[Footnote 1: In the name of Allah, and Allah is greatest!]
Together, crawling on their bellies like dusty puff-adders of the
Sahara itself, the three companions in arms—American, French,
Arab—slid out of the shallow trench, and in the gloom were lost to
sight of the beleaguered Flying Legion.
Their mission of death, death to the Beni Harb or to themselves, had begun.
CHAPTER XXIV
ANGELS OF DEATH
In utter silence, moving only a foot at a time, the trio of man-hunters advanced. They spaced themselves out, dragged themselves forward one at a time, took advantage of every slightest depression, every wrinkle in the sandy desert-floor, every mummy-like acacia and withered tamarisk-bush, some sparse growth of which began to mingle with the halfa-grass as they passed from the coast-dunes to the desert itself.
Breathing only through open mouths, for greater stillness, taking care to crackle no twig nor even slide loose sand, they labored on, under the pale-hazed starlight. Their goal was vague. Just where they should come upon the Beni Harb, in that confused jumble of dunes and nullahs (ravines) they could not tell; nor yet did they know the exact distance separating the Legion's trenches from the enemy. All was vague mystery—a mystery ready at any second, at any slightest alarm, to blaze out death upon them.
None the less, stout-hearted and firm of purpose, they serpented their painful way prone on the hot, dusty bosom of the Sahara. Fate for them and for all the Legion, lay on so slight a thing as the stirring of a twig, the tunk of a boot against a bleached camel's skull, the possibility of a sneeze or cough.
Even the chance scaring-up of a hyena or a vagrant jackal might betray them. Every breath, every heartbeat was pregnant with contingencies of life and death.
Groveling, they slipped forward, dim, moving shadows in a world of brown obscurity. At any moment, one might lay a hand on a sleeping puff-adder or a scorpion. But even that had been fore-reckoned. All three of them had thought of such contingencies and weighed them. Not one but had determined to suppress any possible outcry, if thus stricken, and to die in absolute silence.