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One step outside the gate, and we are among the sand-hills that stretch for miles and miles round Vera Cruz. They are mere shifting sand-mounds; and, though some of them are fifty feet high, the fierce north wind moves them about bodily. The Texans know these winds well, and call them "northers."
The whole space between the mountain range to the north of the Brahmaputra and the river itself was covered with these sand-mounds, except in certain places where the soil was extremely marshy. Here our ponies sank in deep, soft mud. We splashed across several rivulets and skirted a number of ponds.
Let the others beat the drum and show the banner of the Prophet, for by the black stone their spears will have drunk deep ere they look upon the stars again." A long, straggling, boulder-strewn plateau lay on the summit of the red hills, sloping very precipitously to the plain, save at one point, where a winding gully curved downwards, its mouth choked with sand-mounds and olive-hued scrub.
After five days' more travelling over the same kind of desert as formerly described, except that the sand-mounds rose higher yet in front of us, still progressing eastwards, the well-remembered features of the Rawlinson Range and the terrible Mount Destruction rose at last upon my view.
No doubt the camels could get back alive, but ourselves and the horses could never have recrossed the frightful bed of rolling sand-mounds, that intervened between us and the water we had left. My poor old black companion was aghast at such a region, and also at what he considered my utter folly in penetrating into it at all.
Most of the graves were only little sand-mounds for temporary use, until the occupants should be carried back to China; but one was a great semi-circular vault, so grand and substantial-looking that it suggested the Egyptian Catacombs. Over one division of the graveyard, I saw a notice which I could partly read, saying that no woman or child could be buried there.
A gleam of fire, off to the left where the farther dunes approached the sea, suddenly began to show. All eyes turned toward it. The little fire soon grew into a leaping flame, its base hidden by sand-mounds. No Arabs were visible there, but they had surely lighted it, using driftwood from the beach.
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