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Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of scudding sand-pillars wind-jinnee of the Empty Abodes that danced and mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaming lakes, afar. But though they had lost the complete rationality that would have bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still remembered the pact of the mirages.
Indeed I doubt not that the story-teller was thinking of such sand-pillars when he wrote that wonderful description. You may see them in the East by thousands.
At one place, where several smaller valleys opened upon us, these sand-pillars, some small, some large, were promenading about by dozens, looking much like the genie when the fisherman had just let him out of the bottle, and saw him with astonishment beginning to shape himself into a giant of monstrous size.
There seems to be hardly a village in the plain; and the only buildings we see for miles are the herdsmen's houses of stone, flat-roofed, dark inside, and uninviting in their appearance, and the great cattle-pens, the corrals, which seem absurdly too large for the herds that we have yet seen; but in two or three months there will be rain, the ground will be covered with rank grass, the corrals will be crowded with cattle every evening; the mirage will depart when real water comes, dust and sand-pillars will be no longer to be seen, and all the nine horses and mules of the diligence-team, floundering, splashing, and kicking, will hardly keep the heavy coach from settling down inextricably in the mire.
The sole, a broad expanse of loose red arenaceous matter, the washings of the plateau, is fearfully burrowed and honeycombed; it is also subject, like its sister the Sadr, to the frequent assault of "devils," or sand-pillars. That it is plentifully supplied with water, we learn from the presence of birds.
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