230 
SAMIELL, OR WIND OF THE DESERT. 
such a plague, and was told they seldom were touched by it. It 
seems strange that their lungs should be so perfectly insensible 
to what seems instant destruction to the breath of man, but so it 
is, and they are regularly driven down to water at the customary 
times of day, even when the blasts are at the severest. The 
people who attend them, are obliged to plaister their own faces, 
and other parts of the body usually exposed to the air, with 
a sort of muddy clay, which in general protects them from its 
most malignant effects. The periods of the wind’s blowing are 
generally from noon till sun-set; they cease almost entirely 
during the night; and the direction of the gust is always from 
the north-east. When it has passed over, a sulphuric and 
indeed loathsome smell, like putridity, remains for a long time. 
The poison which occasions this smell, must be deadly ; for if 
any unfortunate traveller, too far from shelter, meet the blast, 
he falls immediately; and, in a few minutes his flesh becomes 
almost black, while both it and his bones at once arrive at so 
extreme a state of corruption that the smallest movement of the 
body would separate the one from the other. When we listen 
to these accounts, we can easily understand how the Almighty, 
in whose hands are all the instruments of nature, to work even 
the most miraculous effects, might, by this natural agent of the 
Samiell brought from afar, make it the brand of death by which 
the destroying angel wrought the destruction of the army of 
Sennacherib. Mine host also told me, that at the commence¬ 
ment of November the nights begin to be keen ; and then the 
people remove their beds from their airy and star-lit canopies 
at the tops of their houses, to the chambers within; a dull, but 
comfortable exchange when the winter advances, the cold being 
frequently at an excess to freeze the surface of the water in their 
