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Updated: June 17, 2025
"From your description I am not anxious to make the acquaintance of Khamsîn!" Sime shook his head, knocking out his pipe into the ash-tray. "This is a funny country," he said reflectively. "The most weird ideas prevail here to this day ideas which properly belong to the Middle Ages.
The lowlands and highlands around the settlement looked white-patched with mounds, veins, and scatters of quartz. The evening was stillness itself, broken only by the cries of the Katas, which are now nesting, as they flocked to drink; and the night was cool a promise, and a false promise, that the Khamsin had ended on its usual third day.
"Yes, yes! it is Sahara Desert! come across the Sahara Desert, and is come to Khartûm." "How did he get there?" asked Cairn. The Indian shrugged his shoulders. "I cannot say, but next he come to Wady Halfa, then he is in Assouan, and from Assouan he come down to Luxor! Yesterday an Egyptian friend told me Khamsîn is in the Fayûm.
He followed, and joined the rest of the tent's company in recovering the tattered remnants, and towels, and personal property which had strayed into the domain of the next regiment. Camp was not a healthy spot in the khamsin days, Mac decided. Coins to a piastreless cobber smoothed over a horse-picket difficulty, and he passed out of the camp by back ways.
Motionless, immobile, save for a slow smile, Antony Ferrara stood, and Cairn kept his eyes upon the evil face, and with trembling hands clutched the bars. "It is certainly odd, is it not," resumed the taunting voice, "that Khamsîn, so violent, too, should thus descend upon the Cairene season? I only arrived from the Fayûm this evening, Cairn, and, do you know, they have the pestilence there!
He had heard of the disfavour in which the Inglesi was; but, as he looked at David's face with its quiet smile, the influence which he felt in the desert long ago came over him again. "By Allah," he said aloud abstractedly, "it is a face that will not hide when the khamsin blows! Who shall gainsay it? If he were not an infidel he would be a Mahdi."
There was talk of gilded palaces, Saracenic splendours and dark suggestions from the Arabian Nights. Still, the ten thousand pounds went to David and Hope where they smilingly laboured through the time of high Nile and low Nile, and khamsin and sirocco, and cholera, and, worse than all, the banishments to the hot Siberia of Fazougli.
For instance" he began to recharge the hot bowl "it is not really time for Khamsîn, consequently the natives feel called upon to hunt up some explanation of its unexpected appearance. Their ideas on the subject are interesting, if idiotic. He laughed gruffly, but Cairn was staring at him with a curious expression.
There we had a good defensive position, but the trenches still had to be dug and, as luck would have it, this digging, which ought to have been nothing to our men fit as they were, in ordinary weather, was turned into a very high trial indeed by a khamsin.
As Cambyses had heard at Thebes, that the army he had sent against the oasis of Ammon in the Libyan desert, had perished miserably in a Khamsin, or Simoom, and that his fleet, which was to conquer Carthage, had refused to fight with a people of their own race, he fancied that the Memphians must be celebrating a festival of joy at the news of his misfortunes, sent for their principal men, and after reproaching them with their conduct, asked why they had been gloomy and morose after his victories, but joyous at hearing of his misfortunes.
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