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For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Star could these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts. While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tense with joy, held up their treasure-trove. "The Great Pearl Star!" he cried, in a strange voice. "Kaukab el Durri!
"I should hate to leave it there on the roof." "It will not be left on the roof." "I don't understand, exactly " "There will be very many things you do not understand before this expedition is over and done with. I need say no more." Sharply he clapped his hands, thrice. In a moment, Rrisa appeared at the door. The Master spoke a few guttural, aspirated words of Arabic.
Rrisa, livid with fury and baffled hate, flung up wild arms and began screaming the most extravagant insults at the still invisible nomads, whose fire was now beginning again all along their line. "O rejected ones, and sons of the rejected!" the Arab howled. "O hogs and brothers of hogs!" He fell to gnawing his own hand, as Arabs will in an excess of passion.
Soft, opalescent gleams were blent with prismatic blues, greens, crimsons. Melting violets were stabbed through by hard yellows and penetrant purples. And here an orange flash vied with a delicate old rose; there a rich carnation sparkled beside a misty gray, like fading clouds along the dim horizons of fairyland. The Master murmured: "It's true, then partly true. Rrisa knew part of it!"
"What, Rrisa?" "Behold! I I have found him!" "Found ?" shouted the Master, plunging forward. Leclair followed close, staggering in the sudden gale. "Abd el Rahman?" "The old hyena, surely! M'almé, M'almé! See!" The white men stumbled with broken ejaculations to where Rrisa was crouched over a gaunt figure in the drifting sand. "Is that he, Rrisa?" cried the Master. "Art thou sure?"
As soon as you can get over here in a taxi, from that incredibly stupid club of yours. You can get to Niss'rosh even though it's after seven. Take the regular elevator to the forty-first floor, and I'll have Rrisa meet you and bring you up here in the special. "That's a concession, isn't it? The sealed gates that no one else ever passes, at night, are opened to you. It's very important.
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.
This cord in some way had been severed by the Sheik's rifle when the old man had fallen. The leather sack had rolled a few feet away. Now, with hands that shook so that the Arab could hardly control them, Rrisa was holding out this sack as he staggered through the blinding sand-storm towards his chief. "Al Hamdu Lillah!" "See see what I have found!"
Then once more he fell to pacing; and as he walked that weary space, up and down, he muttered to himself with words we cannot understand. After a certain time, Rrisa came silently back, sliding into the soft dusk of that room almost like a wraith. He bore a silver tray with a hook-nosed coffee-pot of chased metal. The cover of this coffee-pot rose into a tall, minaret-like spike.
"No time, now, for killing! Lucky if we get back ourselves, alive, to the beach! My Captain!" "What now?" the Master flung at him, shielding mouth and eyes with cupped hands. "To the wady, all of us! That may give protection till this blast of Hell passes!" A startled cry from Rrisa forestalled any answer. The Arab's voice rose in a wild hail from the sand-filled dark: "O M'almé, M'almé!"
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