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Updated: May 20, 2025
The storms threw vessel after vessel on the fatal reefs; there were snow-storm and sand-storms; the sand flew up to the houses, blocking the entrances, so that people had to creep up through the chimneys; that was nothing at all remarkable here. It was pleasant and cheerful indoors, where peat fuel and fragments of wood from the wrecks blazed and crackled upon the hearth.
There was another danger to which they were exposed in their march, more terrible even than the scarcity of water. It was that of being overwhelmed in the clouds of sand and dust which sometimes swept over the desert in gales of wind. These were called sand-storms.
From April to October the nights are close, and often very oppressive. During those hot months, both in the morning before the sea-breeze springs up and in the evening when it has died away, all animal creation falls into a torpid state. The perfect calm that then reigns is fearful in its stillness and painful in its effects. From May to August sand-storms frequently occur.
The only pleasant part is the suburb of Almendral, which, with its gardens and orchards, would be still more agreeable but for the sand-storms prevalent throughout nearly the whole of the year. In 1811, Valparaiso numbered only from four to five thousand inhabitants; but in 1825 the population had already tripled itself, and the increase showed no sign of ceasing.
In a tempest they thundered by, in a whirlwind, a scirocco of tan; her cheeks bore the kiss of an Eastern sun, and the sand-storms of her native desert were her satellites. What was Coralie, with her pink silk, her golden hair and slender limbs, beside this magnificent, full-figured Cleopatra? In a twinkling we were scouring the desert she and I and the two coal-black horses.
Hers always the desert seasons: the shrill, icy blast, the intense cold, the steely skies, the fading snows; the gray old sage and the bleached grass under the pall of the spring sand-storms; the hot furnace breath of summer, with its magnificent cloud pageants in the sky, with the black tempests hanging here and there over the peaks, dark veils floating down and rainbows everywhere, and the lacy waterfalls upon the glistening cliffs and the thunder of the red floods; and the glorious golden autumn when it was always afternoon and time stood still!
They were a most welcome shelter from sand-storms and other rigours of the Sinai winter. The order to camouflage them caused some difficulty. A party went down to the wadi and with infinite labour brought up some semi-liquid mud in waterproof sheets, but it was impossible to secure enough in this way.
In spite of runaways, bad roads, floods, sand-storms, battles, and hold-ups, the east and west bound stages usually made the distance in twenty-one days. And there was a long period during 1859 when the two mails which had started on the same day from the two termini met each other at exactly the half-way point. Apparently the Wells-Butterfield interests had won the struggle.
The passage was less than four feet high, and generations of sand-storms had polished its sloping granite floor so as to render it impossible to descend except by resting one's hands on the roof above and lowering one's self foot by foot. A passage of this description, descending at a sharp angle for over two hundred feet, is not particularly easy to negotiate, and progress was slow. Dr.
Small sand-storms swirled across the flat land, and filled their train. They were dirty and tired. They would all be glad when the little desert station of Benito would be reached and they could transfer to the automobiles that would carry them to the hills and the ranch. Summer storms raged ahead of them, big black clouds that threatened.
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