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When the sun rose over the hills, water was again trickling from the stream behind the dwelling of Hadassah; the oleanders were not yet dead, they would bloom into beauty again. I shall pass lightly over the events of several succeeding months. The summer passed away, with its intense heat and its fierce simooms. Then came heavier dews by night, and temperature gradually decreased by day.
The simooms which smote others on the desert jumped over the things which were mine. The storms which heaped the seashore with wrecks did but blow my ships the sooner into port. Strangest of all, I, so dependent upon others, fixed to a place like a dead thing, had never a loss by an agent never. The elements stooped to serve me, and all my servants, in fact, were faithful."
For simooms that scorch you and tempests that freeze; for sand-heaps and sand-hillocks and sand-roads; for men digging sand, for women shaking off sand, for minute boys crawling in sand; for sand in the church-slips and the gingerbread-windows, for sand in your eyes, your nose, your mouth, down your neck? up your sleeves, under your chignon, down your throat; for unexpected corners where tornadoes lie in wait; for "bleak, uncomforted" sidewalks, where they chase you, dog you, confront you, strangle you, twist you, blind you, turn your umbrella wrong side out; for "dimmykhrats" and bad ice-cream; for unutterable circus-bills and religious tea-parties; for uncleared ruins, and mills that spring up in a night; for jaded faces and busy feet; for an air of youth and incompleteness at which you laugh, and a consciousness of growth and greatness which you respect, it
During the first night two attempts were made to steal things from the cart; and two men were found dead in the morning. "On the second night there came on a violent storm, one of those terrible simooms of the desert which makes one feel his helplessness. We were overwhelmed with drifting sand.
The beef-herd, that had been the pivotal point of the round-up and had made the mighty plain echo to its stampings and bellowings, beating up simooms that choked it with thirst, blinded it with dust, confounding itself on every side by the very fury of its blind force, had trailed for a week, tractable as toys in the hands of children.
He had faced the wildest of storms, and bathed in the beams of the brightest sunshine. He was as familiar with wreck as with rations; every species of nautical disaster had befallen him; typhoons, cyclones, and simooms had done their worst to him, but they could not kill him, for Bill bore a sort of charmed life, and invariably turned up again, no matter how many of his shipmates went down.
It evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine, and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it, and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace "very dry." Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.
A prodigious stimulus was thus given to Greek intellectual activity. There were men who had marched with the Macedonian army from the Danube to the Nile, from the Nile to the Ganges. They had felt the hyperborean blasts of the countries beyond the Black Sea, the simooms and sand-tempests of the Egyptian deserts.
We have gay companions on our way; for a breeze overtakes us, and a hundred little simooms of drift whirl along beside us, and whelm in miniature burial whole caravans of dry leaves. Here, too, our track intersects with that of some previous passer; he has but just gone on, judging by the freshness of the trail, and we can study his character and purposes.
Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grass could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat, by the beatings of surf eternal.
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