"Ah!" he screamed, raising himself with a superhuman effort.
Desperate, mad, he snatched at the weapon, and turned
the barrel toward his mouth.
"Kennedy!" shouted Joe, throwing himself upon his friend.
"Let go! hands off!" moaned the Scot, in a hoarse,
grating voice--and then the two struggled desperately for
the rifle.
"Let go, or I'll kill you!" repeated Kennedy. But
Joe clung to him only the more fiercely, and they had
been contending thus without the doctor seeing them for
many seconds, when, suddenly the rifle went off. At the
sound of its discharge, the doctor rose up erect, like a
spectre, and glared around him.
But all at once his glance grew more animated; he extended
his hand toward the horizon, and in a voice no
longer human shrieked:
"There! there--off there!"
There was such fearful force in the cry that Kennedy
and Joe released each other, and both looked where the
doctor pointed.
The plain was agitated like the sea shaken by the fury
of a tempest; billows of sand went tossing over each other
amid blinding clouds of dust; an immense pillar was seen
whirling toward them through the air from the southeast,
with terrific velocity; the sun was disappearing behind an
opaque veil of cloud whose enormous barrier extended
clear to the horizon, while the grains of fine sand went
gliding together with all the supple ease of liquid particles,
and the rising dust-tide gained more and more with
every second.
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