552 
THROUGH ASIA 
of thirst at the end of a few days. I assured him, that the 
compass was a perfectly trustworthy guide, and had led us 
due east all the time ; he had only to note the rise and 
setting of the sun to convince himself of the fact. His 
reply was that the dust-haze, together with telesmat (witch- 
craft), affected even the sun, so that it was no longer to be 
trusted to. 
On April 28th we were awakened by an unusually violent 
hurricane of wind out of the north-north-east, which en- 
veloped the camp in blinding clouds of sand. Up over 
the dunes dashed the whirling columns of sand, down they 
plunged on the lee side, and careered away one after the 
other in a frenzied dance. I tossed a handful of pieces of 
paper on the wind, and watched how they dropped to 
the ground directly they got to the sheltered side of the 
dunes, and there remained. The atmosphere w'as choked 
with dust and sand ; it was so thick that we were unable 
to see the summits of even the nearest dunes. We could 
not possibly have steered our course by the sun that day. 
There w'as not the faintest glimmer of light in the sky to 
indicate his position. This w'as the w’orst storm we had 
e.xperienced throughout the w'hole of our journey through 
the desert, one of those terrible kara-burans or “ black 
storms,” which convert day into night. 
We slept the previous night under the open sky. The 
night being cool, I lay down wrapped in my furs, with 
a bashhk (hood) pulled round my head. In the morning, 
when I awoke, I was literally buried in sand. A thick 
sheet of fine yellow’ sand covered my neck and breast. 
Fine yellow sand had penetrated through every opening in 
my clothing. When I stood up, it slipped down inside my 
shirt next my skin ; so that I had to take off my clothes 
and shake them. My furs w’ere indistinguishable from the 
surface of the dune. Every object about the camp was in 
a precisely similar plight, half smothered in sand. It 
cost us a great deal of trouble to fish them all out with 
our hand-staves. 
The going that day was fearful. We could not get a 
glimpse of our surroundings ; we did not know which way 
