animals scattered , but the air was consumed in their lungs and they died without a scream as the hot wave advanced cross-country like an invading army , a maddened horde whose sole aim was to reduce everything to a colourless sand , to lay waste forest and pasture and raze every construct of man , to scour the land with a cruelty that was savage in its momentum , to push before it he who was fool enough to question the ravening of the dead , those sublunaries to whom he was champion , an unwilling advocate , a soul compelled to wander , he who had failed them even as he failed them now , the heat at his back scorching , the many tongues of a molten lash .