One of these nights, a little before dawn, a sudden awful rushing sound startled the Beduw from their dreams; for a thunder-din resounded marvellously through the waste mountain above us: it seemed as if this world went to wrack. I was awake, and heard it at the full; the sound was double, a loud lasting uproar in the head of the Harra; then some shorter, it might be a vast echo that rumbled in the valley. A moment I dreaded to see the old vulcanic flames, that slumber so long under this soil, and the lava-floods break forth upon us: then I thought some vast rock had fallen in the distant Harra; or was it the noise of a shoot of stones in the abrupt head of the wady? It was a lofty sound such as is heard in the calving of ice in the glacial mountains. The Beduins, with ears full of the strange rumour, were ere day come together at the kahwa. Some neighbours, as they went by, stayed to ask the Nasrâny, “What is it?”—“You do not know your own dîra!”-“But fetch thy books and see; wilt thou not tell us, Khalîl?”—“Was it a rock falling?”-”It is more, there are wennys in this dîra.” The most in the mejlis were of opinion that a “star” had fallen; the sheykh's son at the moment was untying his filly and saw the shooting star, whereupon that thunder-noise followed.