A strange couple truly, the one with the sight, the other with the speech, rendering each other service, until, when together, they each spoke and saw with the other’s vision and tongue.
They rode together now, and the youth pointed backwards and then forwards, and they stayed not their flight for a moment; neither did they try to change their course so as to approach their mistress.
Al-Asad looked behind to where the youth pointed and gave a shout of fear, upon which strange sound Zarah and Ralph Trenchard and the entire body of men looked back and, in a desperate effort, tried to check their beasts.
They might as well have tried to stop a runaway engine as horses and camels fleeing before the dread simoom which advanced slowly behind them like some great, evil, purple giant or monster of the underworld.
The simoom!
A column of poisonous gas, twin of the cyclone, with naught in common with the sirocco; a slowly moving column, whipping the air into gusts, as violent and hot as though blown straight out of the mouth of hell; a phenomenon peculiar to the tropics’ desert places, falling upon the desert wayfarer, over him and gone, in the passing of two or three minutes if he happens to be favoured by the gods, in fifteen if ill-luck dogs his path.
A terrible, writhing, twisting scourge of scorching air, with a centre as calm as a lake under a summer’s sky and as full of poison as a scandal-monger’s tongue. If the wayfarer should not be mounted upon some four-footed beast, endowed with such speed and endurance as will carry him out of its range, then there is only one course left, and that is for him to lay flat upon the ground, to cover his head, to scrape a hole in the sand into which to bury his face, and to hang on to his breath and commend his spirit to his Maker, until the fell monster has passed over him and proceeded upon its death-dealing way.
Zarah was not a leader of men, or the mother of her children, or a child of the desert for nothing.
She turned and raised her right hand, and smiled at her men when they shouted and closed in a ring about her, the horses on her right, the camels on her left, whilst Al-Asad urged his dromedary to her side and caught her mare’s halter, so that she rode between him and Ralph Trenchard.
“It’s almost certain death,” she shouted to Ralph Trenchard as he pressed his horse against her mare as they tore like the wind in the direction of the mountains they could not even see. “Almost certain death if we cannot outride it. The horses are——” She gave a sharp cry as a great puff of scorching wind blew over them, then shouted to Al-Asad.