c THE VERITABLE DESERT ' 251

bush. His efforts to catch it by the tail were amusing but
futile—perhaps happily !

The parallel ranges gradually merged into a stormy sea of
dunes and ridges without symmetry except that the horse-
shoe hollows seemed regularly to face south-west. On one
steepish slope :Ali, who led the way up, dismounted to
scrape away the uppermost crest of sand for our easier
passing. The dime summits stood about 200 feet above the
depressions, while the general level of the sandy downs and
ridges lay about half-way between the two. We halted for
the afternoon prayers and coffee on the open downs, where
we found the horns of a doe Oryx on the ground, where she
had apparently died of hunger. The horns were 29 inches
in length. Another raven appeared to investigate the cause
of our halting, and shortly afterwards as we marched over
the downs we sighted our baggage-animals ahead. Our
camp for the night was by a ridge of the Hibaka, near which
Farraj had located the earth of a Fennec fox and captured
its inhabitants, a male and a female, alive. A small snake had
also been taken during the march by the transport folk, and
that night the bright glare of my pressure-lamp attracted a
large company of moths l and other insects, including the
first grasshopper seen by me in the Rub* al Khali. It had
struck me as altogether extraordinary that, while butterflies
and even dragonflies had been comparatively plentiful from
time to time, not a single grasshopper had been seen in
country apparently so suitable for its activities. On coming
into camp we had seen the tracks of a Stone Curlew
(Karwari), but had not seen the bird itself. We had marched
about 25 miles during the day but, with two days counted
out, had only done about 46 of the 360 miles that had con-
fronted us at starting from Shanna. The climatic con-
ditions had, however, been satisfactory enough with, tem-
peratures ranging from a Tni-mmum of 46° Fahr. at night to
about 85° in the shade by day. The sun was hot in the
afternoons, of course, but it would be difficult to imagine
more perfect nights with a full moon shining down upon us

1 An astonishingly large proportion of the moths collected in the Bub* al
Khali appear to be new species—see Appendix.