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So! Now to the nacelle!" The rifles were opening a lively fire, already, as the men staggered over the prostrate Moslems, reached the nacelle and with a grunt and a heave tumbled the Hajar el Aswad into it. They scrambled after, falling into the shelter of the basket.
Furiously the Legionaries worked the stone back and forth; a shower of mortar fell on the workers' feet and on the upturned, staring faces of the paralyzed Moslems trampled by the horrible contamination of heretical boots perhaps even pigskin boots! and then, all at once, the Hajar el Aswad slid from the place where it had lain uncounted centuries.
The feet of all were cut and bleeding, in spite of rags torn from their tattered uniforms and bound on with strips of cloth; for everywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp stone the black basalt named by the Arabs Hajar Jehannum, or "Rock of Hell."
The Somal have many superstitions connected with this hawk: if it touch a child the latter dies, unless protected by the talismanic virtues of the "Hajar Abodi," a stone found in the bird's body. As it frequently swoops upon children carrying meat, the belief has doubtlessly frequently fulfilled itself.
"It is in the northeast corner, at the very corner, Master. It is between four feet and five from the ground. That, and no other, is the true place, Master, the place of Hajar el Aswad!" "Ah, yes, yes, the books lie," agreed the Master. "And they say, too, that certain of the Feringi have indeed touched and even kissed the Black Stone, and still lived." Rrisa's face clouded.
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.
A tent was then sent down from heaven, but Seth substituted a hut for the tent. After the Flood, Abraham and Ishmael rebuilt the Kaaba. At present it is a cube-shaped, flat-roofed building of stone in the Great Mosque at Mecca. In its southeast corner next to the silver door is the famous black stone "hajar al aswud," dropped from paradise.
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