526 
THROUGH ASIA 
about our ears. But, the whirlwind passed, we stood 
still and literally shook the dust off our clothes by the 
pound. I had brought with me a good stock of snow- 
spectacles, with a fine mesh-work of black wire across 
them ; these now proved invaluable, although the fine sand 
partly forced itself in between the tiny meshes. 
There was however one advantage attending a westerly 
gale. It tended to level down the abrupt faces of the 
sand-dunes, and hurl them over on to the eastern sides. 
And yet what can one hurricane effect as against the 
labour of centuries ? 
My men set out in the morning full of hope that before 
evening we should reach a part of the desert where the 
dunes were lower, and where we should be able to find 
water, and maybe pasture for the camels, and fuel for 
a fire as well. But no such thing. The sand-hills grew 
higher and higher, and we drifted further and further 
into the unknown terrors of the desert. Only once 
during the day did the dunes become really lower, 
namely forty to fifty feet. In that solitary spot we 
caught a glimpse of a few patches of bare level soil, 
partly clay, partly sheeted with saline incrustations. 
At first it had been my intention to keep steadily on 
towards the south-east, in order to find out how far it was 
before the Masar-tagh cropped up again out of the sand of 
the Takla-makan Desert. But we saw no glimpse of a 
mountain, and so gradually bent our course round to the 
east, under the belief that that was the shortest way to 
the Khotan-daria. Islam Bai was our pilot now, and 
excellently well he did the work. He went on a good 
distance ahead, picking out the easiest path, and holding 
the compass in his hand all the time. Down he went 
behind a dune, and became lost to sight ; but he soon 
reappeared on the crest of the next ridge, then down again ; 
and so it went on, time after time. The caravan followed 
slowly in his footsteps. Our line of march thus formed an 
undulating curve, winding across the troughs of the desert 
waves, and over the saddles of the dunes, i.e. the lower 
transverse ridges which connected the loftier crests, and 
