"LABBAYK!"
As Nissr slowed near the oasis, the frightened Arabs—who had been at their ghanda, or mid-day meal—swarmed into the open. They left their mutton, cous-cous, date-paste, and lentils, their chibouques with perfumed vapor and their keef-smoking, and manifested extreme fear by outcries in shrill voices. Under the shadows of the palms, that stood like sentinels against the blistering sands, they gathered, with wild cries.
No fighting-men, these. The glasses disclosed that they were mostly old men, women, children. Young men were few. The fighters had probably gone with the caravan, seen a while before. There came a little ragged firing; but a round of blanks stopped that, and sent the villagers skurrying back into the shelter of the palms, mimosas, and jamelon trees.
Nissr poised at seven hundred and fifty feet and let down tanks, nacelle, and men. There was no resistance. The local naib came with trembling, to make salaam. Water was freely granted, from the sebil, or public fountain—an ancient tank with century-deep grooves cut in its solid stone rim by innumerable camel-hair ropes. The flying men put down a hose, threw the switch of the electric pump, and in a few minutes half emptied the fountain. The astonishment of the villagers passed all bounds.
"These be men of great magic," said the naib, to Rrisa, after the tanks had been hoisted to Nissr, and a dozen sacks of fresh dates had been purchased for the trinkets plus two ryals (about two dollars). "Tell me of these 'People of the Books!'"
"I will tell thee of but one thing, Abu Shawarib," (father of whiskers) answered Rrisa with pride. "Old Abd el Rahman is our prisoner in the flying ship above. We are taking him back to Mecca. All his people of the Beni Harb lie dead far toward the great waters, on the edge of the desert of the sea. The Great Pearl Star we also have. That too returneth to the Haram. Allah isélmak!" (Thanks be to Allah!)
The naib prostrated himself, with joyful cries, and touched lips and forehead with quivering fingers. All others who heard the news, did likewise. Fruits, pomegranate, syrup, honey, and jild el faras[1] were brought as offerings of gratitude. The crew ascended to the air-liner amid wild shouts of praise and jubilation.
[Footnote 1: Literally "mare's skin." Apricot paste in dried sheets, cut into convenient sizes. A great dainty among the Arabs.]
"You see, Leclair?" the Master inquired, as Nissr drew away once more to eastward, leaving the village in the palms behind. "We hold power already with the sons of Islam! What will it be when—?"
"When you attempt to take from them their all, instead of returning to them what they so eagerly desire to have!" the Frenchman put in. "Let us hope all for the best, my Captain, but let us keep our powder very dry!"
Two days and one night of steady flying over the ocean of sand, with but an occasional oasis or caravan to break the appalling wastes of emptiness, brought Nissr to the Valley of the Nile. The river of hoar antiquity came to view in a quivering heat-haze, far to eastward. In anticipation of possible attack, Nissr was forced to her best altitude, of now forty-seven hundred feet, all gun-stations were manned and the engines were driven to their limit. The hour was anxious; but the Legion passed the river in safety, just a little south of the twentieth degree, near the Third Cataract. Bohannan's gloomy forebodings proved groundless.
The Red Sea and Arabia were now close at hand. Tension increased. Rrisa thrilled with a malicious joy. He went to the door of the captive Sheik, and in flowery Arabic informed him the hour of reckoning was at last drawing very near.
"Thou carrion!" he exclaimed. "Soon shalt thou be in the hands of the Faithful. Soon shall Allah make thy countenance cold, O offspring of a one-eyed man!"
Three hours after, the air-liner sighted a dim blue line that marked the Red Sea. The Master pointed at this, with a strange smile.
"Once we pass that sea," he commented, "our goal is close. The hour of great things is almost at hand!"
"Provided we get some petrol," put in Bohannan.
"Faith, an open gate, that should have been closed, defeated Napoleon.
A few hundred gallons of gasoline—"
"The gasoline is already in sight, Major," smiled the chief, his glasses on the coastline. "That caravan—see there?—comes very apropos."
The Legion bore down with a rush on the caravan—a small one, not above fifty camels, but well laden. The cameleers left off crying "Ooosh! Ooosh!" and beating their spitting beasts with their mas'hab-sticks, and incontinently took to their heels. Rrisa viewed them with scorn, as he went down in the nacelle with a dozen of the crew.
The work of stripping the caravan immediately commenced. In an hour some five hundred tin cases of petrol had been hoisted aboard. On the last trip down, the Master sent a packet wrapped in white cloth, containing a fair money payment for the merchandise. British goods, he very wisely calculated, could not be commandeered without recompense The packet was lashed to a camel-goad which was driven into the sand, and Nissr once more got slowly under way.
All eyes were now on the barren chalk and sandstone coasts of the Red Sea, beyond which dimly rose the castellated peaks of Jebel Radhwa. At an altitude of 2,150 feet the air-liner slid out over the Sea, the waters of which shone in the mid-afternoon sun with a peculiar luminosity. Only a few sambuks, or native craft, troubled those historic depths; though, down in the direction of Bab el Mandeb—familiar land to the Master—a smudge of smoke told of some steamer beating up toward Suez.
Leaning from the upper port gallery, the Master with Bohannan, Leclair, and "Captain Alden," watched the shadow of the giant air-liner sliding over the tawny sand-bottom. That shadow seemed a scout going on before them, spying out the way to Arabia and to Mecca, the Forbidden City. To the white men that shadow was only a shadow. To Rrisa, who watched it from the lower gallery, it portended ominous evil.
"It goes ahead of us, by Allah!" he murmured. "Into the Empty Abodes, where the sons of Feringistan would penetrate, a shadow goes first! And that is not good." He whispered a prayer, then added: "For the others, I care not. But my Master—his life and mine are bound with the cords of Kismet. And in the shadows I see darkness for all!"
At 4:27, Nissr passed the eastern shores of the Red Sea. Arabia itself now lay beneath. There exposed to their eyes, at length lay the land of mystery and fear. Bare and rock-ribbed, a flayed skeleton of a terrain, it glowed with wondrous yellow, crimson, and topaz hues. A haze bounded the south-eastern horizon, where a range of iron hills jaggedly cut the sky. Mecca was almost at hand.
The Master entered his cabin and summoned Rrisa.
"Listen," he commanded. "We are now approaching the Holy City. I am bringing back the Apostate Sheik and the Great Pearl Star. I am the preserver of the Star. Thine own people could not keep it. I have recovered it. Is that not true?"
"True, M'almé, praise to Allah!"
"It may be that I shall be called on to preserve some other and still more sacred thing. If so, remember that my salt is still in thy stomach."
"Master, I will not forget." Rrisa spoke dutifully, but his eyes were troubled. His face showed lines of fear, of the struggle already developing in his soul.
"Go thou, then! And remember that whatever happens, my judgment tells me it is best. Raise not a hand of rebellion against me, Rrisa, to whom thou owest life itself. To thy cabin—go!"
"But, Master—"
"Ru'c'h halla!"
The Arab salaamed and departed, with a strange look in his eyes.
When he was gone, the Master called Bohannan and Leclair, outlined the next coup in this strange campaign, and assigned crews to them for the implacable carrying-out of the plan determined on—surely the most dare-devil, ruthless, and astonishing plan ever conceived by the brain of a civilized man.
Hardly had these preparations been made, when the sound of musketry-fire, below and ahead, drew their attention. From the open ports of the cabin, peering far down, the three Legionaries witnessed an extraordinary sight—a thing wholly incongruous in this hoar land of mystery and romance.
Skirting a line of low savage hills that ruggedly stretched from north to south, a gleaming line of metal threaded its way. A train, southbound for Mecca, had halted on the famous Pilgrims' Railway. From its windows and doors, white-clad figures were violently gesticulating. Others were leaping from the train, swarming all about the carriages.
An irregular fusillade, harmless as if from pop-guns, was being directed against the invading Eagle of the Sky. A faint, far outcry of passionate voices drifted upward in the heat and shimmer of that Arabian afternoon. The train seemed a veritable hornets' nest into which a rock had been heaved.
"Faith, but that's an odd sight," laughed the major. "Where else in all this world could you get a contrast like that—the desert, a semibarbarous people, and a railroad?"
"Nowhere else," put in Leclair. "There is no other road like that, anywhere in existence. The Damascus-Mecca line is unique; a Moslem line built by Moslems, for Moslems only Modern mechanism blent with ancient superstition and savage ferocity that implacably hold to the very roots of ancient things!"
"It is the Orient, Lieutenant," added the Master. "And in the Orient, who can say that any one thing is stranger than anything else? To your stations, men!"
They took their leave. The Master entered the pilot-house and assumed control. As Nissr passed over the extraordinary Hejaz Railway, indifferent to the mob of frenzied, vituperating pilgrims, the chief peered far ahead for his first sight of Mecca, the Forbidden.
He had not long to wait. On the horizon, the hills seemed suddenly to break away. As the air-liner roared onward, a dim plain appeared, with here or there a green-blue blur of oasis and with a few faint white spots that the Master knew were pilgrims' camping-places.
Down through this plain extended an irregular depression, a kind of narrow valley, with a few sharply isolated, steep hills on either hand.
The Master's eyes gleamed. His jaw set; his hand, on the controls, tightened till the knuckles whitened.
"The Valley of Mina!" he exclaimed. "Mount Arafat—and there, beyond, lies Mecca! Labbayk! Labbayk!"