Oh! curse the lions.

Why did you help me to salt, you old ass; why did you help me to salt?
It's pickling me behind." Then he became quite incoherent, and only groaned from time to time.
Perhaps, however, this suffering did us a service, since otherwise exhaustion, thirst, and dust might have overwhelmed our senses, and caused us to fall into a sleep from which we never should have awakened.
Yet at the time we were not grateful to it, for at last the agony became almost unbearable.

Indeed, Orme told me afterwards that the last thing he could remember was a quaint fancy that he had made a colossal fortune by selling the secret of a new torture to the Chinese--that of hot sand driven on to the victim by a continuous blast of hot air.
After a while we lost count of time, nor was it until later that we learned that the storm endured for full twenty hours, during the latter part of which, notwithstanding our manifold sufferings, we must have become more or less insensible.

At any rate, at one moment I remembered the awful roar and the stinging of the sand whips, followed by a kind of vision of the face of my son--that beloved, long-lost son whom I had sought for so many years, and for whose sake I endured all these things.
Then, without any interval, as it were, I felt my limbs being scorched as though by hot irons or through a burning-glass, and with a fearful effort staggered up to find that the storm had passed, and that the furious sun was blistering my excoriated skin.

Rubbing the caked dirt from my eyes, I looked down to see two mounds like those of graves, out of which projected legs that had been white.