﴿ سَخَّرَهَا عَلَيْهِمْ سَبْعَ لَيَالٍۢ وَثَمَٰنِيَةَ أَيَّامٍ حُسُومًۭا فَتَرَى ٱلْقَوْمَ فِيهَا صَرْعَىٰ كَأَنَّهُمْ أَعْجَازُ نَخْلٍ خَاوِيَةٍۢ ﴾

“which He willed against them for seven nights and eight days without cease, so that in the end thou couldst see those people laid low [in death], as though they were so many [uprooted] trunks of hollow palm trees:”

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.