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Updated: May 20, 2025
Thus, the camels being dead, and the river impassable, no corn could be brought from Sennaar and Watmedene: there was a famine in Khartoum neither fodder for animals, nor food for man. We remained two months at Khartoum. During this time we were subjected to intense heat and constant dust-storms, attended with a general plague of boils.
On the 22nd we turned due East towards some smokes and what appeared to be a range of hills beyond them. The smokes, however, turned out to be dust-storms, and the range to be immense sandhills. Here we saw the first desert oak, standing solitary sentinel on the crest of a ridge.
The air was heavy with dust and sand from the bed of the river, that filled boots and pockets and drifted down necks and coated eyebrows and moustaches. It was one of the worst dust-storms of the year. We were all huddled together close to the trembling horses, with the thunder clattering overhead, and the lightning spurting like water from a sluice, all ways at once.
The phenomena of dust-storms, well understood by scientists, are not uncommon on the coast of Africa. Reaching some distance out over the sea, they frequently cover the track of ships, as in the case of the one through which the Spray passed in the earlier part of her voyage.
The nations came whirling in out of the north and east like dust-storms, and amid the seeming chaos each was blended with its neighbour so as to toughen the fibre of the whole.
It was not told to me how they navigate themselves across the broken wastes, or by what arts they keep alive in the dust-storms and heat. That was taken for granted, and the man who took it so considered himself the most commonplace of mortals.
And if you abused these dust-storms to a Beewee black, you would insult him: it is not dust, it is the pollen off the pines, and so a multiplex totem to him! The winds belong to various totems, and the rains are claimed by the totem whose wind it was that blew it up. If a storm comes up without wind it belongs to Bohrah, the kangaroo.
Since our return we have been having dust-storms on an average of twice a week, big ones and little ones, lasting from a few hours to several days. There are two kinds: surface storms, when a tremendous wind blows dense clouds of fine, sharp dust along the streets and makes all outdoors intolerable; and overhead storms, which are another thing.
My husband and I now felt quite conquered; and it must be admitted we had reason. We had a horrible evening of dust-storms and hurricanes, and were dreadfully afraid of the tent being blown down. In the morning we packed, and the baggage was taken out to be tied in bundles, when Talib demanded the eleven dollars camel-hire for the day before.
One consequence of Hillyard's new humility was that he now loitered on his journey. He stayed a few days at Assouan and yet another few in Luxor, in spite of the heat, and reached Cairo in the beginning of June when the streets were thick with dust-storms and the Government had moved to Alexandria.
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