After a time, gasping, with his throat, nostrils, and ears full of dust, he struggled to his feet and looked around him, and saw, already far distant, the sand-cloud borne away by the mighty wind, then in its wild career to some other quarter of the desert.
Above him the sky was again cloudless; the air all still and clear; the awful and angry rush of the wind-storm was past.
But where was Hassan Abdullah?
A speck vanishing away in the far distance showed but too plainly where he had gone with all the speed his camel could achieve—a natural swiftness now accelerated by the extremity of fear; and in another minute even that moving speck disappeared, and Malcolm Skene found himself alone—guideless and ignorant of which way to turn his steps in the appalling solitude of the desert.
What was he to do now?
Follow in the route Hassan had taken, and which that wily personage no doubt knew led to some haunt of men, or abode of such civilization as existed there?
Even that he could not do. The horizon showed no point to indicate where the speck he knew to be Hassan and his camel had vanished.
Malcolm's alarm for the future exceeded his just anger and indignation for the present at this sudden and unexpected desertion; but action of some kind became necessary, and though apparently he could not be worse off than where he was, every step he took might be leading further from the path he should pursue to Dayr-el-Syrian—further from a well or succour, and nearer to 'dusty death.'
After glancing at the trappings of his camel, he remounted and rode forward slowly, fain to suck for a moment even a hot pebble of the desert in hope to produce a little moisture in his mouth, while consulting a small pocket map he possessed.
If Hassan had not misled him wilfully, and they had not overshot the proper distance, to judge by the position of the sun, he supposed that Dayr-el-Syrian, where the Amir-Ali's command was encamped, should be somewhere on his right; but, if so, ere this he should have come to the sequestered Macarius Convent—so called from St. Macarius the Elder, of Egypt, a shepherd of the fourth century, who (so runs the story) dwelt for sixty years in the desert; but of that edifice he saw no sign or vestige, and he saw, by the same map, that if he had passed it and gone through the extreme end of the Wady Faregh, then before him must lie the 'Petrified Forest,' of which he knew nothing, and of which he had never heard before, lying apparently more than a hundred miles westward of Cairo—a distance which it seemed almost incredible he had so nearly travelled, and the very name of which was suggestive of something of horror and dismay.