Nothing can equal the beauty of the night in these arid wilds, doubly grateful after the heat and glare of the day. We, the sons of a colder clime, accustomed to see the starry firmament faintly glimmering through a misty haze, can have no idea of the magnificence of its luminous worlds brightly sparkling through an atmosphere of incomparable clearness. Grazing at these isles of light the soul rises on the wings of adoration to Him who made them. The desert is the image of the Infinite; no place is more apt to awaken religious feelings, and no time is fitter for devotion than its still and solitary night. He, who, in the desert does not hear the voice of God, knows not the Almighty, and ranks far below the wandering Arab, who, after the toil of the sultry day, reverentially bows down his forehead in prayer over the sand of the desert. Falling on his knees he exclaims: ‘Allah hu akbar! God is greater:’ greater than all created things, which only bear witness to His greatness.
But it is not alone the sublime grandeur of the desert which raises the spirit of man to his Maker; its terrors also make him vividly feel the Almighty presence, for when the sense of his helplessness becomes overpoweringly acute, he then instinctively looks for protection above.
As the conflicting air-currents of the ocean occasion water-spouts, the terror of the mariner; so also sandspouts or trombs arise in rotatory eddies from the midst of the desert, and assume the form of mighty columns, sometimes slowly moving along, at others advancing with menacing swiftness.
As they rapidly scud with the wings of the whirlwind over the plain-- huge, yellow shafts with lofty heads horizontally bent backwards in the form of clouds, it requires but little stretch of fancy to enter into the Bedouin’s superstition, and, like the imaginative sons of the desert, suppose them to be the genii of the waste which cannot be caught, a notion arising from the fitful movements of the wind-eddy that raises them. As they advance, the pious Moslem stretches out his finger, exclaiming, ‘Avaunt, O thou ill-omened one!’
Every moment the dread columns change their station, their appearance, their form. Onward they move, with terrible rapidity; the sun tints them with the brilliancy of fire; the storm, whirling in and around them, cuts them into several branches, reunites them, now weakens and now again strengthens them; and when, the whirlwind having spent its force, they suddenly collapse, and relieve the traveller from the fear of immediate danger, he yet must not exult too soon, for generally these sandspouts are followed by the dreaded simoom.
