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The only witnesses were the Arabian Desert stars; the only requiem the droning of the helicopters far above, where Nissr hung with her gleaming lights like other, nearer stars in the dense black sky. By ten o'clock, the air-liner had resumed her course, leaving still another brave man to his last sleep, alone. The routine of travel settled down again on the ship and its crew of adventurers.
In a few minutes it had come off the port bows of the giant air-liner, no more than half a mile distant. Now the watchers saw it, slipping through some tenuous higher cloud-banks that had begun to gather, a lean, swift, wasplike speedster: one of the Air Control Board's the A.C.B.'s most rapid aerial police planes.
The air-liner sank slowly, with a hissing of air-intakes into the vacuum-floats, and hung there, trembling, quivering with the slow back-revolution of her screws, the swift energy of her helicopters. The Master put her in charge of Janina, the Serbian ace, and descended to the lower gallery.
Evening and night still found him in profound thought, while the giant air-liner steadily rushed into the south-east, bearing him and the Legion onward toward dim regions now veiled in purple darkness under strange stars. At nine o'clock he ordered Nissr stopped, and had the body of Dr. Lombardo sent down with six men in the nacelle, for burial.
"'In rice, strength; in the Beni Harb, manhood!" Nearer the land, ever sagging down but still afloat though now at times some of the heavier surges broke in foam over the rail of the lower gallery the Eagle of the Sky drifted on, on. Hardly a half-mile now lay between air-liner and shore. Suddenly the Master began to speak: "Listen, Lieutenant! Events are at a crisis, now.
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.
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 pass 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 "
Came a burst of smoke, another concussion, a shuddering impact that trembled through the whole vast air-liner. White-hot fire ribboned back and away, shredded into little, whirling gusts of incandescence that dissolved in black smoke. "Take me alive, eh?" the stowaway shouted, madly. "Ha-ha! I see you! You're all dead men, anyhow! I'll go first show you I'm not afraid!"
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