streaming across the desert and flung the long shadders of
the camels on the gold sand like a thousand grand-daddy-long-legses
marching in procession. We never went very near it, because we knowed
better now than to act like that and scare people's camels and break up
their caravans. It was the gayest outfit you ever see, for rich clothes
and nobby style. Some of the chiefs rode on dromedaries, the first we
ever see, and very tall, and they go plunging along like they was on
stilts, and they rock the man that is on them pretty violent and churn
up his dinner considerable, I bet you, but they make noble good time,
and a camel ain't nowheres with them for speed.

The caravan camped, during the middle part of the day, and then started
again about the middle of the afternoon. Before long the sun begun to
look very curious. First it kind of turned to brass, and then to copper,
and after that it begun to look like a blood-red ball, and the air got
hot and close, and pretty soon all the sky in the west darkened up and
looked thick and foggy, but fiery and dreadful--like it looks through
a piece of red glass, you know. We looked down and see a big confusion
going on in the caravan, and a rushing every which way like they was
scared; and then they all flopped down flat in the sand and laid there
perfectly still.

Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide
wall, and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and
it was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck
us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against
our faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out:

"It's a sand-storm--turn your backs to it!"

We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand
beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we
couldn't see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we
was setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our
heads out and could hardly breathe.

Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off
across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out
and looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn't anything
but just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people
and camels was smothered and dead and buried--buried under ten foot of
sand, we reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind
uncovered the