She swayed and choked as a blast of poisonous wind blew right across them, then staggered closer to Ralph Trenchard as, choking, gasping, he brought the camel to the ground with the heel of his heavy riding-boot upon its knees, and fell. He fell beside Zarah, his arm across her.
Holding his breath for one perilous moment, he lifted his head and looked about him.
The camels lay humped together, their long necks stretched upon the ground, their muzzles buried in the sands; the men lay alongside, their heads pushed under the beasts’ heaving flanks, their faces wrapped in their cloaks and pressed into the sand. Far out in the desert, tails and manes flying in the scorching wind, the horses fled, close together, as though pursued by a thousand devils. The sound of their hoofs upon the sand came faintly, like distant thunder, to be lost in the moaning of the dread simoom as it advanced slowly, writhing, bending, flinging its purple draperies heavenward like some gigantic dancer seen in nightmare.
It was a pillar of horror against the night sky, in front of which fled life, in the wake of which lay a path of death.
Then Ralph Trenchard, with heart hammering, blood thundering in his ears, and brain beating as though it must break the skull, struggled to his knees. The world, like a molten mass of red-hot lead, seemed to weigh upon his shoulders; a band of white-hot iron to encircle his chest; a sponge soaked with boiling water to lay upon his face as he struggled to get out of his coat.
He fell forward upon his hands, the sweat pouring down his agonized face; he raised himself and with a mighty effort pulled his coat off. The fringe of the air eddies lifted the loose ends of the men’s cloaks and tore at the coat he grasped between his teeth as he pressed close to the Arabian girl, who lay motionless on the ground. He laid himself down close beside her, so close that his cheek touched hers and lifting her head, with infinite pain spread the coat upon the ground and wrapped it about her head and his own head, even as the men had wrapped their cloaks, and held the edges tight as the full weight of the simoom’s poison-filled centre passed over them.
Favoured of the gods, they lay for two minutes under the scorching weight—two minutes in which the camel, driven mad by the cheetahs which fought with frenzy in their cage upon its back, scrambled to its feet and fled into the centre of the simoom, there to drop dead; a few seconds in which it seemed to the men that great steamrollers of red-hot steel passed backwards and forwards over them, as they prayed to Allah the Merciful, and held their breath for an eternity of time which was counted in one hundred and twenty ticks of the watch upon the white man’s wrist.
They lay long after the pillar of horror had passed, incapable of movement, their heads pressed under the heaving flanks of the camels, which lay there motionless, and were quite capable of lying there, in their camel-headed foolishness, until another simoom should overtake them.
The desert stretched peacefully under the glittering stars when Al-Asad stirred, pulled the cloak from about his head and his head from under the camel’s flank. He stretched his aching limbs and felt his throbbing head, laughing huskily as he kicked the nearest camel into a consciousness of life and lifted his nearest unconscious neighbour and propped him against the camel’s back. He sat for awhile filling his lungs with the desert air, then rose stiffly and crossed to where Ralph Trenchard and the Arabian girl lay side by side as still as death. He fingered his dagger as he looked at the white man, then laughed and shook his head and removed the coat from about their heads and twined his slender hands in the woman’s hair, then removed Ralph Trenchard’s arm from about her shoulders and lifted her up against his heart.