The following morning the wind was less, but it freshened again later. The dunes were now great billows sloping up to seventy and eighty feet, and taxed the camels severely. Still we pushed on, struggling hour after hour, through the heavy loose sand among the little spumes and fountains that danced and tossed on the brinks of the dunes where the cutting wind beat into our faces. When we halted that evening, after doing thirteen miles, the wind was perhaps a little less, but all around the horizon was veiled and grey with sand.
Next day the going was as bad—dunes up to nearly one hundred feet in places—and the wind stronger, while about midday the father and mother of all dust-storms came on, one of the kind that makes you think it’s midnight in Hades. For an hour we sat huddled up in the lee of a dune, a circle of dumb men and dumb beasts, under the biting lash of a sand-laden wind that seemed to flow past like some torrent of grit. The two Punjabis had swathed their faces in the ends of their pagris, and the rest of us buried ours as well as we could in the big collars of our poshtins.
It passed at last, but it was another hour ere we thought it was worth going on. Nine miles was all we made that day, and some of the dunes must have been over one hundred and twenty feet high.
The camels were showing clearly their weariness and lack of water, as they swayed along slowly, with lack-lustre eyes, dragging gait, and heavy breathing through distended nostrils. That night again we had to give them some more of our precious water, and it became clear that, unless we could get some definite proof of hills in front within the next thirty-six hours there could be no question of going on.
“Perhaps we shall get a fine day to-morrow,” said the ever-optimistic Wrexham. “I want to see the snow the diary talks about.”
“If ever I see snow or water again, I shall go and lie in them and refuse to move again till all the sand I’ve absorbed these last forty-eight hours is washed right out of my system,” snorted Forsyth, bathing his sore eyes in half a teacupful of water.
“Well, I hope you’ll see some to-morrow, though it will be a bit far off for bathing. It’s still absolutely hidden by sand to-night.”
Next day the wind had dropped, though a heavy dust haze still hung in the air. Like the previous day, the dunes were great high slopes, anything from eighty to one hundred feet. But the cessation of the wind made going easier, and the thinning atmosphere made us hopeful of a glimpse of the promised hills.
By the midday halt the sky was pretty clear all round, save in the one direction we wanted to see, and there, instead of our hills, was a heavy bank of cloud. Wrexham and I sat down despondently on the high dune up which we had climbed while Payindah was getting out some food, and looked out with our glasses at the distant clouds. We scanned each little bit of the bank, seeking in vain for the white glint of snow.
Suddenly Wrexham gripped my shoulder.