On this occasion his musical efforts seemed curiously to take effect. The camel for some time remained shuffling uneasily on the ground, probably in considerable pain. But after a time he became quieter, and before long he stretched his long neck out upon the ground and apparently went to sleep.
The day after our operation on the camel we started off again for the “Valley of the Mist” and Qway’s high black mountain.
The weather at the beginning of April is always variable. A strong northerly wind sprang up towards evening, on the third day out, and made things rather uncomfortable. The sky at dusk had a curious silvery appearance that I had noticed often preceded and followed a sand storm. It was presumably caused by fine sand particles in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The wind dropped after dark, as it frequently does in the desert, but it sprang up again in the morning with increased strength. During the night it worked round from north towards the east, and by morning had got round still farther, and was blowing a gale from the south, right into our teeth.
Soon after our start, we found considerable difficulty in making any headway against it, and before long we were marching into a furious gale. One of the beasts, which was perhaps rather overloaded, was several times brought to a standstill by a violent gust. An unusually powerful one that struck him fairly brought him down on his knees. We got him on his feet again, but had gone but a short way when another camel followed his example. Then the first one came down again and this time threw his load.
It was obviously useless to attempt to proceed, so having reloaded the camel, we retraced our steps to a hill at the foot of which we had camped. It was, of course, quite out of the question to pitch the tent, so it was left tied up in a bale, together with the other baggage, while we climbed up on to a ledge that ran round the hill, about twenty feet above its base. Here we were above the thickest of the clouds of sand that swept over the surface of the ground so densely that it was hardly possible to see more than a few yards in any direction.
Towards the afternoon the wind increased if anything in force, and small stones could be heard rattling about among the rocks on the hill. It veered round once more till it was blowing again from the north. The gale had considerably fallen off by sunset. I accordingly, rather to my subsequent regret, decided to spend the night at the bottom of the hill.
When I got out my bedding, I picked up a woollen burnus and shook it to get rid of the sand. It blazed all over with sparks. I put the end of my finger near my blankets, and drew from them a spark of such strength that I could very faintly feel it. When I took off the hat I was wearing I found that my hair was standing on end—this I hasten to state was only due to electricity.
The wind died out towards morning. I had, however, to get up several times before midnight to shake off the sand that had accumulated on my blankets, to prevent being buried alive, for it drifted to an extraordinary extent round the flanks of the hill.
We had started off some time the following morning before it struck me that there was something wrong with the baggage, and I found that the tent had been left behind. We found it at the foot of the hill completely buried by the sand that must have banked up during that gale to the height of two or three feet against the hill.
The horrors of a sand storm have been greatly overrated. An ordinary sand storm is hardly even troublesome, if one covers up one’s mouth and nose in the native fashion and keeps out of the sand. A certain amount of it gets into one’s eyes, which is unpleasant, but otherwise there is not much to complain about. On the other hand, there is an extraordinarily invigorating feeling in the air while a sand storm is blowing—due perhaps to the electrified condition of the sand grains, which, from some experiments I once made on the sand blown off a dune, carry a fairly high charge of positive electricity.