His thoughts first dwelt a little on yesterday's battle and on the wondrous treasure now in his hands. Then they touched the approaching campaign beyond the Iron Mountains in regions never yet seen by any white man's eye, and for a while enveloped some of the potentialities of that campaign.

But "Captain Alden" recurring to his mind, drove away such stern imaginings. The Master's lips smiled, a little; his black eyes softened, and for a moment his face a.s.sumed something that might almost have made it akin to those of men who feel the natural pa.s.sions of the heart. Never before, in all his stern, hard life, had the Master's expression been quite as now.

"Who can she be, I wonder?" he mused. "A woman like that, possessed of that extraordinary beauty; a woman with education, languages, medical skill; a woman with courage, loyalty, and devotion beyond compare, and with all the ardor for service and adventure that any man could have--who can she be? And--d.a.m.n it, now! Who am I, to be thinking of such nonsense, after all?"

His eyes fell on the table. Something lay there, agleam with the sunlight flicking blood-red spots from a polished metal surface. What could this thing be? Surely, it had not lain there, the night before.

The Master wrinkled heavy brows, focussing his sight on this metal object. Puzzled, not yet able to make it out clearly, he raised himself on his elbow and looked with close attention at the mysterious object.

Suddenly he leaped from the berth, strode to the table and caught up--Rrisa's dagger.

"Allah! What's this?" he exclaimed. "Rrisa--he's been here--and with a knife?--"

For a second or two he stood there, staring at the _jambiyeh_ in his grip. His powerful frame tautened; his thick, corded neck swelled with the intensity of his emotion as his head went forward, staring.

His jaw set hard. Then with a kind of half-comprehension, he turned quickly toward the window.

Yes, there were traces on the sill, that could not be mistaken. The Master's keen eyes detected them, under the morning sun. He stepped to his desk, dropped the dagger into a drawer, and pressed the b.u.t.ton for his orderly.

No one appeared. The Master rang again. Quite in vain. With more precipitation than was customary with him, he dressed and went to Rrisa's cabin.

Its emptiness confirmed his suspicions. Returning along the outer gallery, a little pale, he reached the railing opposite his own window. Here a scratch on the metal drew his attention. Closely he scrutinized this scratch. A hint of whitish metal told the tale--metal the Master recognized as having been abraded from a ring the Master himself had given him; a ring of aluminum alloy, fashioned from part of a Turkish grenade at Gallipoli.

The Master's face contracted painfully. In his mind he could reconst.i.tute the scene--Rrisa's hands gripping the rail, his climb over it, his leap. For a moment the Master stood there with blank eyes, peering out over the burning, tawny desolation of the great sand-barrens that stretched away, away, to boundless immensity.

"Yes, he is surely gone," he whispered. "_Shal'lah! Razi Allahu anhu!_" (It is Allah's will; may Allah be satisfied with him!) "What would I not give to have him back!"

The trilling of his cabin phone startled him to attention. He entered, took the receiver and heard Leclair's voice from the pilot-house:

"Clouds on the horizon, my Captain. And I think there is a mountain range coming in sight. Would you care to look?"

The Master, very grim and silent, went into the pilot-house. He had decided to make no mention of what had happened. The suicide must pa.s.s as an accident. He himself must seem to have no knowledge of it.

Morale forbade the admission either of treachery or self-destruction, for any member of the Legion.

The sight of vague, pearl-gray clouds on the far south-east horizon, and of a dim, violet line of peaks notched across the heat-quivering sky in remotest distances, struck him like a blow in the face. Clouds must mean moisture; some inner, watered plain wholly foreign to the general character of the Arabian Peninsula. And the peaks must be the Iron Mountains that Rrisa had told him about. They seemed to rebuff him, to be pointing fingers of accusation at him. Had it not been for his insistence--

"But that is all nonsense!" he tried to a.s.sure himself, as he took his binoculars from the rack and sighted at the forbidding, mysterious range. "Am I responsible for a Moslem's superst.i.tions, or his fanatic irrationality?"

The Master's own narrow escape from death disturbed him not at all.

He hardly even thought of it. All he strove for, now, was to exculpate himself for Rrisa's death. But this he could not do.

A sense of blood-guiltiness clung about him like a garment--the first that he had felt on this expedition. His soul, unemotional, practical, hard, was at last touched and wounded by the realization that Rrisa, pushed beyond all limits of endurance, had chosen death rather than inflict it on his sheik. And the thought that the faithful orderly's body was now lying on the flaming sands, hundreds of miles away--that it was already a prey to jackals, kites, and buzzards--sickened his shuddering heart and filled him with remorse.

"Allah send a storm of sand--_jinnee_ to bury the poor chap, that's all I can wish now!" he pondered, as he studied the strange yellowish and orange tints in utmost horizon distances. The air, over the shimmering peaks, seemed of a different quality from that elsewhere.

To north, to west, the desert rim of the world veiled itself in magic blue, mysteriously dim. But there, it glowed in golden hues. What, thought the Master, might be the meaning of all this?

The Master had no time for speculation. The urgent problem of locating the Bara Jannati Shahr, beyond that inhospitable sierra, banished thoughts of all else. He inspected his charts, together with the air-liner's record of course and position. He slightly corrected the direction of flight. "Captain Alden" was already in the pilot-house, with Leclair. The Master summoned Bohannan tersely, and briefly instructed him:

"You understand, of course, that we may now be facing perils beyond any yet encountered. We have already upset all Islam, and changed the _kiblah_--the direction of prayer--for more than two hundred million human beings. The 'fronting-place' is now aboard _Nissr_."[1]

[Footnote 1: So long as the Black Stone was at the Ka'aba, this building was the only spot in the world where the _kiblah_ was circular, that is, where Moslems could pray all around it. The Legion's theft of the stone had completely dislocated all the most important beliefs and customs of Islam.]

"The most intense animosity of religious fanaticism will pursue us.

If the news of our exploit has, in any unaccountable way such as the Arabs know how to employ, reached Jannati Shahr, we are in for a battle royal. If not, we still have a chance to use diplomacy. A few hours now will determine the issue.

"We are approaching what will probably be the final goal of this expedition; a city beyond unknown mountains; a city that no white man has ever yet seen and that few have even heard of. What the conditions will be there no one can tell; but--"

"Not even Rrisa?" put in the major. "Faith, now's the time, if ever, to consult that lad!"

"Correct, for once," a.s.sented the Master. With purpose to deceive, he phoned for Rrisa. No answer coming, he got Simonds on the wire and ordered him to find the orderly. The investigation thus started would, he knew, soon bring out the fact of the orderly's disappearance. This line of action fairly started, he went on formulating his plans:

"Major, look well to your guns. For once you may have a chance to use them. I have put my various pieces of apparatus in good condition, and have improvised some new features. In addition, we have the second kappa-bomb."

"But I trust we shall not be driven to a fight. If diplomacy can win, there will be no bloodshed. Otherwise, our only limit will be the total destruction of these unknown people, or our own annihilation.

It's a case, now, of win what we are after, or end everything right there, beyond those mountains!"

He ascended to the upper port gallery, and concentrated himself on observation. A certain change in the desert was becoming noticeable, as the air-liner flung herself at high speed into the south-east. At times there must be a little rainfall here, or else some hidden source of water, for a scrub, of dwarf acacia, of camel-gra.s.s, and tamarisk had begun to show.

But as the black, naked mountains drew near, this gave place to flats white with salt, to jagged upcroppings of dull, yellowish rock--how little they then suspected its true nature!--and to detached cliffs sharp as a wolf's teeth, with strata of greenish schist.

It was at 9:30 a.m. of May 28, that _Nissr_ tilted her planes and soared abruptly over the first crags of the Iron Mountains. At a height of forty-five hundred feet she sped above them, the heat of their sun-baked blackness radiating up against her wings and body. No more terrible desolation could be imagined than this rock fortress, split with chasms and unsounded gorges, where here and there more of the yellow outcrops showed. No life appeared, not even vultures. For more than an hour, _Nissr's_ shadow leaped across this utter solitude of death.

The Master summoned Leclair, Bohannan, and "Captain Alden," and for some time gave them careful instructions which none but they were allowed to hear.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

JOURNEY'S END

All this time, the strange, yellowish sheen against the heavens was increasing. What might lie beyond the mountains--who could tell? But that its nature was wholly different from anything any white man ever had beheld seemed obvious.

Quite suddenly, at 10:05, the Master's binoculars detected a break far to southward, in the craggy wall of rock. He ordered _Nissr's_ beak turned directly thither. Swiftly the Eagle of the Sky held her course, speeding like an arrow. And now a vast, open plain was seen to be spreading away, away to indeterminable distances; a plain the further limits of which veiled themselves in bister and dull ocher vapors.

The aureate shimmer on the sky kept steadily increasing, from a point somewhat to the left of _Nissr's_ line of flight. What this might be, none could guess. None save the Master. More agitated than any had ever seen him, he stood there at the rail, lips tight, hands clutching the binoculars at his eyes.

"By Allah!" the major heard him mutter. "It can't be true--the thing I've heard. Only a fable, surely! And yet--"

Now the vast plain was coming clearly to view. It appeared fully under cultivation with patches of greenery that denoted gardens, palm-groves, fruit-orchards; all signs of a well-watered region here at the center of the world's most appalling desert.

This in itself was a thing of astonishment. But it faded to insignificance as all at once a far, dazzling sheen burst on the watchers. Up against the sky a wondrous, yellow blaze seemed to be burning. Enormously far away as it still was, it filled the heart of every observer with a strange, quick thrill of wonder, of hope.

Something of wild exultation seemed to leap through the Legionaries'

veins, at sight of that strange fire.

Leclair glanced at the Master. The dark, taciturn man, for all his self-control, had set teeth into his lip till the blood was all but starting.

On, on swooped _Nissr._ Now the plain was widening. Now, off at the left, behind the shimmer of the wondrous sight that seemed a fantastic city of dreams, long black cliffs had become visible--surely some spur of the Iron Mountains, making to southward at the eastern edge of the plain. This line of crags faded, in remote distance, into the brown vapors that ringed the mystic horizon.