It required almost a thousand years before the dust of Dune's old planet-wide
desert left the atmosphere to be bound up in soil and water. The wind called
sandblaster has not been seen on Arrakis for some twenty-five hundred years.
Twenty billion tons of dust could be carried suspended in the wind of just one
of those storms. The sky often had a silvery look to it then. Fremen said: "The
desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what's underneath." The
planet and the people had layers. You could see them. My Sareer is but a weak
echo of what was. I must be the sandblaster today.

-The Stolen Journals