The dress they wore distinguished them from all the others. They had neither tarboosh nor burnous, but simply red fezes; tight sleeveless shirts of striped stuff, and trousers of Turkish cut. Their feet were bare.
Strange enough figures they made, black as coal, muscled like Hercules, and towering well toward seven feet, with arms and hands in which the sinews stood out like living welts. Their faces expressed neither intelligence nor much ferocity. Submission to Bara Miyan's will marked their whole attitude.
"Sa'ad," commanded Bara Miyan, "seest thou this dog?"
"Master, I see," answered one of the gigantic blacks, speaking with a strange, thick accent.
"Lead him away, thou and Musa. He was brought us by these zawwar (visitors). Thy hands and Musa's are strong. Remember, no drop of blood must be shed in El Barr.[1] But let not the dog see another sun. I have spoken."
[Footnote 1: Literally "The Plain." This name, no doubt, originally applied only to the vast inner space surrounded by the Iron Mountains, seems to have come to be that of Jannati Shahr itself, when spoken of by its inhabitants. El Barr is probably the secret name that Rrisa would not divulge.]
The gigantic executioner—the strangler—named Sa'ad, seized Abd el Rahman by the right arm. Musa, his tar-hued companion, gripped him by the left. Never a word uttered the Apostate as he was led away through the horsemen. But he gave one backward look, piercing and strange, at the Master who had thus delivered him to death—a look that, for all the White Sheik's aplomb, strangely oppressed him.
Then the horsemen closed about the two Maghrabi, or East Africans, and about their victim. Abd el Rahman, the Great Apostate, as a living man, had forever passed from the sight of the Flying Legion.
His departure, in so abrupt and deadly simple a manner, gave the Master some highly conflicting thoughts. The fact that no blood was ever to be shed in this city had reassuring aspects. On the other hand, how many of these Maghrabi stranglers did Bara Miyan keep as a standing army? A Praetorian guard of men with gorilla-hands like the two already seen might, in a close corner, prove more formidable than men armed with the archaic firearms of the place or with cold steel.
A sensation of considerable uneasiness crept over the Master as he pondered the huge strength and docility of these two executioners. It was only by reflecting that the renegade Sheik would gladly have murdered the whole Legion, and that now (by a kind of poetic justice) he had been delivered back into the hands of the Sunnites he had so long defied and outraged, that the Master could smooth his conscience for having done this thing.