BELEAGUERED
"La Illaha illa Allah! M'hámed rasul Allah!" Raw, ragged, exultant, a scream of passion, joy, and hate, it rose like the voice of the desert itself, vibrant with wild fanaticism, pitiless and wild.
The wolflike, high-pitched howl of the Arab outcasts—the robber-tribe which all Islam believed guilty of having pillaged the Haram at Mecca and which had for that crime been driven to the farthest westward confines of Mohammedanism—this war-howl tore its defiance through the wash and reflux of the surf.
The pattering hail of slugs continued to zoon from the sand-hills, bombarding the vast-spread wings and immense fuselage of Nissr. For the most part, that bombardment was useless to the Beni Harb. A good many holes, opened up in the planes, and some broken glass, were about the Arabs' only reward.
None of the bullets could penetrate the metal-work, unless making a direct hit. Many glanced, spun ricochetting into the sea, and with a venomous buzzing like huge, angry hornets, lost themselves in quick, white spurts of foam.
But one shot at least went home. Sheltered though the Legion was, either inside the fuselage or in vantage-points at the gun-stations, one incautious exposure timed itself to meet a notched slug. And a cry of mortal agony rose for a moment on the heat-shimmering air—a cry echoed with derision by fifteen score barbarians behind their natural rampart.
There was now no more shooting from the liner. What was there to shoot at, but sand? The Arabs, warned by the death of the gaunt fellow in the burnous, had doffed their headgear. Their brown heads, peeping intermittently from the wady and the dunes, were evasive as a mirage.
The Master laughed bitterly.
"A devil of a place!" he exclaimed, his blood up for a fight, but all circumstances baffling him. A very different man, this, from the calm, impersonal victim of ennui at Niss'rosh, or even from the unmoved individual when the liner had first swooped away from New York. His eye was sparkling now, his face was pale and drawn with anger; and the blood-soaked cotton and collodion gave a vivid touch of color to the ensemble. That the Master had emotions, after all, was evident. Obvious, too, was the fact these emotions were now fully aroused. "What a devil of a place! No way to get at those dog-sons, and they can lie there and wait for Nissr to break up!"
"Yes, my Captain, or else starve us where we lie!" the lieutenant put in. "Or wait for thirst and fever to do the work. Then—rich plunder for the sons of theft!"
"Ah, Leclair, but we're not going to stay here, for any such contingency!" exclaimed the chief, and turned toward the door. "Come, en avant! Forward, Leclair!"
"My Captain! You cannot charge an entrenched enemy like that, by swimming a heavy surf, with nothing but revolvers in hand!"
"Can't, eh? Why not?"
"The rules of war—"
"To Hell with the rules of war!" shouted the Master, for the first time in years breaking into profanity. "Are you with me, or are you—"
"Sir, do not say that word!" cried the Frenchman, reddening ominously.
"Not even from you can I accept it!"
The Master laughed again, and strode out into the main corridor, with
Leclair close behind him.
"Men!" he called, his voice blaring a trumpet-call to action.
"Volunteers for a shore-party to clean out that kennel of dogs!"
None held back. All came crowding into the spacious corridor, its floor now laterally level but sloping toward the stern, as Nissr's damaged aft-floats had filled and sunk.
"Revolvers and lethal pistols!" he ordered. "And knives in belts! Come on!"
Up the ladder they swarmed to the take-off gallery. Their feet rang and clattered on the metal rounds. Other than that, a, strange silence filled the giant air-liner. The engines now lay dead. Nissr was motionless, save for the pitch and swing of the surf that tossed her; but forward she could no longer go.
As the men came up to the top gallery, the hands of the setting sun reached out and seized them with red ardor. The radiance was half blinding, from that sun and from light reflected by the heavily running waves, all white-caps to shore. On both aileron-tips, the machine-guns were spitting intermittently, worked by crews under the major and Ferrara, the Italian ace.
"Cease firing!" ordered the Master. "Simonds, you and Prisrend deal out the lethal guns. Look alive, now!"
Sheltering themselves from the patter of slugs behind stanchions and bulwarks, the Legionaries waited. The sea wind struck them with hot intensity; the sun, now almost down, flung its river of blood from ship to horizon, all dancing in a shimmer of heat.
By the way Nissr was thumping her floats on the bottom, she seemed about to break up. But, undismayed, the Legionaries armed themselves, girt on their war-gear and, cool-disciplined under fire, waited the order to leap into the sea.
Not even the sight of a still body in the starboard gallery—a body from under which a snaky red line was crawling, zigzagging with each pitch of the liner—gave them any pause. This crew was well blooded, ready for grim work of give-and-take.
"A task for me, sir!" exclaimed "Captain Alden," pointing at the body.
The Master refused.
"No time for nursing, now!" he negatived the plea. "Unless you choose to remain behind?"
"Never, sir!"
"Can you swim with one arm?"
"With both tied!"
"Very well! All ready, men! Overboard, to the beach! There, dig in for further orders. No individual action! No charge, without command! Overboard—come on—who follows me?"
He vaulted the rail, plunged in a white smother, surged up and struck out for shore. Rrisa was not half a second behind him. Then came all the others (save only that still figure on the buffed metals), a deluge of leaping, diving men.
The surf suddenly became full of heads and shoulders, vigorous arms, fighting beachward. Strong swimmers every one, the Legion battled its way ashore, out from under Nissr's vast-spreading bulk, out from under her forward floats. Not one Legionary but thrilled with the killing-lust, the eager spur of vengeance for Kloof, first victim of the Beni Harb's attack.
Along the dune, perhaps five hundred yards back of the beach, very many heads now appeared. The Arabs well knew themselves safe from attack, so long as these hated white swine of Ajam[1] were in the breakers. Golden opportunity to pick them off, at ease!
[Footnote 1: Arabs divide the world into two categories; themselves, and Ajam, or all non-Arabs.]
A long, ragged line of desert men appeared, in burnouses and benishes, or loose floating garments, and all heavily armed. The last bleeding rays of the sunset flickered on the silver-mounted rifles as they spat fire into the heat-quivering air.
All about the swimmers, waterspouts jetted up. Two men grunted, flailed wild arms and sank, with the water about them tinged red as the sunset. Another sank face downward, a moment, then with only one arm, continued to ply for land, leaving a crimson trail behind.
None of the untouched Legionaries took any heed of this, or stopped their furious swimming to see what damage had been done or to offer help. Life was at stake. Every second in the breakers was big with death. This was stern work, to be put through with speed. But the faces of the swimming men grew hard to look upon.
The Master and Leclair were first to touch foot to the shelving bottom, all churned up by the long cavalry-charges of the sea-horses, and to drag themselves out of the smother. Rrisa and Bohannan came next, then Enemark, and then the others—all save Beziers and Daimamoto, French ace and Japanese surgeon, whose work was forever at an end. Enemark, engineer and scientist, shot through the left shoulder, was dragged ashore, strangling, by eager hands.
"Down! Down!" shouted the Master. "Dig in!"
Right well he knew the futility, the suicidal folly of trying to charge some three hundred entrenched men with a handful of panting, exhausted soldiers armed only with revolvers.
"Take cover!" his cry rang along the beach. They obeyed. Under a galling fire that flung stinging sand into their faces and that took toll of two more Legionaries, wounded, the expedition dug for its very life.
The best of strategy! The only strategy, the Master knew, as—panting a little, with thick, black hair glued by sea-water to his head—he flattened himself into a little depression in the sand, where the first ripple of the dunes began.
Hot was the sand, and dry. Withered camel-grass grew in dejected tufts here, there, interspersed with a few straggles of half a. A jackal's skull, bleached, lay close to the Master's right hand. Its polish attested the care of others of its kind, of hyenas, and of vultures. Just so would a human skull appear, in no long time, if left to nature's tender ministrations. Out of an eyehole of the skull a dusty gray scorpion half crawled, then retreated, tail over back, venomous, deadly.
Death lurked not alone in sea and in the rifles of the inhabitants of this harsh land, but even in the crawling things underfoot.
The Master paid no heed to shriveled grass, to skull, or scorpion. All his thoughts were bent on the overcoming of that band of Islamic outcasts now persistently pot-shotting away at the strange flying men from unknown lands "that faced not Mecca nor kept Ramadan"—men already hidden in swiftly scooped depressions, from which the sand still kept flying up.
"Steady, men!" the Master called. "Get your wind! Ready with the lethal guns! Each gun, one capsule. Then we'll charge them! And—no quarter!"
Again, silence from the Legion. The fire from the dunes slackened. These tactics seemed to have disconcerted the Beni Harb. They had expected a wild, only half-organized rush up the sands, easily to be wiped out by a volley or two from the terribly accurate, long-barreled rifles. But this restraint, this business-like entrenching reminded them only too forcibly of encounters with other men of the Franks—the white-clad Spanish infantry from Rio de Oro, the dreaded piou-pious, zouaves, and Légion Etrangère of the French.
Firing ceased, from the Beni Harb. Silence settled on both sides. From the sea, the noise of waves breaking along the lower works of Nissr mingled with the hiss and refluent slither of the tumbling surf on the gleaming beach. For a while peace seemed to have descended.
A purple shade settled over the desert. The sun was nearly gone, now, and dusk would not be long in closing its chalice down over the light-wearied world. Leclair, entrenched beside the Master, whispered:
"They do not understand, these dog-brothers—may Allah make their faces cold!" He grinned, frankly, with sparkling eyes and white teeth. "Already we have their beards in our hands!"
The Master's only answer was to draw from his pocket an extra lethal gun, hand it over and, in a whisper, hastily instruct the Frenchman how to use it. Then he cried, loudly:
"Ready, men! Fire!"
All along the line, the faint, sighing hiss of the strange weapons sounded. Over the top of the dune little, almost inaudible explosions began taking place as—plop! plop! plop!—the capsules burst. Not now could their pale virescence be seen; but the Master smiled again, at realization that already the lethal gas was settling down upon the horde of Shiah outcasts.
To Leclair he whispered in Arabic an ancient saying of the desert folk: "'Allah hath given skill to three things, the hands of the Chinese, the brains of the Franks, the tongues of the Arabs!'" He added: "When the gas strikes them, they would think the Frankish brain more wonderful than ever—if they could think at all!"
He slid his hand into the breast of his jacket, pulled a little cord and drew out a silver whistle, the very same that he had used at Gallipoli. As he slid it to his lips, they tautened. A flood of memories surged over him. His fighting-blood was up, like that of all the other Legionaries in that hasty trench-line along the white sand-drifts.
A moment's silence followed. Outwardly, all was peace. No sound but the waves broke the African stillness. A little sand-grouse, known as kata by the Arabs, came whirring by. Far aloft, a falcon wheeled, keen-eyed for prey. Once more the deadly scorpion peeped from the skull, an ugly, sullen, envenomed thing.
The Master held up the silver whistle, glinting in the last sun-glow. They saw it, and understood. All hearts thrilled, tightening with the familiar sense of discipline. Fists gripped revolver-butts; feet shuffled into the sand, getting a hold for the quick, forward leap.
Keenly trilled the whistle. A shout broke from some twenty-five throats. The men leaped up, forward, slipping, staggering in the fine sand, among the bunches of dried grass. But forward they drove, and broke into a ragged, sliding charge up the breast of the dunes.
"Hold your fire, men! Hold it—then give 'em Hell!" the Master shouted. He was in the first wave of the assault. Close by came Rrisa, his brown face contracted with fanatic hate of the Beni Harb, despoilers of the Haram sanctuary.
There, too, was "Captain Alden," grim with masked face. There was Bohannan, Leclair—and pistol-barrels flickered in the evening glow, and half the men gripped knives in their left hands, as well. For this was to be a killing without quarter, to the very end.