Journey's end, at last!
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE GREETING OF WARRIORS
Without delay, everything was put in complete readiness for whatever eventualities might develop. If these strange people meant peace and wanted it, the Legion would give them peace. If war, then by no means was the Legion to be unprepared.
The gangplank was put down from the starboard port in the lower gallery. The helicopters were cut off. Nothing was left running but one engine, at half-speed, to furnish current for the apparatus the Master had decided to use in dealing with the Jannati Shahr folk in case of need—some of this having been evolved on the run from Mecca.
Four hampers were carried down the gangplank and set on the grass, about fifty feet ahead of Nissr's huge beak, that towered in air over the men like an eagle over sparrows. These hampers contained the chosen apparatus. Wires were attached, and run back to the ship, and proper connections made at once by Leclair and Menendez, under the Master's instructions.
The machine-guns were dismounted and taken "ashore," to borrow a nautical phrase. These were set up in strategic positions before the liner, and full supplies of ammunition both blank and ball were served to them.
About a quarter of a mile to north of Nissr's position, one of the small watercourses or irrigating ditches that cut the plain glimmered through a grove of Sayhani dates.[1] To this ditch the Master sent two men in search of the largest stone they could find there. When they returned with a rock some foot in diameter, he ordered it placed half-way between Nissr and the palm-grove.
[Footnote 1: Sayhani (the Crier), so called because one of these palms is fabled to have cried aloud in salutation to Mohammed, when the Prophet happened to walk beneath it.]
These preparations made, the Master lined up his Legionaries for inspection and final instructions. Standing there in military array, fully armed, they made rather a formidable body of fighters despite their paucity of numbers. Courage, eagerness, and joy—still unalloyed by all the fatigues and perils of the long trek after adventure—showed on every face. Even through the eyeholes of "Captain Alden's" mask, daring exultation glimmered.