"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."