his enemy, beautiful and wicked, Semiramis the Great Queen.
Driving on, as a ship at sea drives before the tempest, he was aware of certain phantom shapes, some few spear-lengths off, that loomed gigantic in the fatal cloud. Were they real or but creatures of his brain, already maddened by a sense of suffocation? Perhaps demons of the simoon, triumphant, derisive, rejoicing in his destruction. No; they were surely earthly forms—two or three horsemen plunging up to their girths, and a dromedary in the midst. Were they waving to him for help, or only struggling and gesticulating in blind perplexity, in the agony of a fierce despair? The whirlwind drove him nearer, nearer yet. He could distinguish the reddened eye of the dromedary, and its distended nostril craving for a breath of air, while choked with sand.
There came another mighty rush and roar to stun him as with a blow. Half conscious, he was aware of a face that moved before him through the gloom like a vision of the night—a dreamy face, calm, fearless, beautiful, smiling its sad farewell. Even at such extremity his heart leaped up with keen guilty throbs, for in that passing vision it recognised the face of the Great Queen.