OVER MECCA
The descent of the giant air-liner and her crew of masterful adventurers on the Forbidden City had much the quality of a hawk's raid on a vast pigeon-cote. As Nissr, now with slowed engines loomed down the Valley of Sacrifice, a perfectly indescribable hurricane of panic, rage, and hate surged through all the massed thousands who had come from the farthest ends of Islam to do homage to the holy places of the Prophet.
The outraged Moslems, in one fierce burst of passion against the invading Feringi, began to swarm like ants when the stone covering their ant-hill is kicked over. From end to end of the valley, a howling tumult arose.
On the Darb el Ma'ala, or Medina Road, a caravan bearing the annual mahmal gift of money, jewels, fine fabrics, and embroidered coverings for the Ka'aba temple, cut loose with rifles and old blunderbusses. Dogs began to bark, donkeys to bray, camels to spit and snarl. The whole procession fell into an anarchy of hate and fear.
The vast camp of conical white tents in the Valley of Mina spewed out uncounted thousands of Hujjaj (pilgrims), each instantly transformed into a blood-lusting fiend. From the Hill of Arafat; from Jannat el Ma'ale Cemetery; from the dun, bronzed, sun-baked city of a hundred thousand fanatic souls; from the Haram sanctuary itself where mobs of pilgrims were crowded round the Ka'aba and the holy Black Stone; from latticed balcony and courtyard, flat roof, mosque, and minaret, screams of rage shrilled up into the baked air, quivering under the intense sapphire of the desert sky.
Every crowded street of the bowl-shaped city, all converging toward the Sacred Enclosure of the Haram, every caravanserai and square, became a mass of howling ghuzzat, or fighters for the faith. Mecca and its environs, outraged as never before in the thousands of years of its history, instantly armed itself and made ready for a Jihad, or holy war of extermination.
Where the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents, had tamely enough submitted to the invaders, these Ahl Hayt, or People of the Walls, leaped to arms, eager for death if that could be had in the battle against the infidel dog—for death, so, meant instant bearing up to Paradise, to cool fountains and sweet fruits, and to the caresses of the seventy entrancing houris that each good Moslem has had promised him by "The Strong Book," Al Koran.
Every man and boy in all that tremendous multitude spread over many square miles of rocky, sun-blistered aridity, seized whatever came first to hand, for the impending war, as the black shadow of Nissr lagged down toward the city and the Haram. Some snatched rifles, some pistols; others brandished spears and well-greased nebut clubs, six feet long and deadly in stout hands. Even camel-sticks and tent-poles were furiously flung aloft. Pitiful, impotent defiance, no more effective than the waving of ants' antennae against the foot that kicks their nest to bits!
Screams, curses, execrations in a score of tongues mounted in one frenzied chorus. Swarms of white-robed pilgrims came running in masses after the drifting shadow, knocking each other down, falling aver tent-pegs, stampeding pack-animals. The confusion amazed the Legionaries as they watched all this excitement through their powerful glasses.
"It looks," thought the Master, with a smile, "as if our little surprise-party might be a lively affair. Well, I am ready for it. 'Allah knows best, and time will show!'"
All over the plain and through the city, myriads of little white puffs, drifting down-wind, showed the profusion of firing. Now came the boom of a cannon from the Citadel—an unshotted gun, used only for calling the Faithful to prayer. Its booming echo across the plain and up against the naked, reddish-yellow hills, still further whipped the blood-frenzy of the mad mobs.
Even the innumerable pigeons, "Allah's announcers,"[1] swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka'aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City. Men, birds, and animals alike, all shared the terror of this unheard-of outrage when—according to ancient prophesy—the Great Devils of Feringistan should desecrate the holy places.
[Footnote 1: So called because of their habit of cooing and bowing.
Moslems fancy they are praying to Allah and making salaam to him.]
"Slow her!" commanded the Master into the engine-room phone, and began compensating with the helicopters, as Nissr lagged over the crowded city. "Shut off—let her drift! Stand by to reverse!"
Mecca the Unattainable now lay directly beneath, its dun roofs, packed streets, ivory minarets all open to the heretics' gaze from portholes, from the forward observation pit and from the lower gallery. As Nissr eased herself down to about one thousand feet, the plan of the city became visible as on a map. The radiating streets all started from the Haram. White mobs were working themselves into frenzy, trampling the pilgrims' shrouds that had been dipped in the waters of the well, Zem Zem, and laid out to dry.
Not even the Master's aplomb could suppress a strange gleam in his eye, could keep his face from paling a little or his lips from tightening, as he now beheld the inmost shrine of two hundred and thirty million human beings. Nor did any of the Legionaries, bold as they were, look upon it without a strange contraction of the heart. As for the Apostate Sheik, that old jackal of the desert was crouched in his place of confinement, with terror clutching at his soul; with visions of being torn to pieces by furious Sunnite mobs oppressing him.
And Rrisa, what of him? Shut into his cabin, with the door locked against intrusion, he was lying face downward on the metal floor, praying. For the first time in the world's history, a Moslem's kiblah, or direction of prayer, was directly downward!
"Reverse!" ordered the Master. Nissr hovered exactly above the Haram enclosure. "Lower to five hundred feet, then hold her!"
The air-liner sank slowly, with a hissing of air-intakes into the vacuum-floats, and hung there, trembling, quivering with the slow back-revolution of her screws, the swift energy of her helicopters. The Master put her in charge of Janina, the Serbian ace, and descended to the lower gallery.
Here he found the crew assembled by Bohannan and Leclair ready for the perilous descent they were about to make.
He leaned over the rail, unmindful of the ragged patter of bullets from below, and with a judicial eye observed the prospect. His calm contrasted forcibly with the frenzied surging of the pilgrim mobs below, a screaming, raging torrent of human passion.
Clearly he could discern every detail of the city whereof Mohammed wrote in the second chapter of the Koran: "So we have made you the center of the nations that you should bear witness to men." He could see the houses of dark stone, clustering together on the slopes like swallows' nests, the unpaved streets, the Mesjid el Haram, or sacred square, enclosed by a great wall and a colonnade surmounted by small white domes.
At the corners of this colonnade, four tall white minarets towered toward the sky—minarets from which now a pretty lively rifle-fire was developing. A number of small buildings were scattered about the square; but all were dominated by the black impressive cube of the Ka'aba itself, the Bayt Ullàh, or Allah's house.
The Master gave an order. Ferrara obeying it, brought from his cabin a piece of apparatus the Master had but perfected in the last two days of flight over the Sahara. This the Master took and clamped to the rail.
"Captain Alden," said he, "stand by, at the engine-room phone from this gallery, here, to order any necessary adjustments as weights are dropped or raised. Keep the ship at constant altitude as well as position. Major Bohannan and Lieutenant Leclair, are your crews ready for the descent?"
"Yes, sir," the major answered. "Oui, mon capitaine," replied the
Frenchman.
"Tools all ready? Machine-guns installed? Yes? Very well. Open the trap, now, and swing the nacelle by the electric crane and winch. Right! Steady!"
The yells of rage and hate from below were all this time increasing in volume and savagery. Quite a pattering of rifle-bullets had developed against the metal body of the lower gallery and—harmlessly glancing—against the fuselage.
Smiling, the Master once more peered over. He seemed, as indeed he was, entirely oblivious to any fear. Too deeply had the Oriental belief of Kismet, of death coming at the appointed hour and no sooner, penetrated his soul, to leave any place there for the perils of chance.
The swarming Haram enclosure presented one of the most extraordinary spectacles ever witnessed by human eyes. The strangeness of the scene, witnessed under the declining sun of that desert land, was heightened by the fact that all these furious Moslems were seen from above. Men cease to appear human, at that angle. They seem to be only heads, from which legs and arms flail out grotesquely.
The Haram appeared to have become a vast pool of brown faces and agitated white ihrams (pilgrim robes) of weaving brown hands, of gleaming weapons. This pool, roaring to heaven, showed strange, violent currents in flow and refluent ebb of hate.
To descend into that maelstrom of frenzied murder-lust took courage of the highest order. But neither Bohannan nor the Frenchman had even paled. Not one of their men showed any hesitancy whatever.
"Ready, sir," said the major, crisply. "Faith, give the signal and down we go; and we'll either bring back what we're going after, or we'll all come back and report ourselves dead!"
"Just a minute, Major," the Master answered. He had opened a small door of the box containing the apparatus he had just clamped to the rail, and had taken out a combination telephone earpiece and receiver. With this at mouth and ear, he leaned over the rail. His lips moved in a whisper inaudible even to those in the lower gallery with him.
An astonishing change, however, swept over the infuriated mob in the Haram and throughout the radiating streets. One would have thought a bolt from heaven had struck the Moslems dumb. The angry tumult died; the vast hush that rose to Nissr was like a blow in the face, so striking was its contrast with the previous uproar. Most of the furious gesticulation ceased, also. All those brown-faced fanatics remained staring upward, silent in a kind of thunder-struck amazement.