«ومهمة مغبرة أرجاؤه ... كان لون أرضه سماؤه»
And a vast dusty wilderness, its reaches veiled in grit, whose earth’s color was as though its sky.
The line brings the color of the earth and sky so close that the earth seems to define the sky’s appearance. Ordinarily a landscape might be likened to the sky; the reversed direction intensifies the vision of dust engulfing both.
The rhetorical work lies in hyperbole, not in verbal novelty for its own sake. The audience imagines a scene where the ordinary visual distinction between ground and horizon is almost lost.
This illustrates how inversion can be justified by a clear contextual effect.