CHAPTER XXXVI.
ALONE!
It was about noon, now, and with a start, roused from his day-dream and half-apathy, Malcolm Skene looked about him and saw that he had then to face one of the most appalling, yet sublime, sights of the desert—a sand-storm—at that season when the Egyptian winds approach the Southern tropic, and they are more variable and tempestuous than during any other season of the year—a state in which they remain till February.
Distant about two miles, he suddenly saw the Zobisha, as Hassan called it—several lofty pillars of sand travelling over the waste with wondrous swiftness. The tallest was vertical, the others seemed to lean towards it, and, at the bases of all, the sand rose as if lashed by a whirlwind into a raging sea, amid which tough mimosa bushes were uprooted and swept away like feathers.
The whirlwind subsided, but the mighty cloud of sand and small pebbles which it had raised high in the darkened heavens, almost to the zenith, continued to tower before the two sojourners in the desert for more than an hour—purple, dun, and yellow in hue at times, and anon all blended together.
Brave though he was, a nameless dread such as he had never felt before possessed the soul of Skene at a sight so unusual and terrific; and there flashed upon his mind the recollection of his letter to Hester, and how true his presentiment seemed to be proving now, for he felt on the verge of suffocation.
Hassan Abdullah, who in his prayers usually sighed for the Paradise of the Prophet, with his seventy houris awaiting him in their couches of hollow pearl, the fruits of the Tree of Toaba, and springs of unlimited lemonade, now prayed only for his own safety, while both their camels forgot their usual docility, and became well nigh unmanageable with terror.
The air was full of impalpable dust. To avoid suffocation or blindness therefrom, Skene dismounted, tied his gauze pugaree tightly over his face, and placing his camel between him and the skirt of the blast, which now developed into a wind-storm, sweeping the column of sand with wondrous speed before it, stooped his head close to the saddle and held on to a stirrup-leather.
On came the wind-storm, and before he had time to think, to express wonder to Hassan as to what it could be, the tornado swept over the desert, carrying before it mimosa bushes and cacti, clouds of shining pebbles, the withered fragments of an old gum-tree, and the white bones of a dead camel.
How his animal withstood the sharp and sweeping blast that darkened all around them, Malcolm Skene knew not; but he found his hands torn from the stirrup-leather, and himself flung furiously and helplessly amid the sand, which half covered him.