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Bohannan dropped a heavy teakwood bar into staples of bronze. "God!" he panted, his right eye misted with blood from a jagged cut on the brow. Shrieks of rage, from without, were answered by jeers and shouts of exultation from the Legionaries. "Nom de Dieu!" gasped Leclair. His neck was blackened with a powder burn, and the tunic was ripped clean off him.
No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was her suffering.
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.
Leclair, entrenched beside the Master, whispered: "They do not understand, these dog-brothers may Allah make their faces cold!" He grinned, frankly, with sparkling eyes and white teeth. "Already we have their beards in our hands!" The Master's only answer was to draw from his pocket an extra lethal gun, hand it over and, in a whisper, hastily instruct the Frenchman how to use it.
Then thou and thine can fly away to thine own country, and bear witness that there be Arabs who do not love to slay the Feringi, but count all men as brethren. "But if thou wilt not deliver Abd el Rahman to me, or test thy magic against my magic, then depart now, in peace, before the setting of the sun. I have spoken!" "Take him at his word, my Captain!" murmured Leclair.
Blasé as the Legionaries were and hardened to wonders, the sight of this corridor and of the vast banquet-hall opening out of it, at the far end, came near upsetting their aplomb. The major even muttered an oath or two, under his breath, till Leclair nudged him with a forceful elbow. Not thus must Franks, from Feringistan, show astonishment or admiration.
Major Bohannan and Lieutenant Leclair, are your crews ready for the descent?" "Yes, sir," the major answered. "Oui, mon capitaine," replied the Frenchman. "Tools all ready? Machine-guns installed? Yes? Very well. Open the trap, now, and swing the nacelle by the electric crane and winch. Right! Steady!" The yells of rage and hate from below were all this time increasing in volume and savagery.
"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.
"I think, Major," said he, "we shall have to use one of the two kappa-ray bombs on these Arabic gentry. It's rather too bad we haven't more of them, and that the capsules are all gone." "Pardon me, my Captain," put in Leclair, "but the paralysis-vibrations, eh? As you did to me, why not to them?" "Impossible. The way we're crippled, now, I haven't the equipment.
And what we cannot understand, though it is all perfectly natural, we call religion, the supernatural, God." From a great vacancy, the Master's words proceeded. Leclair, tugging in vain at the bonds that, invisible yet strong as steel, held him powerless, stared with wild eyes. "There is no supernatural," said the now disembodied voice.
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