INTO THE VALLEY OF MYSTERY
The upraised blade, poised for swift murder, did not descend. With a groan from the heart's core, Rrisa let fall his trembling hand, as he recoiled toward the vague patch of starlight that marked the cabin window.
"Bismillah!" he whispered hoarsely. "I cannot! This is my sheik—'and thrice cursed is the hand that slays the sheik.' I cannot kill him!"
For a moment he remained there, pondering. Swift, passionate thoughts surged through his brain, which burned with fever. In Rrisa's fighting-blood the supreme battle of his whole existence was aflame—duty of annihilating the violator of his Faith combating duty of loyalty absolute to one whose salt he had eaten, to one who had preserved his life.
So, in the dark he stood there, a shadow among shadows. He peered about with white-rimmed eyes, striving to discover where now the Myzab and the sacred Black Stone might be. The dim bulk of the blanket under the berth came to his senses. He knelt, touched the blanket, felt the hard solidity within.
Torn with anguish of a great conflict, he pondered, smearing the sweat of agony from his hard-wrinkled forehead. Better was it to fling these holy things from the cabin window, out into the night? Better the certainty that the desert sands, far below, would inevitably drift over them, forever burying them from the sight of his people; or better the chance that the Master, after all, really intended to deliver them back into Moslem hands at Bara Jannati Shahr?
"Allah, oh, guide thy servant now!" the orderly prayed with trembling lips. "Allah, show thou me the way!"
The Master, stirring in his sleep, sighed deeply and let his right hand fall outside the berth. Rrisa, fearful of imminent discovery, made up his mind with simple directness. He salaamed in silence, all but brushing the Master's hand with his lips.
"Wa'salem!" (Farewell!) he breathed. Then he got up, turned, laid his dagger on the table and slid out through the window as soundlessly as he had come. He crossed the marrow gallery in the gloom, and mounted the rail beyond which yawned black vacancy.
For a moment he stayed there, peering down first at the impenetrable abysses below, then up at the unmoved stars above. The ghostly aura of light in the gallery showed his face wan, deep-graven with lines, agonized, ennobled by strong decisions of self-sacrifice.
"Thou, Allah," he whispered, "dost know life cannot be for both my Master and thy servant, after what thy servant hath seen. I offer thee my life for his! Thou wilt judge aright, for thou knowest the hearts of men and wilt wrong no man by the weight of a grain of sand. Thou art easy to be reconciled, and merciful! There is no God but Allah, and M'hámed is his Prophet!"
With no further word, he leaped.
Just a fraction of a second, a dim-whirling object plummeted into space. It vanished.
As best he understood, Rrisa had solved his problem and had paid his score.
The Master wakened early, with the late May sun already Slanting in from far, dun and orange desert-levels, gilding the metal walls of his cabin. For a few moments he lay there, half dreamily listening to the deep bass hum of the propellers, the slight give and play of the air-liner as she shuddered under the powerful drive of her Norcross-Brail engines.
His thoughts first dwelt a little on yesterday's battle and on the wondrous treasure now in his hands. Then they touched the approaching campaign beyond the Iron Mountains in regions never yet seen by any white man's eye, and for a while enveloped some of the potentialities of that campaign.
But "Captain Alden" recurring to his mind, drove away such stern imaginings. The Master's lips smiled, a little; his black eyes softened, and for a moment his face assumed something that might almost have made it akin to those of men who feel the natural passions of the heart. Never before, in all his stern, hard life, had the Master's expression been quite as now.
"Who can she be, I wonder?" he mused. "A woman like that, possessed of that extraordinary beauty; a woman with education, languages, medical skill; a woman with courage, loyalty, and devotion beyond compare, and with all the ardor for service and adventure that any man could have—who can she be? And—damn it, now! Who am I, to be thinking of such nonsense, after all?"
His eyes fell on the table. Something lay there, agleam with the sunlight flicking blood-red spots from a polished metal surface. What could this thing be? Surely, it had not lain there, the night before.
The Master wrinkled heavy brows, focussing his sight on this metal object. Puzzled, not yet able to make it out clearly, he raised himself on his elbow and looked with close attention at the mysterious object.
Suddenly he leaped from the berth, strode to the table and caught up—Rrisa's dagger.
"Allah! What's this?" he exclaimed. "Rrisa—he's been here—and with a knife?—"
For a second or two he stood there, staring at the jambiyeh in his grip. His powerful frame tautened; his thick, corded neck swelled with the intensity of his emotion as his head went forward, staring. His jaw set hard. Then with a kind of half-comprehension, he turned quickly toward the window.
Yes, there were traces on the sill, that could not be mistaken. The Master's keen eyes detected them, under the morning sun. He stepped to his desk, dropped the dagger into a drawer, and pressed the button for his orderly.
No one appeared. The Master rang again. Quite in vain. With more precipitation than was customary with him, he dressed and went to Rrisa's cabin.
Its emptiness confirmed his suspicions. Returning along the outer gallery, a little pale, he reached the railing opposite his own window. Here a scratch on the metal drew his attention. Closely he scrutinized this scratch. A hint of whitish metal told the tale—metal the Master recognized as having been abraded from a ring the Master himself had given him; a ring of aluminum alloy, fashioned from part of a Turkish grenade at Gallipoli.
The Master's face contracted painfully. In his mind he could reconstitute the scene—Rrisa's hands gripping the rail, his climb over it, his leap. For a moment the Master stood there with blank eyes, peering out over the burning, tawny desolation of the great sand-barrens that stretched away, away, to boundless immensity.
"Yes, he is surely gone," he whispered. "Shal'lah! Razi Allahu anhu!" (It is Allah's will; may Allah be satisfied with him!) "What would I not give to have him back!"
The trilling of his cabin phone startled him to attention. He entered, took the receiver and heard Leclair's voice from the pilot-house:
"Clouds on the horizon, my Captain. And I think there is a mountain range coming in sight. Would you care to look?"
The Master, very grim and silent, went into the pilot-house. He had decided to make no mention of what had happened. The suicide must pass as an accident. He himself must seem to have no knowledge of it. Morale forbade the admission either of treachery or self-destruction, for any member of the Legion.
The sight of vague, pearl-gray clouds on the far south-east horizon, and of a dim, violet line of peaks notched across the heat-quivering sky in remotest distances, struck him like a blow in the face. Clouds must mean moisture; some inner, watered plain wholly foreign to the general character of the Arabian Peninsula. And the peaks must be the Iron Mountains that Rrisa had told him about. They seemed to rebuff him, to be pointing fingers of accusation at him. Had it not been for his insistence—
"But that is all nonsense!" he tried to assure himself, as he took his binoculars from the rack and sighted at the forbidding, mysterious range. "Am I responsible for a Moslem's superstitions, or his fanatic irrationality?"
The Master's own narrow escape from death disturbed him not at all. He hardly even thought of it. All he strove for, now, was to exculpate himself for Rrisa's death. But this he could not do.
A sense of blood-guiltiness clung about him like a garment—the first that he had felt on this expedition. His soul, unemotional, practical, hard, was at last touched and wounded by the realization that Rrisa, pushed beyond all limits of endurance, had chosen death rather than inflict it on his sheik. And the thought that the faithful orderly's body was now lying on the flaming sands, hundreds of miles away—that it was already a prey to jackals, kites, and buzzards—sickened his shuddering heart and filled him with remorse.
"Allah send a storm of sand—jinnee to bury the poor chap, that's all I can wish now!" he pondered, as he studied the strange yellowish and orange tints in utmost horizon distances. The air, over the shimmering peaks, seemed of a different quality from that elsewhere. To north, to west, the desert rim of the world veiled itself in magic blue, mysteriously dim. But there, it glowed in golden hues. What, thought the Master, might be the meaning of all this?
The Master had no time for speculation. The urgent problem of locating the Bara Jannati Shahr, beyond that inhospitable sierra, banished thoughts of all else. He inspected his charts, together with the air-liner's record of course and position. He slightly corrected the direction of flight. "Captain Alden" was already in the pilot-house, with Leclair. The Master summoned Bohannan tersely, and briefly instructed him:
"You understand, of course, that we may now be facing perils beyond any yet encountered. We have already upset all Islam, and changed the kiblah—the direction of prayer—for more than two hundred million human beings. The 'fronting-place' is now aboard Nissr."[1]
[Footnote 1: So long as the Black Stone was at the Ka'aba, this building was the only spot in the world where the kiblah was circular, that is, where Moslems could pray all around it. The Legion's theft of the stone had completely dislocated all the most important beliefs and customs of Islam.]
"The most intense animosity of religious fanaticism will pursue us. If the news of our exploit has, in any unaccountable way such as the Arabs know how to employ, reached Jannati Shahr, we are in for a battle royal. If not, we still have a chance to use diplomacy. A few hours now will determine the issue.
"We are approaching what will probably be the final goal of this expedition; a city beyond unknown mountains; a city that no white man has ever yet seen and that few have even heard of. What the conditions will be there no one can tell; but—"
"Not even Rrisa?" put in the major. "Faith, now's the time, if ever, to consult that lad!"
"Correct, for once," assented the Master. With purpose to deceive, he phoned for Rrisa. No answer coming, he got Simonds on the wire and ordered him to find the orderly. The investigation thus started would, he knew, soon bring out the fact of the orderly's disappearance. This line of action fairly started, he went on formulating his plans:
"Major, look well to your guns. For once you may have a chance to use them. I have put my various pieces of apparatus in good condition, and have improvised some new features. In addition, we have the second kappa-bomb."
"But I trust we shall not be driven to a fight. If diplomacy can win, there will be no bloodshed. Otherwise, our only limit will be the total destruction of these unknown people, or our own annihilation. It's a case, now, of win what we are after, or end everything right there, beyond those mountains!"
He ascended to the upper port gallery, and concentrated himself on observation. A certain change in the desert was becoming noticeable, as the air-liner flung herself at high speed into the south-east. At times there must be a little rainfall here, or else some hidden source of water, for a scrub, of dwarf acacia, of camel-grass, and tamarisk had begun to show.
But as the black, naked mountains drew near, this gave place to flats white with salt, to jagged upcroppings of dull, yellowish rock—how little they then suspected its true nature!—and to detached cliffs sharp as a wolf's teeth, with strata of greenish schist.
It was at 9:30 a.m. of May 28, that Nissr tilted her planes and soared abruptly over the first crags of the Iron Mountains. At a height of forty-five hundred feet she sped above them, the heat of their sun-baked blackness radiating up against her wings and body. No more terrible desolation could be imagined than this rock fortress, split with chasms and unsounded gorges, where here and there more of the yellow outcrops showed. No life appeared, not even vultures. For more than an hour, Nissr's shadow leaped across this utter solitude of death.
The Master summoned Leclair, Bohannan, and "Captain Alden," and for some time gave them careful instructions which none but they were allowed to hear.