“Shall we pitch the tents?” Tofi asked at last. The sun was high. It seemed now that they would not go beyond this place before noon.

“No,” Norit said shortly, in a tone not inviting question. “Stay still.”

Marak shrugged and found occupation sharpening his boot-knife, as Hati and two of the helpers had tucked up and attempted to sleep.

Norit combed out the one tassel and three or four others.

Then a haze in the west caught Marak’s eye, a fuzzy seam on the far horizon that grew wider and wider and wider every instant.

“Hati,” he said as it grew. And to all of them, “Storm.”

Damn Luz, there was no time to pitch the tent. The storm came like sand flowing downhill: it went from that seam to a band across the horizon to a towering wall faster than he had ever seen a storm move, less like a wind than a landslide. In hardly longer than a panicked mind could think about it, that wall filled the sky, and rushed over them with a stench of earth and heat like nothing Marak had ever smelled.

The beasts did not attempt to rise: with successive shoves of their knees and hind feet, they shifted about to present their backsides to that oncoming wind, burdens and all.

Sand began to blast over them, stinging exposed skin.

“Get together!” Tofi shouted, flinging his arms about Marak and Hati. The au’it folded her book and put away her writing kit. Norit moved closer to them, the au’it joined them; and Tofi’s two men, and they all pressed themselves against the sun-heated earth, together, making a single lump, robes tucked up for shelter.

The moving sand deafened them and dimmed the light. Marak protected his eyes with the headcloth and tried to see through that veil, and found only greater dark and lesser. It grew hard to breathe through the folds of cloth. The smell was that of a sandstorm, and of hot sand and of deep sand and of burning.

There was no substance left in the air; they struggled for the least whisper of breath, losing strength, until at last the air came, tasting like the wind off a forge.

Lying together, faces buried in each other’s robes, they gasped and breathed such as they could, fighting for the dusty air they drew, and dared not move, while the wind roared over them, and kept on, and kept on.

But air there began to be, if only a trickle through cloth; and the sand that blasted over them began to settle long enough to become a weight in the folds of their robes. It found ways in among them, in the crooks of arms and legs, building supports under them, finding crevices to fill, threatening to bury them alive.