Different however, was it with the slumbering castaways. Over them a peril was suspended--a real peril--of which perhaps, on that night not one of them was dreaming--and in which, perhaps, not one of them would have put belief,--but for the experience of it they were destined to be taught before the morning. Could an eye have looked upon them as they lay, it would have beheld a picture sufficiently suggestive of danger. It would have seen four human figures stretched along the bottom of a narrow ravine, longitudinally aligned with one another--their heads all turned one way, and in point of elevation slightly _en echelon_--it would have noted that these forms were asleep, that they were already half buried in sand, which, apparently descending from the clouds was still settling around them; and that, unless one or other of them awoke, all four should certainly become "smoored." What does this mean? Merely a slight inconvenience arising from having the mouth, ears, and nostrils obstructed by sand, which a little choking, and sneezing, and coughing would soon remove. Ask the Highland shepherd who has imprudently gone to sleep under the "blowin' sna'"; question the Scandinavian, whose calling compels him to encamp on the open "fjeld"; interrogate Swede or Norwegian, Finn or Lapp, and you may discover the danger of being "smoored." That would be in the snow,--the light, vascular, porous, permeable snow,--under which a human being may move, and through which he may breathe,--though tons of it may be superpoised above his body,--the snow that, while imprisoning its victim, also gives him warmth, and affords him shelter,--perilous as that shelter may be. Ask the Arab what it is to be "smoored" by sand; question the wild Bedouin of the Bled-el-jereed,--the Tuarick and Tiboo of the Eastern Desert,--they will tell you it is danger often _death_! Little dreamt the four sleepers as they lay unconscious under that swirl of sand,--little even would they have suspected, if awake,--that there was danger in the situation. There was, for all that, a danger, great as it was imminent,--the danger, not only of their being "smoored," but stifled, suffocated, buried fathoms deep under the sands of the Saaera, for fathoms deep will often be the drift of a single night. The Arabs say that, once "submerged" beneath the arenaceous "flood," a man loses the power to extricate himself. His energies are suspended, his senses become numbed and torpid--in short, he feels as one who goes to sleep in a snow-storm.