"They weren't magnetized then, Major," he answered. "Shall I have someone help you?"

"No, by G.o.d! I'll either lift this thing or die, right here!" the Celt panted, redder still. But he did not lift the little cube. The best he could do was to drag it, against mighty resistance, to the edge of the trap; and with a last, mighty heave, project it into s.p.a.ce.

As it left the trap, _Nissr_ rocked and swayed, showing how great a weight had been let drop. Down sped the little, netted cube, whirling in the sunlight. Its speed was almost that of a rifle-ball--so far in excess of anything that could have been produced by gravitation as to suggest that some strange, magnetic force was hurling it earthward, like a metal-filing toward an electro-magnet. It dwindled to nothing, in a second, and vanished.

All peered over the rail, eager with antic.i.p.ation. No explosion followed, but the most astonishing thing happened. All at once, without any preliminary disturbance, the ground became white. A perfect silence fell on the Haram and the city for perhaps half a mile on all sides of the sacred enclosure Haram and streets, roof-tops, squares all looked as if suddenly covered with deep snow.

This whiteness, however, was not snow, but was produced by the _ihrams_ of the pilgrims now coming wholly to view.

Instead of gazing down on the heads of the mult.i.tude--all bare heads, as the Prophet commands for pilgrims--the Legionaries now found themselves looking at their whole bodies. Every pilgrim in sight had instantaneously fallen to the earth, on the gravel of the Haram, along the raised walks from the porticoes to the Ka'aba, on the marble tiling about the Ka'aba itself, even in the farthest visible streets.

The white-clad figures lay piled on each other in grotesque att.i.tudes and heaps. Even the stone tank at the north-west side of the Ka'aba, under the famous Myzab, or Golden Waterspout on the Ka'aba roof, was heaped full of them; and all round the sacred Zem Zem well they lay in silent windrows, reaped down by some silent, invisible force.

In the remote suburbs and out on the plain, the Legionaries'

binoculars could still see a swarming of white figures; but all the immediate vicinity was now wholly silent, motionless. To and fro the Master swept his gla.s.ses, and nodded with satisfaction.

"You have now fifteen minutes, men," said he, "before the paralyzing shock of that silent detonation--that noiseless release of molecular energies which does not kill nor yet destroy consciousness in the least--will pa.s.s away. So--"

"You mean to tell me, my Captain, _those pilgrims are still conscious?_" demanded Leclair, amazed.

"Perfectly. They will see, hear, and know all you do. I wish them to.

The effect will be salutary, later. But they cannot move or interfere.

All you have to look out for is the incoming swarm of fanatics already on the move. So there is no time to be lost. Into the nacelle, and down with you!"

"But if they try to rush us you can drop the other bomb, can't you?"

demanded the major, as they all clambered into the nacelle.

The Master smiled, as he laid his hands on top of the basket and cast his eyes over the equipment there, noting that machine-guns, pick-axes, crowbars, and all were in position.

"The idea does you credit, Major," said he. "The fact that the other bomb would of course completely paralyze you and your men, here, is naturally quite immaterial. Let us have no more discussion, please.

Only fourteen minutes, thirty seconds now remain before the _Hujjaj_ will begin to recover their muscular control. You have your work cut out for you, the next quarter-hour!"

The Master raised his hand in signal to Grison, at the electric winch A turn of a lever, and the nacelle rose from the metals of the lower gallery. It swung over the trap and was steadied there, a moment, by many hands. The raiding-party leaped in.

"Lower away!" commanded the chief

Smoothly the winch released the fine steel cable, with a purring sound. Down shot the nacelle, steadily, swiftly, with the major, Leclair, and the others now engaged in the most perilous, dare-devil undertaking imaginable.

Down, swiftly down, to raid the _Bayt Ullah_, the sacred Ka'aba, holy of holies to more than two hundred million Moslem fanatics, each of whom would with joy have died to keep the hand of the unbelieving dog from so much as touching that h.o.a.r structure or the earth of the inviolate Haram.

Down, swiftly down with picks and crowbars. Down, into the midst of all that paralyzed but still conscious hate, to the very place of the supremely sacred Black Stone, itself.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE BATTLE OF THE HARAM

The raiding-party, beside its two leaders, consisted of Lombardo, Rennes, Emilio, Wallace, and three others, including Lebon. The lieutenant's orderly, now having recovered strength, had pleaded so hard for an opportunity to avenge himself on the hated Moslems that Leclair had taken him.

As for Lombardo, he had downright insisted on going. His life, he knew, was already forfeited to the expedition--by reason of his having let the stowaway escape--and, this being so, he had begged and been granted the favor of risking it in this perilous undertaking.

Such was the party now swiftly dropping toward the Haram where never yet in the history of the world two English-speaking men had at one time gathered; where never yet the speech of the heretic had been heard; where so many intruders had been beheaded or crucified for having dared profane the ground sacred to Allah and his Prophet.

To the major, peering over the side of the nacelle, it seemed as if the Haram--central spot of pilgrimage and fanatic devotion for one-seventh of the human race--were leaping up to meet him. With dizzying rapidity the broad square, the grim black Ka'aba, the prostrate white throngs all sprang up at the basket. Fascinated, the major watched; his eyes, above all, sought the mysterious Ka'aba.

Excitement thrilled his romantic soul at thought that he was one of the very first white men in the world ever to behold that strange, ancient building.

Clearly he could see the stone slabs cemented with gypsum, the few stricken pigeons lying there, the cords holding the huge _kiswah_, or brocaded cloth, covering "Mecca's bride," (the Ka'aba). The Golden Waterspout was plainly visible, gleaming in the sun--a ma.s.sive trough of pure metal, its value quite incalculable.

Now the Ka'aba was close; now the nacelle slowed, beside it, in the shadow of its grim blackness. The major got an impression of exceeding richness from the shrouding veil, which he saw to be a huge silken fabric, each side like a vast theater curtain of black, with a two-foot band a little more than half-way up, the whole covered with verses from the Koran worked in gold.

The nacelle sank gently on to a heap of motionless pilgrims, canted to the left, and came to rest. Not a groan, curse, or even a sigh escaped the desecrated Moslems forever defiled by the touch of the infidels'

accursed machine.

The effect was horribly uncanny--of all those brown men, open-eyed and conscious, but perfectly unable to move so much as an eyebrow. Such as had fallen with their eyes in the direction of the nacelle, could see what was going on; the others could only judge of this incredible desecration by what they could hear. The sound of foreign voices, speaking an unbelievers' tongue in the very shadow of the Ka'aba, must have been supremely horrible to every Mohammedan there.

"Out, men, and at it!" the major commanded, as he scrambled from the nacelle, slid and stumbled over the Moslems, and reached hands for the tools pa.s.sed out to him. Leclair followed. Men and tools were swiftly unloaded, leaving only Wallace and Emilio at their guns, as agreed.

"Faith, but this is some proposition!" grunted the major, as the seven men trampled over the prostrate bodies, without any delay whatever to peer at the Haram or the Ka'aba.

"The stone's there, men, at the south-east corner! Get busy!"

No exhortation was necessary. Every man, nerved to the utmost energy by the extreme urgency of the situation, leaped to work. And a strange scene began, the strangest in all the history of that unknown city of mysteries. The little troop of white men in uniform stumbled over the bodies and faces of their enemies along the Ka'aba, past the little door about seven feet from the ground, and so, skirting the slanting white base, two feet high, came to the Hajar el Aswad, or Black Stone, itself.

Above, in the burning Arabian sky, the air-liner hovered like a gigantic bird of prey, her gallery-rails lined with motionless watchers. The Master observed every move through powerful gla.s.ses.

Over his ears a telephone headpiece, which he had slipped on, kept him in close touch with the men in the nacelle, via the steel cable. This cable formed a strand between East and West; if any evil chance should break it, life would end there and then for nine members of the Legion, brave men all.

That their time was short, indeed, was proved by the vague, hollow roar already drifting in from the outskirts of the city, and from the plain whence, crowding, struggling into the city's narrow ways, a raging ma.s.s of pilgrims was already on the move. A tidal-wave, a sea of hate, the hundred thousand or more _Hujjaj_ as yet untouched by the strong magic of the Feringi, were fighting their way toward the Haram.

The time of respite was measured but by minutes. Each minute, every second, bore supreme value.

"There she is, men!" the major shouted, pointing. And on the instant, driving furiously with pick-axe, he struck the first blow.

Plainly, about three feet below the bottom of the silken veil and four feet above the pavement, there indeed they saw the inestimably sacred stone, which every Moslem believes once formed a part of Paradise and was given by Allah to the first man. To the Legionaries' excited eyes it seemed to be an irregular oval, perhaps seven inches in diameter, with an undulating surface composed of about a dozen smaller stones joined by cement and worn blackly smooth by millions of touches and kisses.

It was surrounded by a border of cement that looked like pitch and gravel; and the major noted, even as he drove his pick into this cement, that both the stone and the border were enclosed by a ma.s.sive circle of gold with the lower part studded full of silver nails.

Only these hasty observations, and no more, the Legionaries made as they fell with furious energy to the task of dislodging the venerable relic. To all but this labor they were oblivious--to the heat and stifle of that sun-baked square, the mute staring of the paralyzed _Hujjaj_, the wafting languor of incenses from the colonnades, the quiet murmur of waters from the holy well, Zem Zem.

The scene, which ordinarily would have entranced them and filled them with awe, now had become as nothing. Every energy, every sense had centered itself only on this one vital work of extracting the Black Stone from the Ka'aba wall and of making a swift getaway with it before the rising murmur of rage, from without the area of paralysis, should sweep in on them with annihilating pa.s.sion.

"Here, Emilio--drive your pick here!" commanded the major, his red face now dark crimson with heat and excitement as well as with the intense force wherewith he was wielding his implement. Cement flew in showers at every stroke, out over the sweating Legionaries and the prostrate Moslems near the stone. The white men slid and stumbled on limp bodies, trampled them unheedingly, and of the outstretched pilgrims made as it were a kind of vantage-post for the attack on the inmost citadel of Islam.

"Work quick, Major!" came the Master's voice, seemingly at Bohannan's elbow. "There's a fearful drove of the rascals coming. You'd better get that stone out and away in double-quick time!"

The major replied nothing, but his pick-axe flailed into the cement with desperate energy. Emilio and others seconded him, while Rennes and Wallace dug, kneeling, with their crowbars. The blows echoed with staccato rapidity through the sacred Haram, which now had begun to fill with the confused roar of the on-coming mobs from the Ma'abidah suburb and the Plain of Mina, from Jebel Hindi and the Sulaymainyah quarter.