Tales of the Ramad'han Author:James Augustus St. John General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1835 Original Publisher: R. Bentley Subjects: Islam in literature Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Religion / Islam / General Social Science / Islamic Studies Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustra... more »tions and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER VIII. " And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness .... The thing which I greatly feared, is come upon me; and that which I was afraid of, is come unto me .... By the blast of God they perish, by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed .... And they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven." Book of Job. It is needless to describe, day by day, the movements of the caravan. The heat was intense, and the toil so overpowering, that the caniels soon began to fall under their burdens, and perish on the sands; so that their track across the desert was marked by the carcases of the sumpter animals. Next, death began to make its appearance among the camp attendants and female slaves, over whose bodies was thrown a little sand, which the first storm would perhaps blow away, leaving their nakedbodies to be torn in pieces and devoured by the jackals and hyenas. Though accustomed from his boyhood to escort caravans by this route at all seasons of the year, the old -Ab- abde chief declared he had never experienced so extraordinary a state of the atmosphere. Almost from the moment of its appearing above the horizon, the fierce ardour of the sun, which seemed by some convulsion in the heavens to be driven from its course, and to roll daily many thousand miles nearer the earth, was, to all but the Bedouins, literally intolerable. Not a breath was stirring upon the vas...« less