Although stories of whole caravans being swallowed up and buried in sandstorms belong to the realm of fable, it is true that one such storm did destroy 1,500 goats and 2,000 sheep in 1947.
-Lloyd Cabot Briggs, Tribes of the Sahara, 1960
Cambysean myths about lost armies and lost caravans die hard in the Sahara. When it blew fiercely one day on us, Mas’ūd pointed into the wind and said what I heard as Um Duhayr, which the dictionary I was carrying had as, Mother of the Little Eternity, from the word Dahr in the Diminutive form, and I thought to myself, Poetic. But later I asked a Sudanese folklorist if the Kababish always called a headwind by such a name and he said No, so I checked Lane for other variants of the component letter D, and found this for Dthahīr, A Complaint of the Body, or in plain English, Mother of Pains in the Ass, and I thought, Mas’ūd was right.