SHIPWRECK AND WAR
"You call them dogs, eh?" asked the chief. "And why?"
"What else are such apostate fanatics? People who live by robbery and plunder—people who, if they find no gold in your money-belt, will rip your stomach open to see if you've swallowed it! People who boast of being harami (highwaymen), and who respect the jallah (slave-driver)!
"People who practice the barbaric thar, or blood-feud! People who torture their victims by cutting off the ends of their fingers before beheading or crucifying them! People who glory in murdering the 'idolators of Feringistan,' as they call us white men! Let me advise you now, my Captain, when dealing with these people or fighting them, never use your last shot on them. Always keep a mercy-bullet in your gun!"
"A mercy-bullet?"
"For yourself!"
The Master pondered a moment or two, as Nissr drifted on toward the now densely massed Arabs on the beach, then he said:
"You seem to know these folk well."
"Only too well!"
The Master's next words were in the language of the desert:
"Hadratak tet kal'm Arabi?" (You speak Arabic?)
"Na'am et kal'm!" affirmed the lieutenant, smiling. And in the same tongue he continued, with fluent ease: "Indeed I do, Effendi. Yes, yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the headwaters of the Niger.
"Five years I spent among the Arabs, doing air-work, surveying the Sahara, locating oases, mapping what until then were absolutely unknown stretches of territory. I did a bit of bombing, too, in the campaign against Sheik Abd el Rahman, in 1913."
"Yes, so I have heard. You almost lost your life, that time?"
"Only by the thickness of a semmah seed did I preserve it," answered the Frenchman. "My mechanician, Lebon, and I—we fell among them on account of engine trouble, near the oasis of Adrar, not far from here. We had no machine-gun—nothing but revolvers. We stood them off for seven hours, before they rushed us. They captured us only because our last cartridges were gone."
"You did not save the mercy-bullet that time, eh?"
"I did not, Effendi. I did not know them then as I do now. They knocked us both senseless, and then began hacking our machine to pieces with their huge balas (yataghans). They thought our plane was some gigantic bird.
"Superstition festers in their very bones! The giant bird, they believed, would ruin their date crops; and, besides, they thirsted for the blood of the Franks. As a matter of fact, my Captain, these people do sometimes drink a little of the blood of a slaughtered enemy."
"Impossible!"
"True, I tell you! They destroyed our plane with fire and sword, reviled us as pigs and brothers of pigs, and named poor Lebon 'kalb ibn kalb,' or 'dog and son of a dog.' Then they separated into two bands. One band departed toward Wady Tawarik, taking Lebon. They informed me that on the morrow they would crucify him on a cross of palm-wood, head downward."
"And they executed Lebon?"
Leclair shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose so," he answered with great bitterness. "I have never seen or heard of him since. As for me, they reserved me for some festivities at Makam Jibrail. During the next night, a column of Spanish troops from Rio de Oro rushed their camp, killed sixty or seventy of the brown demons, and rescued me. Since then I have lusted revenge on the Beni Harb!"
"No wonder," put in the chief, once more looking at the beach, where now the war-party was plainly visible to the naked eye in some detail. The waving of their arms could be distinguished; and plainly glittered the blood-crimson sunset light on rifle-barrels, swords, and javelins. The Master loosened his revolver in its holster. "About twenty minutes from now, at this rate," he added, "some of the Beni Harb will have reason to remember you."
"Yes, and may Jehannum take them all!" exclaimed the Frenchman, passionately. His eyes glowered with hate as he peered across the narrowing strip of waves and surf. "Jehannum, where every time their skins are burned off, as the Koran says, new ones will grow to be burned off again! Where 'they shall have garments of fire fitted upon them and boiling water poured upon their heads, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron—"
"And their tormentors shall say unto them: 'Taste ye the pain of burning!'" the Master concluded the familiar quotation with a smile. "Waste no time in wishing the Beni Harb future pain, my dear Lieutenant. Jehannum may indeed reserve the fruit of the tree Al Zakkum, for these dogs, but our work is to give them a foretaste of it, today. Kismet seems to have willed it that you and the Beni Harb shall meet again. Is it not a fortunate circumstance, for you?"
"Fortunate, yes," the Frenchman answered, his eyes glowing as they estimated the strength of the war-party, now densely massed along the shining sands, "But, thank God, there are no women in this party! That would mean that one of us would have to kill a woman—for God help a woman of Feringistan caught by these jinnee, these devils of the waste!"
Silence again. Both men studied the Beni Harb. The Frenchman judged, reverting to his native tongue: "Certainly more than three hundred of these 'abusers of the salt,' my Captain. And we are hardly thirty. Even if we reach land, we must soon sink to earth. Without food, water, anything—ce n'est pas gai, hein?"
"No, it is not gay," the chief answered. "But with machine-guns—"
"Machine-guns cannot fight against the African sun, against famine, thirst, delirium, madness. Well—'blessed be certainty,' as the Arabs say."
"You mean death?"
"Yes, I mean death. We always have that in our grasp, at any rate—after having taken full toll of these devils. I should not mind, so much, defeat at the hands of the nobler breed of the Arabian Peninsula. There, in the Ruba el Khali[1] itself, I know a chivalric race dwells that any soldier might be proud to fight or to rule over. But these Shiah heretic swine—ah, see now, they are taking cover already? They will not stand and fight, like men!"
[Footnote 1: Ruba el Khali (The Empty Abodes), a name applied by the Arabs to the Peninsula, especially the vast inner region never penetrated by any white man.]
Scornfully he flung a hand at the Beni Harb. The fringes of the tribe were trickling up the sands, backward, away, toward the line of purple-hazed dunes that lined the coast. More and more of the war-party followed. Gradually all passed up the wady, over the dunes and vanished.
"They are going to ambush us, my Captain," said Leclair. "'In rice, strength; in the Beni Harb, manhood!'"
Nearer the land, ever sagging down but still afloat—though now at times some of the heavier surges broke in foam over the rail of the lower gallery—the Eagle of the Sky drifted on, on. Hardly a half-mile now lay between air-liner and shore. Suddenly the Master began to speak:
"Listen, Lieutenant! Events are at a crisis, now. I will speak very plainly. You know the Arabs, good and bad. You know Islam, and all that the Mohammedan world is. You know there are more than 230,000,000 people of this faith, scattered from Canton to Sierra Leone, and from Cape Town to Tobolsk, all over Turkey, Africa, and Arabia—an enormous, fanatic, fighting race! Probably, if trained, the finest fighting-men in the world, for they fear neither pain nor' death. They welcome both, if their hearts are enlisted!"
"Yes, yes, I know! Their Hell yawns for cowards; their Paradise opens to receive the brave! Death is as a bride to the Moslem!"
"Fanatics all, Lieutenant! Only a few white men have ever reached Mecca and returned. Bartema, Wild, and Joseph Pitt succeeded, and so did Hurgronje, Courtelmont, Burton, and Burckhardt—though, the Arabs admit only the two last.
"But how many hundreds have been beheaded or crucified? No pilgrimage ever takes place without a few such victims. A race of this type is a potential world-power of incalculable magnitude. Men who will die for Islam and for their master without a quiver—"
"My Captain! What do you mean?"
The lieutenant's eyes had begun to fill with flame. His hand tightened to a fist.
"Mon Dieu, what do you mean? Can it be possible you dream of ruling the races of Islam?"
Something whined overhead, from the beach now only about a quarter-mile distant. Then a shot from behind the dunes cracked out across the crumbling, hissing surf.
"Ah," laughed Leclair, "the ball has opened, eh? Well this is now no time for talk, for empty words. I think I understand you, my Captain; and to the death I stand at your right hand!"
Their palms met and clasped, a moment, in the firm grip of a compact between two strong men, unafraid. Then each drew his pistol, crouching there at the windows of the pilot-house.
"Hear how that bullet sang?" questioned the Frenchman. "It was notched—a notched slug, you understand. That is a familiar trick with these dog-people of the Beni Harb. Sometimes, if they have poison, they dip the notched slug in that too. And, ah, what a wound one makes! Dum-dums are a joke beside such!"
Another shot sounded. Many cracked out along the dune. All up and down the crest of the tawny sand-hills, red under the sun now close to the horizon, the fusillade ran and rippled. On Nissr, metal plates rang with the impact of the slugs, or glass crashed. The gigantic Eagle of the Sky, helpless, received this riddling volley as she sagged ashore, now almost in the grip of the famished surf.
"Yes, the ball is opening!" repeated Leclair, with an eager laugh. His finger itched on the trigger of his weapon; but no target was visible. Why waste ammunition on empty sand-dunes?
"Let it open!" returned the chief. "We'll not refuse battle, no, by Allah! Our first encounter with Islam shall not be a surrender! Even if we could survive that, it would be fatal to this vast plan of mine—of ours, Lieutenant. No, we will stand and fight—even till 'certainty,' if Allah wills it so!"
A sudden burst of machine-gun fire, from the upper starboard gallery, crashed out into the sultry, quivering air. The kick and recoil of the powerful Lewis sent a fine, swift shudder through the fabric of the wounded Eagle.
"There goes a tray of blanks," said the Master. "Perhaps that will rout them out, eh? Once we can get them on the run—"
Leclair laughed scornfully.
"Those dog-sons will not run from blanks, no, nor from shotted charges!" he declared. "Pariahs in faith, despoilers of the Haram—the sacred inner temple—still this breed of Rafaz (heretic) is bold. Ah, 'these dogs bare their teeth to fight more willingly than to eat.' It will come to hot work soon, I think!"
Keenly he scanned the dunes, eager for sight of a white tarboosh, or headgear, at which to take a pot-shot. Nothing was visible but sand—though here, there, a gleam of steel showed where the Arabs had nested themselves down in the natural rampart with their long-barreled rifles cuddled through carefully scooped rifts in the sand.
Again the machine-gun chattered. Another joined it, but no dust-spurts leaped from the dune, where now a continual play of fire was leaping out. The Beni Harb, keenly intelligent, sensed either that they were being fired at with blanks, or that the marksmanship aboard the air-liner was execrable. A confused chorus of cries and jeers drifted down from the sand-hills; and all at once a tall, gaunt figure in a brown and white striped burnous, with the hood drawn up over the head, leaped to sight.
This figure brandished a tremendously long rifle in his left hand. His right was thrust up, with four fingers extended—the sign of wishing blindness to enemies. A splendid mark this Arab made. The Master drew a fine bead on him and fired.
Both he and Leclair laughed, as the Arab pitched forward in the sand. Unseen hands dragged the warrior back, away, out of sight. A slug crashed through the upper pane of the port window, flattened itself against the main corridor door and dropped to the sofa-locker.
The Master reached for the phone and switched in the connection with the upper starboard gallery.
"Major Bohannan!" he ordered. "No more blanks! The real thing, now—but hold your fire till we drift over the dune!"
"Drift over!" echoed Leclair. "But, monsieur, we'll never even make the beach!"
"So?" asked the chief. He switched to the engine-room.
"Frazier! Lift her a little, now! Rack everything—strain everything—break everything, if you must, but lift her!"
"Yes, sir!" came the engineer's voice. "I'll scrap the engines, sir, but I'll do that!"
Almost as if a mocking echo of the command and the promise, a dull concussion shuddered through Nissr. The drone of the helicopters sank to a sullen murmur; and down below, waves began combing angrily over the gallery.
"Ah, nom de Dieu!" cried Leclair, in sudden rage at seeing his chance all gone to pot, of coming to grips with the hated Beni Harb. From the penetralia of the air-liner, confused shouts burst forth. The upper galleries grew vocal with execrations.
Not one was of fear; all voiced disappointment, the passion of baffled fury. Angrily a boiler-shop clatter of machine-guns vomited useless frenzy.
Wearily, like a stricken bird that has been forced too long to wing its broken way, the Eagle of the Sky—still two hundred yards from shore—lagged down into the high-running surf. Down, in a murderous hail of fire she sank, into the waves that beat on the stark, sun-baked Sahara shore.
And from hundreds of barbarous throats arose the killing-cry to
Allah—the battle-cry of Beni Harb, the murder-lusting Sons of War.