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Updated: May 1, 2025
Nissr trembled, hesitated, lifted a few inches, settled back once more. Again the buzzer sounded. The noise of rapid feet became audible above, in the upper galleries. Ferrara called into the phone: "It's a British destroyer, sir! She's just rounded the point, three miles south. Signals up for us to surrender!" "Machine-guns against naval ordnance!" gritted the Master savagely. "Surrender?"
British goods, he very wisely calculated, could not be commandeered without recompense The packet was lashed to a camel-goad which was driven into the sand, and Nissr once more got slowly under way. All eyes were now on the barren chalk and sandstone coasts of the Red Sea, beyond which dimly rose the castellated peaks of Jebel Radhwa.
And for a while the three men crouched in the wady with the two unconscious ones, torturer and victim. At length the Master spoke: "This won't do, Lieutenant. We must be getting back." Leclair peered at him in the screaming dark. "Why, my Captain?" asked he. "The Legionaries can care for themselves. If Nissr is breaking up, in the gale, we can do nothing. And on the way we may be lost.
One of the great gates began to swing shut, far at the end of the track. The Master laughed again, with the wind whipping at his hair. "Full speed ahead!" he shouted into the telephone. The Nissr leaped into a swifter course. Then all at once she skidded clear of the track, slanted upward, breasted the air. Her searchlight blazed. All along her flanks, fire-jets spangled the night.
"Captain Alden" was already in the pilot-house, with Leclair. The Master summoned Bohannan tersely, and briefly instructed him: "You understand, of course, that we may now be facing perils beyond any yet encountered. We have already upset all Islam, and changed the kiblah the direction of prayer for more than two hundred million human beings. The 'fronting-place' is now aboard Nissr."
From the sea, the noise of waves breaking along the lower works of Nissr mingled with the hiss and refluent slither of the tumbling surf on the gleaming beach. For a while peace seemed to have descended. A purple shade settled over the desert. The sun was nearly gone, now, and dusk would not be long in closing its chalice down over the light-wearied world.
The main body of the Legion would, of course, also perish in this débâcle if still alive; but the probability existed that before Nissr could take the air, all would be dead. The program was explicit. All five men of the rear guard fully understood its every detail and all had sworn to carry it out to the letter.
Flocks of vultures rose and soared away. Jackals and hyenas cowered and slunk to cover. The tumult of the guns and this vast, drifting monster of the air had overcome even their greed for flesh. Another shot, puffing white as wool from the bow-chaser of the destroyer, screeched through the vultures, scattering them all ways, but made a clean miss of Nissr.
His eyes were far ahead, where the war-party was beginning to debouch on the white sands along the shore full three hundred fighting-men, or more, well armed, as the tiny sparkles of sunlight flicking from weapons proved. As Nissr drew in to land, the Beni Harb grew visible to the naked eye, like a swarm of ants on the desert rim. "The woman's heart," repeated the Master.
Uncouth, lame, scarred by flame and shell, Nissr spread her vast wings and still the Eagle of the Sky, undaunted and unbeaten roared into swift flight toward the waiting mysteries of the vacant abodes. Mid-morning found Nissr far from the coast, skimming along at fifteen hundred feet altitude over the Tarmanant region of the Sahara.
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