7

He forced it upon them for seven nights and eight days, the first of which was the morning of Wednesday, eight days before the end of [the month of] Shawwāl, and this was at the height of winter, successively, one after the next (husūman: it [the action of the wind] is likened to the repeated actions of a hāsim, 'one cauterizing a wound', time and again until it [the blood] has been cut off, inhsama) so that you might have seen the people therein lying prostrate, lying dead on the ground, as if they were the hollow, collapsed, trunks of palm-trees.