"Well, men," said he, in even tones. "Here it is, at last. We're seeing something no Feringi ever saw before—the hidden treasure of Jannati Shahr!"
CHAPTER XLV
THE JEWEL HOARD
Men do strange things, at times, when confronted by experiences entirely outside even the limits of imagination. At sight of the perfectly overwhelming masses of wealth that lay there in square pits chiseled out of the solid gold, most of the Legionaries reacted like men drunk or mad.
The hoard before them was enough to unbalance reason.
Leclair began to curse with amazing fluency in French and Arabic, while his orderly fell into half-hysterical prayer. Bristol—stolid Englishman though he was—had to make a strong effort to keep his teeth from chattering. The two Italians, one with an ugly wound on the jaw, burst out laughing, waving their arms extravagantly. Simonds shouted jubilation and began to jump about in the most extraordinary fashion. Wallace sat down heavily on the floor, held his lamp out over one of the pits and stared with blank incomprehension.
As for the major, he dropped to his knees, threw down his weapons and plunged his arms up to the elbows in the sliding sparkle of the gems. To have heard him babble, one would have given him free entrance into any lunatic asylum.
The only two who had remained appreciably calm were "Captain Alden" and the Master. But even they, as fully as all the rest, forgot the impending menace of attack. For a moment, even their ears were deaf to the muffled tumult outside the door, their senses dulled to every other thing in this world save the incredible hoard there in the golden pits before them.
Pain, exhaustion, defeat ceased to be, for the Legionaries. Ruin and the shadow of Azraël's wing departed from their minds. For, bring what the future might, the present was offering them a spectacle such as never before in this world's history had the eyes of white men rested on.
Not even a man in extremis could have turned away his gaze from the unbelievable masses of shimmering wealth in those square pits of gold.