[Footnote 1: Arabs divide the world into two categories; themselves, and Ajam, or all non-Arabs.]
A long, ragged line of desert men appeared, in burnouses and benishes, or loose floating garments, and all heavily armed. The last bleeding rays of the sunset flickered on the silver-mounted rifles as they spat fire into the heat-quivering air.
All about the swimmers, waterspouts jetted up. Two men grunted, flailed wild arms and sank, with the water about them tinged red as the sunset. Another sank face downward, a moment, then with only one arm, continued to ply for land, leaving a crimson trail behind.
None of the untouched Legionaries took any heed of this, or stopped their furious swimming to see what damage had been done or to offer help. Life was at stake. Every second in the breakers was big with death. This was stern work, to be put through with speed. But the faces of the swimming men grew hard to look upon.
The Master and Leclair were first to touch foot to the shelving bottom, all churned up by the long cavalry-charges of the sea-horses, and to drag themselves out of the smother. Rrisa and Bohannan came next, then Enemark, and then the others—all save Beziers and Daimamoto, French ace and Japanese surgeon, whose work was forever at an end. Enemark, engineer and scientist, shot through the left shoulder, was dragged ashore, strangling, by eager hands.
"Down! Down!" shouted the Master. "Dig in!"
Right well he knew the futility, the suicidal folly of trying to charge some three hundred entrenched men with a handful of panting, exhausted soldiers armed only with revolvers.
"Take cover!" his cry rang along the beach. They obeyed. Under a galling fire that flung stinging sand into their faces and that took toll of two more Legionaries, wounded, the expedition dug for its very life.
The best of strategy! The only strategy, the Master knew, as—panting a little, with thick, black hair glued by sea-water to his head—he flattened himself into a little depression in the sand, where the first ripple of the dunes began.
Hot was the sand, and dry. Withered camel-grass grew in dejected tufts here, there, interspersed with a few straggles of half a. A jackal's skull, bleached, lay close to the Master's right hand. Its polish attested the care of others of its kind, of hyenas, and of vultures. Just so would a human skull appear, in no long time, if left to nature's tender ministrations. Out of an eyehole of the skull a dusty gray scorpion half crawled, then retreated, tail over back, venomous, deadly.