In less than two minutes the world, the atmosphere, everything had ceased to be.  It was a universe of dust and sand, hurtling—­God knew whither.

In the suddenness of the storm’s descent upon her, Beth became speechless with dismay.  Her mare dropped her head and slowly continued to walk.  Road, hills, desert—­all had disappeared.  To go onward was madness; to remain seemed certain death.  Despair and horror together gripped Beth by the heart.  There was nothing in the world she could do but to close her eyes and double low above the saddle, her hat bent down to shield her face.

At the end of a few minutes only the frightfulness of the thing could no longer be endured.  Beth had been all but torn from her seat by the sheer weight and impact of the wind.  All the world was roaring prodigiously.  The sand and dust, driving with unimaginable velocity, smoked past in blinding fury.

The mare had ceased to move.  Beth was aware of her inertia, dimly.  She remembered at last to dismount and stand in the animal’s shelter.  At length on the raging and roaring of the air-sea, crashing onward in its tidal might, came a fearful additional sound.  It was rushing onward towards the girl with a speed incredible—­a sound of shrieking, or whistling, that changed to a swishing as if of pinions, Titanic in size, where some monstrous winged god was blown against, his will in a headlong course through the tumult.

Then the something went by—­the whole roof of a house—­from twenty miles away.  It scraped in the earth, not ten feet off from where the pony stood—­and she bolted and ran for her life.

Down went Beth, knocked over by the mare.  With a hideous crash the flying roof was hurled against a nearby pinnacle of rock.  The wooden wings split upon the immovable obstruction, and on they went as before.

The pony had disappeared, in panic that nothing could have allayed.  The storm-pall swallowed her instantly, Beth could not have seen her had she halted a rod away.  Her eyes had been opened for half a moment only before she was flung to the earth.  She was rolling now, and for the moment was utterly powerless to rise or to halt her locomotion.

When she presently grasped at a little gray shrub, came to a halt, and tried to stand erect, she was buffeted bodily along by the wind with no strength in her limbs to resist.

She was blown to the big rock pinnacle on which the roof had been divided.  An eddy twisted her rudely around to the shelter, and she flung herself down upon the earth.

CHAPTER XXV

A TIMELY DELIVERANCE

How long she lay there Beth could never have known.  It seemed a time interminable, with the horror of the storm in all the universe.  It was certainly more than an hour before the end began to come.  Then clouds and the blizzard of sand and dust, together with all the mighty roaring, appeared to be hurled across the firmament by the final gust of fury and swept from the visible world into outer space.