orous, permeable
snow,--under which a human being may move, and through which he may
breathe,--though tons of it may be superpoised above his body,--the snow
that, while imprisoning its victim, also gives him warmth, and affords
him shelter,--perilous as that shelter may be.

Ask the Arab what it is to be "smoored" by sand; question the wild
Bedouin of the Bled-el-jereed,--the Tuarick and Tiboo of the Eastern
Desert,--they will tell you it is danger often _death_!

Little dreamt the four sleepers as they lay unconscious under that swirl
of sand,--little even would they have suspected, if awake,--that there
was danger in the situation.

There was, for all that, a danger, great as it was imminent,--the
danger, not only of their being "smoored," but stifled, suffocated,
buried fathoms deep under the sands of the Saaera, for fathoms deep will
often be the drift of a single night.

The Arabs say that, once "submerged" beneath the arenaceous "flood," a
man loses the power to extricate himself. His energies are suspended,
his senses become numbed and torpid--in short, he feels as one who goes
to sleep in a snow-storm.

It may be true; but, whether or no, it seemed as if the four English
castaways had been stricken with this inexplicable paralysis. Despite
the hoarse roaring of the breakers, despite the shrieking and whistling
of the wind, despite the dust constantly being deposited on their
bodies, and entering ears, mouth, and nostrils,--despite the stifling
sensation one would suppose they must have felt, and which should have
awakened them,--despite all, they continued to sleep. It seemed as if
that sleep was to be eternal!

If they heard not the storm that raged savagely above them, if they felt
not the sand that pressed heavily upon them, what was there to warn,
what to arouse them from that ill-starred slumber?

CHAPTER XII.

A MYSTERIOUS NIGHTMARE.

The four castaways had been asleep for a couple of hours,--that is, from
the time that, following the example of the young Scotchman, they had
stretched themselves along the bottom of the ravine. It was not quite an
hour, however, since the commencement of the sand-storm; and yet in this
short time the arenaceous dust had accumulated to the thickness of
several inches upon their bodies; and a person passing the spot, or even
stepping right over them, could not have told that four human beings
were buried beneath,--that is, upon the supposition that they wo