way back to the horses; who, the image of
despair, stood where I had left them.

I literally dragged them to the little bushes, which to my delight they
ate greedily; fruit, foliage, and even the bare twigs. So, again I was
respited; but I knew it to be only a respite, for the bushes were few,
and I could find no sign of others or of t'samma.

And so for days I wandered, finding a few of the berries here and
there, often half maddened and stupefied by them, my head awhirl too
with fever, alternately hoping and despairing, my sense of direction
almost gone, striving, whenever possible, to work north in my lucid
moments, but finding often by crossing my own spoor that I had been
wandering in a vain circle.

Then one afternoon, as I lay in a sort of semi-stupor beneath one of
the bushes that had yielded me a fair number of berries, a sharp gust
of wind aroused me, and looking around me I saw, whirling across the
bare dunes towards me, a huge cloud of thick opaque dust, gathering up
the loose sand as it sped, whirling high in the air and blotting out
the whole sky with its dense volume, snatching up, carrying away, and
burying deep again, all that came in its path. It was a sandstorm, and
I was in its path, here amongst the loose dunes, where escape seemed
impossible. I must fly or be buried! The horses, snorting with fear,
would have bolted had I not caught them quickly; and tired as they
were, they needed no urging on from the destroying monster that sped
relentlessly after them. The dunes were here low and open, and the red
berries on which the horses had lived of late, seemed to have maddened
and stimulated them, for they seemed to fly on the very wings of the
wind. Right before the storm they sped, the first advance gusts eddying
around us, the sky overhead already thick with the flying sand.

And now, maddened with fever, intoxicated with the strange stimulation
of the berries I too had been eating, I no longer fled in fear, but in
its place came a wild exhilaration, and I shouted aloud as I flogged
the panting horses to further efforts.

Now, to my disordered brain, the sandstorm was a legion of pursuing
fiends, that snatched at me from every gust and eddy; now, too, they
were gaining on us, and I shrieked and fought with the imaginary demons
as, in spite of the speed of the horses, the storm gained on us and
enveloped us more and more at every stride. And so for an eternity I
seemed to fly, now hemmed in with