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From the Hill of Arafat; from Jannat el Ma'ale Cemetery; from the dun, bronzed, sun-baked city of a hundred thousand fanatic souls; from the Haram sanctuary itself where mobs of pilgrims were crowded round the Ka'aba and the holy Black Stone; from latticed balcony and courtyard, flat roof, mosque, and minaret, screams of rage shrilled up into the baked air, quivering under the intense sapphire of the desert sky.
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.
"Down, you blazing idiot!" commanded the major, dragging at him with hands that shook. The doctor thrust him away, and turned toward the Ka'aba, the roof of which was not three feet distant. "The golden spout see?" he cried, pointing. "Dio mio, what a treasure!" On to the edge of the nacelle he clambered. "Don't be a damn fool, Doctor!" the major shouted; but already Lombardo had leaped.
Slowly he continued: "Prayer, with face to Mecca, alms-giving, the keeping of the fast of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to the Ka'aba, these are our law. Yea, Master, I have myself seen the Ka'aba, and more than once!" A certain trouble had now grown manifest in Rrisa's eyes. His lips moved silently, as if still praying; but no words were audible.
Its booming echo across the plain and up against the naked, reddish-yellow hills, still further whipped the blood-frenzy of the mad mobs. Even the innumerable pigeons, "Allah's announcers," swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka'aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City.
Every pilgrim in sight had instantaneously fallen to the earth, on the gravel of the Haram, along the raised walks from the porticoes to the Ka'aba, on the marble tiling about the Ka'aba itself, even in the farthest visible streets. The white-clad figures lay piled on each other in grotesque attitudes and heaps.
Cursing with frantic excitement, the Legionaries tugged it from the wall, together with its golden band. Above them the kiswah bellied outward, swaying in the breeze. No Moslem has ever admitted that the Ka'aba veil is ever moved by any other thing than the wings of angels.
The white minarets round the Haram still with delicate tracery as of carved ivory stood up against the sky; but of the out-raged people, the colonnades, the despoiled and violated Ka'aba, nothing could any more be seen. Southward by eastward sped Nissr; and with her now was departing the soul of Islam.
The sudden crack of a rifle-shot snapped from the arcade, and a puff of rock-dust flew from the corner of the Ka'aba, not two feet from the major's head. "Come on, men!" cried the major. "Away!" Some latent mysticism had been stirred in him; some vague, half-sensed superstition.
Excitement thrilled his romantic soul at thought that he was one of the very first white men in the world ever to behold that strange, ancient building. The Golden Waterspout was plainly visible, gleaming in the sun a massive trough of pure metal, its value quite incalculable. Now the Ka'aba was close; now the nacelle slowed, beside it, in the shadow of its grim blackness.
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