When day had fully dissipated the faint haze of morning we endeavoured to appraise the contours of this gross, amorphous entity,--for the concept that it was one and indivisible had gradually but irresistibly formed. It grew more and more enormous; more gross and inimical. Irregular and convoluted ridges arose from it here and there; it appeared to be absolutely bare of vegetation. In the centre was piled a humped, bulging mass; out of this Bantom Berg lifted its clean-cut cone of granite,--a soaring sphynx still waiting for the carver's chisel. Here and there columns of dust--slender beneath but widely dilating above at an enormous height, stalked slowly over the body of the prone monster, marking each the path of a miniature whirlwind. As we drew near, the face of the dune-tract once more became indefinite and complicated; for a time the eye could not follow nor appraise its details. But suddenly the thing explained itself; from the central mass, the prostrate carcase of the obscene creature, a number of league-long tentacles, consisting of sand-dunes, extended. These were thick at the base, but they tapered away to nothingness. Like a crouching spider or a half-huddled cuttle-fish the monstrosity sprawled,--its talon-tentacles seeming to gather in the plains--to infest them like a malignant cancer. The character of the country we were traversing had changed; again the ground was hard beneath our feet; angular fragments of limestone were strewn over its surface. It was as though the dune-devil had collected and assimilated the surface sand so that its loathly limbs might develop. Inexpressibly sinister was this creature,--this mysterious, insatiable intruder from the desolate northern wastes. It seemed to be endowed with some low-graded form of rudimentary life; otherwise it was hard to account for the definite and arbitrary variations in the scheme of its southward advance. For the tentacles did not all extend in the same direction; occasionally one curved in its course and developed against the prevailing wind. The dune-monster was the slow-pacing steed of the Thirst King; it was his throne, his host and his strong city; it was the abhorrent body of which he was the resistless and implacable soul!