Sand-swimming or shuffle-burial is a rocking motion driven by the ribs. The viper flattens its body, alternates lateral undulations of the trunk, and the displaced grains flow over its back until it sits flush with the desert floor. The whole process takes seconds and leaves a faint shallow depression rather than a spoil heap.
Burial serves two ends at once. It hides the snake from the lizards and rodents it ambushes and from birds that hunt it, and it puts the body into cooler, more humid sand while the surface bakes. Only the upward-facing eyes and nostrils remain clear.
The horns are the more puzzling feature. They are single modified supraocular scales, and some individuals and populations lack them entirely, which shows they are not essential. Proposals include shading the eye, breaking up the head outline and deflecting sand from the eye during burial, and none has been demonstrated. The species appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs, where a horned viper glyph carried the consonantal sound f.