Just as the wind became strong enough to blow the sand in their teeth, it suddenly failed, and the air got hot and heavy once more. But it seemed hotter than it had been; the sweat poured from them and ran saltly upon their lips. And still the clouds grew in the north-west, until at last they suddenly obscured the star by which their leader steered. He stayed till the others joined him.
"Rain," he said, pointing to the heavy cloud bank. And as he spoke forked lightning ran upon the clouds and split them wonderfully, opening intense and awful depths.
As the Baker opened his mouth to speak, he heard a sound such as he had never heard before.
"Listen!" he cried, "what is it?"
And Smith stood still as he heard a roar which was not thunder nor loosed waters. It was the sound of a tornado in the desert, and he saw even in the dark a dun cloud low down, but close upon them. For as the distant thunder roared at last, another flash of lightning showed the white sand sea as in noon-day, and he beheld the desert rise.
"Lie down!" he cried, and the next moment the wind swept over them with a roar, and the grit flew like fine shot, screaming, and they grasped at unstable sand, which fled from between their fingers, to hold to the moving earth. At last they grasped each other and waited as the sand piled about them, as if it was alive, and got into their eyes and their hair and their dry mouths. They could not speak, and if they could have spoken, their voices would have been swallowed up; they could not open their eyes, and if they could they would have seen no more than if they had lain drowning in a turbid flood. But there was no rain.
Through the frightful uproar and the red blast there came now incredible and incessant flashes of lightning, which burnt into their brains even as they lay face down with closed eyes. And through the vast diapason of the organic storm were short splitting roars which shocked and half deafened them. They felt like blind beasts stricken of God in the wilderness; they were scapegoats for the crimes of things, and then they were nothing but struggling physical blots of mere suffering life. For the sand drifted upon them and covered them up. They struggled out of it, and were rolled over. They tore at each other for something to hold to.
They tore at each other for something to hold to.