Next morning we started early again, and made good progress once more, though by now the dunes were growing in height, up to twenty-five to thirty-five feet. We remarked that both to right and left they seemed higher still, but that may only have been the effect of looking out to the horizon. That day we made sixteen miles, for the higher dunes exacted their toll in the day’s march, although actually the pace did not seem much slower.
On the way Wrexham looked in vain for the place where he had found the dead man. The continually shifting sand-dunes left no chance of locating any spot not marked by some definite permanent feature, such as a clump of dead trees. By now the man’s bones or his mummified body were doubtless buried under the sands, perhaps to show up again centuries hence.
That night we looked out from a high dune—nearly fifty feet it must have been—over our route of next day, and saw that the dunes ahead were bigger than those we had crossed so far, and the sky, which had hitherto been cloudless, showed windy streakings to the northeast.
“Harder going to-morrow, I think,” said Wrexham, pointing to the wind-clouds on the horizon.
Sure enough, next morning at dawn a strong northeast wind was blowing, and everything was smothered in sand. Our tea was full of it, our food was gritty with it, and our hair and our clothes ran sand.
The dunes were higher now; fifty to sixty feet was about the average, and still we had the impression that our route was lower than the surrounding country. We covered only thirteen miles that day owing to the wind, the sand devils, and the heavier going and higher dunes. Our faces were masks of sand and perspiration, and we looked out with sand-reddened eyes under sand-whitened eyebrows.
That night we had to give the camels, who were showing signs of fatigue, a small water ration from our precious store. While we were watering them, Sadiq came up to suggest our turning back the next day. There could be no ruins in this wilderness of sand, he said, and there was not a vestige of a sign of any hills. But, if we would go back, he knew a man who had found really first-class ruins, and if we wanted mountains—well, there were lashings of them quite close to the trade route. Finding us obdurate, he gave up his endeavours, but I could see that he was convinced that all sanity had departed from us, and was doubtless entreating Allah to turn us back soon.
“To-morrow evening, anyway, we ought to get the first view of the snow, provided that the air clears a bit,” said Wrexham, as we sat in the stuffy tent with the flies laced up, trying to eat food that was not more than one third sand.
“If there is any snow in the world,” said Forsyth, whose eyes seemed to have suffered more than ours from the driving gritty wind. “I had an idea that the dust of Mespot was the last word, but it’s only toilet powder compared to this article.”
He ruefully scraped the top of his chupatti, hoping to get below the outer layers of sand.