Struggles With Cyrenaica

I suppose it's no secret that I've wrestled with my novel Cyrenaica for almost four years now. For some reason I just can't seem to get it all out there where I want it, so I keep writing, and rewriting, and sometimes I want to just throw the whole thing out and start all over again. Or not! But even so, there are a few things that I like about the story, and one of them is a passage that equates a sandstorm with the end of the world, with our heroes, a small band of U.S. Marines, pinned underneath it. See what you think:

Now the desert takes them in. A storm from the south brings a shoulder of sand half a mile high and as far across as the eye can see, advancing out of the wasteland like a yellow wall of surf. Locals call this phenomenon the simum—the poison wind. The fine dust sets the Christians’ teeth on edge. There is sand in everything, grit in all they eat. Palm trees rustle and shake in the tempest and the world is without form, as if all echoes of the Almighty’s ordering strictures uttered at and in creation of Creation itself have finally trailed off into corridors of nothingness beyond light and human hope and the motes and atoms and elemental stuff of existence, unbound at last, have devolved immediately into mere random movement now and for the rest of eternity hot and howling and corrosive to the touch. The Americans wrap cloth around their faces for fear of losing their sight to the wind-driven particles, and they move through the streets laterally, with one hand raised as if to ward off this prolonged and awful judgment of the sky.