I drag myself wearily along, sinking deeply at every step.

I climb sand-hills of strange and fantastic shapes, cones, and domes, and roof-like ridges, where the sportive wind seems to have played with the plastic mass, as children with potter's clay.

I encounter huge basins like the craters of volcanoes, formed by the circling swirl; deep chasms and valleys, whose sides are walls of sand, steep, often vertical, and not unfrequently impending with comb-like escarpments.
All these features may be changed in a single night, by the magical breath of the "norther".

The hill to-day may become the valley to-morrow, and the elevated ridge have given place to the sunken chasm.
Upon the summits of these sand-heights I am fanned by the cool breeze from the Gulf.

I descend into the sheltered gorges, and am burned by a tropic sun, whose beams, reflected from a thousand crystals, torture my eyes and brain.