Sure enough, next morning at dawn a strong northeast wind was blowing, and everything was smothered in sand. Our tea was full of it, our food was gritty with it, and our hair and our clothes ran sand. The dunes were higher now; fifty to sixty feet was about the average, and still we had the impression that our route was lower than the surrounding country. We covered only thirteen miles that day owing to the wind, the sand devils, and the heavier going and higher dunes. Our faces were masks of sand and perspiration, and we looked out with sand-reddened eyes under sand-whitened eyebrows. That night we had to give the camels, who were showing signs of fatigue, a small water ration from our precious store. While we were watering them, Sadiq came up to suggest our turning back the next day. There could be no ruins in this wilderness of sand, he said, and there was not a vestige of a sign of any hills. But, if we would go back, he knew a man who had found really first-class ruins, and if we wanted mountains--well, there were lashings of them quite close to the trade route. Finding us obdurate, he gave up his endeavours, but I could see that he was convinced that all sanity had departed from us, and was doubtless entreating Allah to turn us back soon. “To-morrow evening, anyway, we ought to get the first view of the snow, provided that the air clears a bit,” said Wrexham, as we sat in the stuffy tent with the flies laced up, trying to eat food that was not more than one third sand. “If there _is_ any snow in the world,” said Forsyth, whose eyes seemed to have suffered more than ours from the driving gritty wind. “I had an idea that the dust of Mespot was the last word, but it’s only toilet powder compared to this article.” He ruefully scraped the top of his _chupatti_, hoping to get below the outer layers of sand. The following morning the wind was less, but it freshened again later. The dunes were now great billows sloping up to seventy and eighty feet, and taxed the camels severely. Still we pushed on, struggling hour after hour, through the heavy loose sand among the little spumes and fountains that danced and tossed on the brinks of the dunes where the cutting wind beat into our faces. When we halted that evening, after doing thirteen miles, the wind was perhaps a little less, but all around the horizon was veiled and grey with sand. Next day the going was as bad--dunes up to nearly one hundred feet in places--and the wind stronger, while about midday the father and mother of all dust-storms came on, one of the kind that makes you think it’s midnight in Hades. For an hour we sat huddled up in the lee of a dune, a circle of dumb men and dumb beasts, under the biting lash of a sand-laden wind that seemed to flow past like some torrent of grit. The two Punjabis had swathed their faces in the ends of their _pagris_, and the rest of us buried ours as well as we could in the big collars of our _poshtins_.