The Master loosed a knot in the cord, drew the sack open and shook into his left palm a thing of marvellous beauty and wonder.
By the dim, fitful gleam of the fire, probably the strangest and most costly necklace in the world became indistinctly visible. At sight of it, everything else was forgotten—the wrecked air-liner, the waiting Legion, the unconscious Arabs now being buried in the resistless charge of the sand-armies. Even poor Lebon, tortured slave of the Beni Harb, a lay neglected. For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Star could these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts.
While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tense with joy, held up their treasure-trove.
"The Great Pearl Star!" he cried, in a strange voice.
"Kaukab el Durri! See, one pearl is missing—that is the one said to have been sold in Cairo, twelve years ago, for fifty-five thousand pounds! But these are finer! And its value as a holy relic of Islam—who can calculate that? God, what this means to us!"
Words will not compass the description of this wondrous thing. As the Master held it up in the sand-lashed dimness, half-gloom and half-light, that formed a kind of aura round the fire—an aura sheeted through and all about by the aerial avalanches of the sand—the Legionaries got some vague idea of the necklace.
Three black pearls and two white were strung on a fine chain of gold. A gap in their succession told where the missing pearl formerly had been. Each of the five pearls was of almost incalculable value; but one, an iridescent Oman, far surpassed the others.
This pearl was about the size of a man's largest thumb-joint. Its shape was a smooth oval; its hue, even in that dim, wind-tossed light, showed a wondrous, tender opalescence that seemed to change and blend into rainbow iridescences as the staring Legionaries peered at it. The other pearls, black and white alike, ranked as marvelous gems; but this crown-jewel of the Great Pearl Star eclipsed anything the Master—for all his wide travel and experience of life—ever had seen.
By way of strange contrast in values the pearls were separated from each other by worthless, little, smooth lumps of madrepore, or unfossilized coral. These lumps were covered with tiny black inscriptions in archaic Cufic characters; though what the significance of these might be, the Master could not—in that gloom and howling drive of the sand-devils—even begin to determine.
The whole adornment, as it lay in the Master's palm, typified the Orient. For there was gold; there were gems and bits of worthless dross intermingled; and there about it was drifting sand of infinite ages, darkness, flashes of light, color, mystery, wonder, beauty.