It was during the first day of the _khamseen_ that the engine-wheels became clogged with the remains of a man whom the whirling dust prevented from seeing or hearing anything of engines. The violence of the annual April _khamseen_ is incredible by those who haven't suffered it. The initial days of the _khamseen_ period the Egyptians celebrate in the festival of _Shem el Nessim_. They go out into the fields of the Delta (of the Delta, mark you) with music and with dancing. There's no disputing about taste--if, that is, the _khamseen_ is blowing "up to time." Nothing more distressing you'll meet amongst desert scourges. It's the _khamseen_ which kills camels in mid-desert by suffocation. That is a fair test of the driving and dust-raising powers of the storm. It begins with a zephyr for which the uninitiated thanks Allah in the first half-hour. By the end of an hour he is calling upon Allah for deliverance. At the end of a day he speculates upon his chances of seeing the morning. At the end of the second day he calls upon Allah to take away his life. The _khamseen_ this year lasted two days without intermission. It began at dark without further warning than that of a leaden sky and a compression of the atmosphere. But these are indications that are, in Egypt, so often indicative of nothing, that they lose significance altogether. On the 20th of April they proved to have been highly charged with meaning. In forty minutes the gale had reached its height. And there it stayed. Men expected relief momentarily; but it never came that night--nor the next day--nor the night following. "Such violence cannot last," said the Australian. In twenty-four hours he was not sure it might not last for ever. Few tents stood the strain longer than an hour. Men grumbled and turned in with a half-sense of security from the tempest without. They hardly looked for their house to come tumbling about their ears before midnight. But few escaped that; the others spent the night under fallen canvas. Sinaian desert sand cannot be expected to bear an indefinite strain upon tent-guys. Those tents which stood at sunrise (if sunrise it could be called) were kept up only by the frequent periodicity of the mallet's application in the thick night. As soon as one tent-peg left earth, the beginning of the end was come unless the inmate crouched out and replaced it and strengthened the others. He came back with ears and nose and eyes clogged and face stung painfully. At the third attempt to keep his home up he said: "I'll go no more! Damn it! Let it come!"--and it came.