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A PERILOUS DESERT JOURNEY. 97
part of the desert, was fearfully heavy. Had the whole
of the desert consisted, as I confess I previously thought it
did, of a chaos of sand-dunes 300 feet high, our journey
would certainly have ended in disaster. But counting on
my previous experience, I thought that, even if we lost
the camels and had to abandon all our belongings, we
five men would nevertheless be able to make our way out
on foot.
The scene that meets the eye to the east from the top of
one of those high dune-accumulations can only be described
as appalling, and yet it is at the same time unspeakably
grand in the sublimity of its desolation. You can see
nothing but the steep leeward slopes of the dunes shooting
almost vertically downwards from the crest of each suc-
cessive dune-accumulation. You imagine that it is a
veritable ocean of sand, the gigantic waves of which have
been suddenly arrested and fixed where they stand by some
invisible power, and only await the utterance of some
magic formula to roll on irresistibly farther, engulfing and
destroying everything that lies in their path.
At the third camp we tried to dig a well. At the depth
of 3:^ feet we got plenty of water, with a temperature of
40°. 6 Fahr., but it was as bitter as the most concentrated
salt-solution. It was evident we could not rely upon that
treacherous ground ; we must, therefore, exercise the
greatest possible economy in using up our blocks of ice.
Morning and evening we thawed only just as much as we
barely needed, and confined ourselves to three logs of wood,
two in the evening and one the next morning.
On the fourth day the storm blew from the north. The
atmosphere was heavily charged with flying dust and sand,
so that all we could see, through the thick haze which sur-
rounded us on every side, were the objects in our immediate
vicinity, and even then only indistinctly. The effect upon
our minds was both strange and awe-inspiring. At noon
7
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