Soon the Embassy’s two-mile-long procession of horses, camels and elephants found itself in “sand-hills, rising one after another, like waves of the sea, and marked on the surface by the wind, like drifted snow … Off the road our horses sunk into the sand above the knees.”31 Two weeks’ hard trudge brought them through “a tract of more than ordinary desolation, until we discovered the walls and towers of Bikaner, a great and magnificent city in the midst of a wilderness.”
