THE GREAT PEARL STAB
The Master began to feel a peculiar anxiety. Into the east he peered, where now indeed a low, steady hum was growing audible, as of a million angry spirits swarming nearer. The stars along that horizon had been blotted out, and something like a dark blanket seemed to be drawing itself across the sky.
"My Captain," said the lieutenant, "there may be trouble brewing, close at hand. A sand-storm, unprotected as we are—"
"Men with stern work to do cannot have time to fear the future!"
Leclair grew silent. Rrisa alone was speaking, now. With a call of "Ya Latif!" (O Merciful One!) he had begun the performance of his ceremony, with rigid exactness. He ended with another prostration and the usual drawing down of the hands over the face. Then he arose, took up his javelin again, and with a clear conscience—since now his rites had all been fulfilled—cried aloud:
"Now, Master, I am ready for the work of helping Azraël, the death-angel, separate the souls and bodies of these Shiah heretics!"
A sudden howling of a jackal startled Rrisa. He quivered and stood peering into the night, where now the unmistakable hum of an approaching sand-storm was drawing near. His superstitious soul trembled with the old belief of his people that creatures of the dog breed can see Azraël, invisible to human eyes. At thought of the death-angel standing nigh, his heart quaked; but rage and hate inspired him, and he muttered:
"Fire to your bellies, broiling in white flame! Fuel of Jehannum, may Eblis be your bed, an unhappy couch! Spawn of Shaytan (Satan), boiling water to cool your throats! At Al Hakkat (judgment day) may the jinnee fly away with you!"
"To work, men!" cried the Master. "There is great work to do!"
As if in answer to his command, a blustering, hot buffet of wind roared down with amazing suddenness, filling the dark air with a stinging drive of sand. The fire by the beach flailed into long tongues of flame, throwing black shadows along the side of the wady. No stars were now visible. From empty spaces, a soughing tumult leaped forth; and on the instant a furious gust of fine, cutting particles whirled all about, thicker than driven snow in a northern blizzard.
"Iron, O thou ill-omened one!" cried Rrisa, with the ancient invocation against the sand-storm. He stretched out his forefinger, making the sign of protection. Neither the meaning of his cry nor of the gesture could he have explained; but both came to him involuntarily, from the remote lore of his people.
He turned from the oncoming storm, leaning against the wind, clutching for his cap that the wind-devil had just whirled away. After it he stumbled; and, falling to his knees, groped for it in the gloom.
"Thousand devils!" ejaculated the Frenchman. "No time, now, for killing! Lucky if we get back ourselves, alive, to the beach! My Captain!"
"What now?" the Master flung at him, shielding mouth and eyes with cupped hands.
"To the wady, all of us! That may give protection till this blast of
Hell passes!"
A startled cry from Rrisa forestalled any answer. The Arab's voice rose in a wild hail from the sand-filled dark:
"O M'almé, M'almé!"
"What, Rrisa?"
"Behold! I—I have found him!"
"Found—?" shouted the Master, plunging forward.
Leclair followed close, staggering in the sudden gale. "Abd el
Rahman?"
"The old hyena, surely! M'almé, M'almé! See!"
The white men stumbled with broken ejaculations to where Rrisa was crouched over a gaunt figure in the drifting sand.
"Is that he, Rrisa?" cried the Master. "Art thou sure?"
"As that my mother bore me! See the old jackal, the son of Hareth! (the devil). Ah, see, see!"
"Dieu!" exclaimed the Frenchman, in his own tongue. "It is none other!" With a hand of great rejoicing, he stirred the unconscious Sheik—over whom the sand was already sifting as the now ravening simoom lashed it along.
Forgotten now were all his fears of death in the sand-storm. This delivery of the hated one into his hands had filled him with a savage joy, as it had the two others.
"Ah, mon vieux!" he cried. "It is only the mountains that never meet, in time!"
The Master laughed, one of those rare flashes of merriment that at infrequent intervals pierced his austerity. Away on the growing sand-storm the wind whipped that laugh. Simoom and sand now appeared forgotten by the trio. Keen excitement had gripped them; it held them as they crouched above the Sheik.
"Allah is being good to us!" exulted the Master, peering by the gale-driven fire-glare. "This capture is worth more to the Legion than a hundred machine-guns. What will not the orthodox tribes give for this arch-Shiah, this despoiler of the sacred Haram at Mecca?"
He began feeling in the bosom of the old man, opening the cloaklike burnous and exploring the neck and chest with eager fingers.
"If we could only lay hands on the fabled loot of the Haram!" he whispered, his voice tense with excitement.
Rrisa, wide-eyed, with curling lips of scorn, peered down at the Sheik. The orderly, bare-headed, was shielding eyes and face from the sand-blast, with hands that trembled. His teeth were bared with hate as he peered at the prostrate heretic.
A tall, powerful figure of a man the Sheik was, lying there on his right side with his robe crumpled under him—the robe now flapping, whipping its loose ends in the high and rising wind. His tarboosh had been blown away, disclosing white hair.
That hair, too, writhed and flailed in the gusts that drove it full of sand, that drifted his whole body with the fine and stinging particles. His beard, full and white, did not entirely conceal the three parallel scars on each cheek, the mashali, which marked him as originally a dweller at Mecca.
One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle, its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with gold.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his questing fingers had discovered about the old man's neck. With hands that trembled a little, he drew out this cord. Then he uttered an exclamation of intense disappointment.
There was nothing at the end of the crimson loop, save a lamail, or pocket Koran. Leclair muttered a curse, and moved away, peering toward the fire, spying out the wady through the now almost choking sand-drive—the wady where they certainly must soon take refuge or be overwhelmed by the buffeting lash of sand whirled on the breath of the shouting tempest.
Even in the Master's anger, he did not throw the Koran away. Too astute, he, for any such act in presence of Rrisa. Instead, he bound the Arab to fresh devotion by touching lips and forehead, and by handing him the little volume. The Master's arm had to push its way against the wind as against a solid thing; and the billion rushing spicules of sand that swooped in upon him from the desert emptiness, stung his flesh like tiny scourges.
"This Koran, Rrisa, is now thine!" he cried in a loud voice, to make the Arab hear him. "And a great gift to thee, a Sunnite, is the Koran, of this desecrating son of the rejected!"
Bowed before the flail of the sand—while Rrisa uttered broken words of thanks—the Master called to Leclair:
"By Corsi (Allah's throne), now things assume a different aspect!
This old dog of dogs is a prize, indeed! And—what now—"
Leclair did not answer. The Frenchman was not even near him. The Master saw him in the wady, dimly visible through the ghostly white sand-shrouds spinning in the blue-whipped fire-glare. There on hands and knees the lieutenant was huddled. With eager hands he was tearing the hood of a za'abut—a rough, woolen slave cloak, patched and ragged—from the face of a prostrate figure more than half snowed under a sand-drift.
"Nom de Dieu!" the Master heard him cry. "Mais, nom de—"
"What have you found, Lieutenant?" shouted the Master, letting the simoom drive him toward the wady. In their excitement none of the men would yet take cover, lie down and hide their faces under their coats as every dictate of prudence would have bidden. "Who is it, now? What—"
"Ah, my Captain! Ah! the pity of it! Behold!"
The Frenchman's voice, wind-gusted, trembled with grief and passionate anger; yet through that rage and sorrow rang a note of joy.
"Tell me, Leclair! Who, now?" demanded the Master, as he came close and peered down by the fire-gleam roaring on the beach, sending sheaves of sparks in comet-tails of vanishing radiance down-wind with rushing sand.
"It is impossible, my Captain," the lieutenant answered in French. His voice could now make itself heard more clearly; for here in the wady a certain shelter existed from the roaring sand-cyclone. "Impossible, but—Dieu!—it is true!"
"What is true?"
"Incredible, yet—voilà!"
"In Allah's name, Lieutenant!" the Master ejaculated, "compose yourself! Explain! Who is this Arab, here?"
"No Arab, sir! No, no!"
"Not an Arab? Well, what is he, then?"
"Ah, these scars, my Captain! Behold—see the slave dress, the weals of the branding-iron on cheek and brow! Ah, for pity! See the starved body, the stripes of the lash, the feet mangled by the bastinado! What horrible things they have done to him—ah, God have pity on us!"
Tears gleamed on the stern fighter's cheeks, there in the ghostly blue firelight—tears that washed little courses through the dust and sand now griming his face. The French airman, hard in battle and with heart of steel and flame, was crying like a child.
"What now? Who is it?" shouted the Master. "A European?"
"Yes, my Captain! A Frenchman!"
"A Frenchman. You don't mean to say it—is—"
"Yes, yes! My orderly! Lebon!"
"God!" exclaimed the Master. "But—"
A cry from Rrisa interrupted him, a cry that flared down-wind with strange, wild exultation. The Arab had just risen from the sand, near the unconscious, in-drifting form of the Sheik, Abd el Rahman.
In his hands he was holding something—holding a leather sack with a broken cord attached to it. This cord in some way had been severed by the Sheik's rifle when the old man had fallen. The leather sack had rolled a few feet away. Now, with hands that shook so that the Arab could hardly control them, Rrisa was holding out this sack as he staggered through the blinding sand-storm towards his chief.
"Al Hamdu Lillah!" (Praise to the Lord of the Three Worlds!) choked Rrisa in a strange voice, fighting for his very breath. "See—see what I—have found!"
Staring, blinking, trying to shelter his eyes against the demons of the storm, the Master turned toward him.
"What, Rrisa?"
Down into the wady stumbled the Arab, gray-powdered with clinging sand.
"Oh," he choked, "it has been taken from these yezid, these abusers of the salt! Now we rescue it from these cut-off ones! From the swine and brothers of the swine it has been taken by Allah, and put back into the hands of Rrisa, Allah's slave! See, M'almé, see!"
The shaking hands extended the leather sack. At it the Master stared, his face going dead white.
"Thou—dost not mean—?" he stammered.
"Truly, I do!"
"Not Kaukab el Durri?"
"Aye—it was lying near that heretic dog!"
"The Great Pearl Star, the sacred loot from the Haram?"
"Kaukab el Durri, M'almé. The Great Pearl Star itself!"