In antic.i.p.ation of possible attack, _Nissr_ was forced to her best alt.i.tude, of now forty-seven hundred feet, all gun-stations were manned and the engines were driven to their limit. The hour was anxious; but the Legion pa.s.sed the river in safety, just a little south of the twentieth degree, near the Third Cataract. Bohannan's gloomy forebodings proved groundless.

The Red Sea and Arabia were now close at hand. Tension increased.

Rrisa thrilled with a malicious joy. He went to the door of the captive Sheik, and in flowery Arabic informed him the hour of reckoning was at last drawing very near.

"Thou carrion!" he exclaimed. "Soon shalt thou be in the hands of the Faithful. Soon shall Allah make thy countenance cold, O offspring of a one-eyed man!"

Three hours after, the air-liner sighted a dim blue line that marked the Red Sea. The Master pointed at this, with a strange smile.

"Once we pa.s.s that sea," he commented, "our goal is close. The hour of great things is almost at hand!"

"Provided we get some petrol," put in Bohannan.

"Faith, an open gate, that should have been closed, defeated Napoleon.

A few hundred gallons of gasoline--"

"The gasoline is already in sight, Major," smiled the chief, his gla.s.ses on the coastline. "That caravan--see there?--comes very apropos."

The Legion bore down with a rush on the caravan--a small one, not above fifty camels, but well laden. The cameleers left off crying "_Ooosh! Ooosh!_" and beating their spitting beasts with their _mas'hab_-sticks, and incontinently took to their heels. Rrisa viewed them with scorn, as he went down in the nacelle with a dozen of the crew.

The work of stripping the caravan immediately commenced. In an hour some five hundred tin cases of petrol had been hoisted aboard. On the last trip down, the Master sent a packet wrapped in white cloth, containing a fair money payment for the merchandise. British goods, he very wisely calculated, could not be commandeered without recompense The packet was lashed to a camel-goad which was driven into the sand, and _Nissr_ once more got slowly under way.

All eyes were now on the barren chalk and sandstone coasts of the Red Sea, beyond which dimly rose the castellated peaks of Jebel Radhwa.

At an alt.i.tude of 2,150 feet the air-liner slid out over the Sea, the waters of which shone in the mid-afternoon sun with a peculiar luminosity. Only a few _sambuks_, or native craft, troubled those historic depths; though, down in the direction of Bab el Mandeb--familiar land to the Master--a smudge of smoke told of some steamer beating up toward Suez.

Leaning from the upper port gallery, the Master with Bohannan, Leclair, and "Captain Alden," watched the shadow of the giant air-liner sliding over the tawny sand-bottom. That shadow seemed a scout going on before them, spying out the way to Arabia and to Mecca, the Forbidden City. To the white men that shadow was only a shadow.

To Rrisa, who watched it from the lower gallery, it portended ominous evil.

"It goes ahead of us, by Allah!" he murmured. "Into the Empty Abodes, where the sons of Feringistan would penetrate, a shadow goes first!

And that is not good." He whispered a prayer, then added: "For the others, I care not. But my Master--his life and mine are bound with the cords of Kismet. And in the shadows I see darkness for all!"

At 4:27, _Nissr_ pa.s.sed the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Red Sea. Arabia itself now lay beneath. There exposed to their eyes, at length lay the land of mystery and fear. Bare and rock-ribbed, a flayed skeleton of a terrain, it glowed with wondrous yellow, crimson, and topaz hues.

A haze bounded the south-eastern horizon, where a range of iron hills jaggedly cut the sky. Mecca was almost at hand.

The Master entered his cabin and summoned Rrisa.

"Listen," he commanded. "We are now approaching the Holy City. I am bringing back the Apostate Sheik and the Great Pearl Star. I am the preserver of the Star. Thine own people could not keep it. I have recovered it. Is that not true?"

"True, _M'alme_, praise to Allah!"

"It may be that I shall be called on to preserve some other and still more sacred thing. If so, remember that my salt is still in thy stomach."

"Master, I will not forget." Rrisa spoke dutifully, but his eyes were troubled. His face showed lines of fear, of the struggle already developing in his soul.

"Go thou, then! And remember that whatever happens, my judgment tells me it is best. Raise not a hand of rebellion against me, Rrisa, to whom thou owest life itself. To thy cabin--go!"

"But, Master--"

"_Ru'c'h halla!_"

The Arab salaamed and departed, with a strange look in his eyes.

When he was gone, the Master called Bohannan and Leclair, outlined the next _coup_ in this strange campaign, and a.s.signed crews to them for the implacable carrying-out of the plan determined on--surely the most dare-devil, ruthless, and astonishing plan ever conceived by the brain of a civilized man.

Hardly had these preparations been made, when the sound of musketry-fire, below and ahead, drew their attention. From the open ports of the cabin, peering far down, the three Legionaries witnessed an extraordinary sight--a thing wholly incongruous in this h.o.a.r land of mystery and romance.

Skirting a line of low savage hills that ruggedly stretched from north to south, a gleaming line of metal threaded its way. A train, southbound for Mecca, had halted on the famous Pilgrims' Railway.

From its windows and doors, white-clad figures were violently gesticulating. Others were leaping from the train, swarming all about the carriages.

An irregular fusillade, harmless as if from pop-guns, was being directed against the invading Eagle of the Sky. A faint, far outcry of pa.s.sionate voices drifted upward in the heat and shimmer of that Arabian afternoon. The train seemed a veritable hornets' nest into which a rock had been heaved.

"Faith, but that's an odd sight," laughed the major. "Where else in all this world could you get a contrast like that--the desert, a semibarbarous people, and a railroad?"

"Nowhere else," put in Leclair. "There is no other road like that, anywhere in existence. The Damascus-Mecca line is unique; a Moslem line built by Moslems, for Moslems only Modern mechanism blent with ancient superst.i.tion and savage ferocity that implacably hold to the very roots of ancient things!"

"It is the Orient, Lieutenant," added the Master. "And in the Orient, who can say that any one thing is stranger than anything else? To your stations, men!"

They took their leave. The Master entered the pilot-house and a.s.sumed control. As _Nissr_ pa.s.sed over the extraordinary Hejaz Railway, indifferent to the mob of frenzied, vituperating pilgrims, the chief peered far ahead for his first sight of Mecca, the Forbidden.

He had not long to wait. On the horizon, the hills seemed suddenly to break away. As the air-liner roared onward, a dim plain appeared, with here or there a green-blue blur of oasis and with a few faint white spots that the Master knew were pilgrims' camping-places.

Down through this plain extended an irregular depression, a kind of narrow valley, with a few sharply isolated, steep hills on either hand.

The Master's eyes gleamed. His jaw set; his hand, on the controls, tightened till the knuckles whitened.

"The Valley of Mina!" he exclaimed. "Mount Arafat--and there, beyond, lies Mecca! _Labbayk! Labbayk!_"

CHAPTER x.x.x

OVER MECCA

The descent of the giant air-liner and her crew of masterful adventurers on the Forbidden City had much the quality of a hawk's raid on a vast pigeon-cote. As _Nissr_, now with slowed engines loomed down the Valley of Sacrifice, a perfectly indescribable hurricane of panic, rage, and hate surged through all the ma.s.sed thousands who had come from the farthest ends of Islam to do homage to the holy places of the Prophet.

The outraged Moslems, in one fierce burst of pa.s.sion against the invading Feringi, began to swarm like ants when the stone covering their ant-hill is kicked over. From end to end of the valley, a howling tumult arose.

On the Darb el Ma'ala, or Medina Road, a caravan bearing the annual _mahmal_ gift of money, jewels, fine fabrics, and embroidered coverings for the Ka'aba temple, cut loose with rifles and old blunderbusses. Dogs began to bark, donkeys to bray, camels to spit and snarl. The whole procession fell into an anarchy of hate and fear.

The vast camp of conical white tents in the Valley of Mina spewed out uncounted thousands of _Hujjaj_ (pilgrims), each instantly transformed into a blood-l.u.s.ting fiend. From the Hill of Arafat; from Jannat el Ma'ale Cemetery; from the dun, bronzed, sun-baked city of a hundred thousand fanatic souls; from the Haram sanctuary itself where mobs of pilgrims were crowded round the Ka'aba and the holy Black Stone; from latticed balcony and courtyard, flat roof, mosque, and minaret, screams of rage shrilled up into the baked air, quivering under the intense sapphire of the desert sky.

Every crowded street of the bowl-shaped city, all converging toward the Sacred Enclosure of the Haram, every caravanserai and square, became a ma.s.s of howling _ghuzzat_, or fighters for the faith. Mecca and its environs, outraged as never before in the thousands of years of its history, instantly armed itself and made ready for a _Jihad_, or holy war of extermination.

Where the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents, had tamely enough submitted to the invaders, these Ahl Hayt, or People of the Walls, leaped to arms, eager for death if that could be had in the battle against the infidel dog--for death, so, meant instant bearing up to Paradise, to cool fountains and sweet fruits, and to the caresses of the seventy entrancing houris that each good Moslem has had promised him by "The Strong Book," Al Koran.

Every man and boy in all that tremendous mult.i.tude spread over many square miles of rocky, sun-blistered aridity, seized whatever came first to hand, for the impending war, as the black shadow of _Nissr_ lagged down toward the city and the Haram. Some s.n.a.t.c.hed rifles, some pistols; others brandished spears and well-greased _nebut_ clubs, six feet long and deadly in stout hands. Even camel-sticks and tent-poles were furiously flung aloft. Pitiful, impotent defiance, no more effective than the waving of ants' antennae against the foot that kicks their nest to bits!

Screams, curses, execrations in a score of tongues mounted in one frenzied chorus. Swarms of white-robed pilgrims came running in ma.s.ses after the drifting shadow, knocking each other down, falling aver tent-pegs, stampeding pack-animals. The confusion amazed the Legionaries as they watched all this excitement through their powerful gla.s.ses.