the somber bastion of cloud heaved its sooty
bulk up the sky. The air stagnated and the whole desert was soundless.

A round and tumbled mass, blue-black but attended by a copper-colored
rack, detached itself from a shelf-like stratum of cloud, and
elongating, seemed to descend to the surface of the sea. Daylight went
out instantly and a prolonged moan came from the distant east.
Blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the whirling mass and almost
absolute darkness fell after each bolt. Out of the inky midnight
toward the east came an ever-increasing sound of a maddened sea,
gathering in volume and fury and menace. Kenkenes flung himself on his
face and waited.

He did not have long to wait.

With a noise of mighty rending, reinforced by a continuous roll of
savage thunder, the storm struck. A spinning cone of wind caught a
great expanse of sand, and lifting the loose covering, carried a huge
twisting column inland--death and entombment for any living thing it
met. With it went a great blast of spray, stones, sea-weed, masses of
sedge uprooted bodily, much wreckage, palm trees, small huts which went
to pieces as they were carried along, wild and domestic animals,
anything and everything that lay in the path of the storm.

The rotatory movement passed with the first whirl, but a hurricane,
blowing with overcoming velocity, pressed like a wall against anything
that strove to face it. Its hoarse raving filled Kenkenes' ears with
titanic sound. The breath was snatched from his nostrils; his eyelids,
tightly closed, were stung with sharply driven sand. Though he
struggled to his feet and attempted to proceed, he staggered and
wandered and was prone to turn away from the solid breast of the mighty
blast. He could not hope to make headway blinded, yet he dared not
lift his face to the sand. He could make a shelter over his eyes that
he might watch his feet, but he could not discover path and direction
in this manner.

The day was far advanced, and already the army had outstripped him.
Might not Har-hat at this hour be descending with his veterans,
seasoned against the simoons of Arabia, upon Israel, demoralized in the
storm?

Desperate, the young man dropped his hands and flung up his head.

He was standing in a soft light, very faintly diffused about him but
narrowing ahead of him, brightening, as it contracted, into almost
daytime brilliance to the south. The illuminated strip was not wide;
the platea