ONWARD TOWARD THE FORBIDDEN CITY
The Master rang for full engine-power, and threw in all six helicopters with one swift gesture.
"Major," commanded he, as Nissr's burned and wounded body began to quiver through all its mutilated fabric; "Major, man the machine-guns again. All stations! Quick!"
Bohannan departed. The droning of the helicopters rose to a shrill hum. The Master switched in the air-pressure system; and far underneath, white fountains of spumy water leaped up about the floats, mingled with sand and mud all churned to frenzy under the bursting energy of the compressed air released through thousands of tubules.
Nissr trembled, hesitated, lifted a few inches, settled back once more.
Again the buzzer sounded. The noise of rapid feet became audible above, in the upper galleries. Ferrara called into the phone:
"It's a British destroyer, sir! She's just rounded the point, three miles south. Signals up for us to surrender!"
"Machine-guns against naval ordnance!" gritted the Master savagely.
"Surrender?" He laughed with hot defiance.
The first shell flung a perfect tornado of brine into air, glistening; it ricochetted twice, and plunged into the dunes. A "dud," it failed to burst.
Nissr rose again as the second shell hit fair in the hard clay of the wady, cascading earth and sand a hundred feet in air. Both reports boomed in, rolling like thunder over the sea.
"Shoot and be damned to you!" cried the Master. Nissr was rising now, clearing herself from the water like a wounded sea-bird. A tremendous cascade of water sluiced from her hissing floats, swirling in millions of sun-glinted jewels more brilliant even than Kaukab el Durri.
Higher she mounted, higher still. The destroyer was now driving in at full speed, with black smoke streaming from four funnels, perfectly indifferent to possible shoals, rocks or sand-bars along this uncharted coast. Another shell screamed under the lower gallery and burst in a deluge of sand near one of the mooring-piles.
"Very poor shooting, my Captain," smiled Leclair, leaning far out the port window of the pilot-house. "But then, we can't blame the gunners for being a bit excited, trying to bag a bit of international game like this Legion."
"And beside," put in Alden coolly, "our shifting position makes us rather a poor target. Ah! That shell must have gone home!"
Nissr quivered from nose to tail. A violent detonation flung echoes from sea and shore; and bits of splintered wreckage spun down past the windows, to plunge into the still swirling, bubbling sea.
The Master made no answer, but rang for the propellers to be clutched in. Nissr obeyed their quickening whirl. Her altitude was already four hundred and fifty feet, as marked by the altimeter. Lamely she moved ahead, sagging to starboard, badly scarred, ill-trimmed and awry, but still alive.
Her great black shadow, trailing behind her in the water, passed on to the beach, wrinkled itself up over the dunes and slid across the sand-drifts where little flutters of cloth, uncovered by the ghoulish jackals, showed from the burning stretch of tawny desert.
Flocks of vultures rose and soared away. Jackals and hyenas cowered and slunk to cover. The tumult of the guns and this vast, drifting monster of the air had overcome even their greed for flesh.
Another shot, puffing white as wool from the bow-chaser of the destroyer, screeched through the vultures, scattering them all ways, but made a clean miss of Nissr.
The air-liner gathered speed as the west wind got behind her, listed her, pushed her forward in its mighty hands. Swifter, ever swifter, her shadow slipped over dune and wady, over hillock and nullah, off away toward the pellucidly clear-golden tints of the horizon beyond which lay the unknown.
Rrisa, at his gun-station, gnawed his fingers in rage and scorn of the pursuing Feringi, and cried: "Allah make it hard for you! Laan'abuk!" (Curses on your fathers!)
Old Sheik Abd el Rahman, close-locked in a cabin, quivered, not with fear, but with unspeakable grief and amazement past all telling. To be thus carried away through the heavens in the entrails of the unbelievers' flying dragon was a thing not to be believed. He prostrated himself, with groans and cries to Allah. The Legionaries, from galleries and gun-stations waving derisive arms, raised shouts and hurrahs.
Sweaty, spent, covered with grease and dirt, they cheered with leaping hearts.
Another shell, bursting in mid-air not fifty yards away, rocked Nissr, keeled her to port, and for a moment sent her staggering down. She righted, lifted, again gathered speed.
More and more wild became the shooting, as she zigzagged, rose, soared into something like her old-time stride. Behind her the sea drew back, the baffled destroyer dwindled, the harmless shots crashed in.
Ahead of her the desert opened. Uncouth, lame, scarred by flame and shell, Nissr spread her vast wings and—still the Eagle of the Sky, undaunted and unbeaten—roared into swift flight toward the waiting mysteries of the vacant abodes.
Mid-morning found Nissr far from the coast, skimming along at fifteen hundred feet altitude over the Tarmanant region of the Sahara. The one shell from the destroyer that had struck her had done no more than graze the tip of the starboard aileron, inflicting damage of no material consequence. It could easily be repaired.
For the present, all danger of any interference from any civilized power seemed to be at an end. But the world had discovered that Nissr and her crew had not yet been destroyed, and the Legionaries felt they must prepare for all eventualities. The stowaway's rash act was still big with possibilities of the most sinister import.
"This is probably just a temporary respite," said Bohannan, as he sat with the Master in the latter's cabin. The windows had been slid wide open, and the two men, leaning back in easy wicker chairs, were enjoying the desert panorama each in his own way—Bohannan with a cigar, the Master with a few leaves of the "flower of paradise."
Now once more clean and a little rested, they had again assumed something of their former aspect. "Captain Alden," and as many others as could be spared from duty, were asleep. The Legion was already pulling itself together, though in depleted numbers. Discipline had tautened again. Once more the sunshine of possible success had begun to slant in through a rift in the lowering clouds of disaster.
"It's still, perhaps, only a temporary respite," the major was saying. "Of course, as long as we stay in the Sahara, we're safe enough from molestation. It's trying to get out—that, and shortage of petrol—that constitute our problem now."
"Yes?" asked the chief, noncommittally. He peered out the window at the vast, indigo horizons of the desert, curving off to northward into a semicircle of burnished blue. Here, there, the etherial wonder of a mirage painted the sandy sea. Vast distances opened on all sides; the sparkling air, brilliant with what seemed a kind of suspended jewel-dust, made every object visible at an incredible remoteness. The wonder of that morning sun and desert could not be put in words.
"Our troubles are merely postponed," the Celt continued, gloomily. "The damage was done when that infernal destroyer sighted us. Just how the alarm was given, and what brought the sea-wasp racking her engines up the coast, we can't tell. But the cat's out of the bag, now, and we've got to look out for an attack at any moment we try to leave this region."
"It's obvious my wireless messages about being wrecked at sea won't have much weight now," the Master replied, analytically. "They would have, though, if that slaving-dhow hadn't put in to investigate us. I have an idea that those jallahs (slavers) must in some way have let the news out at Bathurst, down in Gambia. That's the nearest British territory."
"I wish they'd come within machine-gun fire!" growled the major, blowing smoke.
"Still, we've got lots of room to maneuver," the chief continued. "We're heading due east now," with a glance at the wall-compass and large-scale chart of Northern Africa. "We're now between Mauretania and Southern Algeria, bound for Fezzan, the Libyan Desert, and Nubia on the Red Sea. That is a clear reach of more than three thousand miles of solid desert."
"Oh, we're all right, as long as we stay in the desert," Bohannan affirmed. "But they'll be watching for us, all right, when we try to leave. It's all British territory to the east of us, from Alexandria down to Cape Town. If we could only make our crossing of the Nile and the Red Sea, at night—?"
"Impossible, Major. That's where we've got to restock petrol. If it comes to a show-down, crippled as we are, we'll fight! Of course, I realize that, fast as we fly, the wireless flies faster. We may have to rely on our neutralizers again—"
"They're working?"
"Imperfectly, yes. They'll still help us, in 'civilized warfare.' And as for what will happen at Mecca, if the Faithful are indiscreet enough to offer any resistance—"
"Got something new, have you?"
"I think it may prove something of a novelty, Major. Time will tell, if Allah wills. Yes, I think we may have a little surprise for our friends, the Meccans."
The two fell silent again, watching the desert panorama roll back and away, beneath them. Afar, two or three little oases showed feathery-tufted palms standing up like delicate carvings against the remote purple spaces or against the tawny, seamed desolation that burned as with raw colors of fires primeval. Here, there, patches of stunted tamarisk bushes were visible. A moving line of dust showed where a distant caravan was plodding eastward over the sparkling crystals of an ancient salt sea-bottom. A drift of low-hanging wood-smoke, very far away, betrayed the presence of a camp of the Ahl Bayt, the People of the Black Tents.
The buzzer of the Master's phone broke the silence between the two men, a silence undertoned by the throb and hum of the now effectively operating engines.
"Well, what is it?" the Master queried.
"Promising oasis, mon capitaine," came the voice of Leclair from the upper starboard gallery. "Through my glass I can make out extensive date-palm groves, pomegranate orchards, and gardens. There must be plenty of water there. We should take water, eh?"
"Right!" the Master answered. He got up and turned to Bohannan.
"Major," commanded he, "have Simonds and a crew of six stand by, in the lower gallery, to descend in the nacelle. Rrisa is to go. They will need him, to interpret. Give them a few of the trinkets from that assortment we brought for barter, and a little of our Arabic money."
"Yes, sir. But you know only two of the detachable tanks are left."
"Two will suffice. Have them both lowered, together with the electric-drive pump. Don't annoy me with petty details. You are in charge of this job now. Attend to it!"
He passed into the pilot-house, leaned at the window and with his glasses inspected the deep green patch, dark as the profoundest sea, that marked the oasis. A little blind village nestled there, with mud-brick huts, a watch-tower and a tiny minaret; date-grounds and fields of corn, melons, and other vegetables spread a green fringe among the groves.