SUNRISE OVER A DESERT.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 543, 19 February 1913, Page 2

SUNRISE OVER A DESERT.

Now longwhile our black booths hatl been built upon the sandy stretches, lying before the swelling white .\>fud side ; the lofty coast of Trnan in front, whose cragged beaches, where '.:■< any footing foi small herbs nourished of this barren atmosphere, are the harbour of wild goats, which never drink. The summer's night at end, the sun stands up as a crown of hostile flames from that huge covert of inhospitable sandstone bergs ; the desert day dawns not little and little, but it is noontkie in an hour. The sun. entering as a tyrant upon the waste landscape, darts upon us a torment of fiery beams, not to be remitted till the far-off evening.

No matins here of birds ; not a rook partridge-cock, calling with blithesome chuckle over the extreme waterless desolation.

Grave is that giddy heat upon the crown of the head ; the ears tingle with flickering shrillness, a subtle crepitation it seems, in the glass iness of this sun-stricken nature • the hot sand-blink is in the eves, and there is little refreshment to find tents' shelter ; the worsted booths leak to this fiery ram ol sunnv light. Mountains looming like dry bones through the thin air, stand far around about us : the savage Hank of Ybba Moghrair, the high spire and ruinous stacks of 01-Jebal, Chebad, the coast of Helwan !-Fro m "Wanderings in Arabia," by Charles M. Doughty.