Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
Still, not one uttered any word of despair or suggestion of surrender. Everything but a fight to the finish was forgotten. Only one man even thought of Nissr and of what probably had happened out there on the plain. This man was Leclair. "Dieu!" he grunted. "An accident, eh? Something must have gone wrong or did the brown devils attack?
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 woman, however, smiled with dry lips, and from her belt took out a little, flattened piece of lead the bullet which, fired at Nissr from near the Ka'aba, had fallen at her feet and been picked up by her as a souvenir. "Here is a bullet," said she chokingly. "You can cut this in two and shape it. We can reload two shells with some of the Arab powder. It will do!" They laughed irrationally.
Those to whom the duty was assigned of giving his metal-weighted body sea burial turned away their eyes, so that they might not see that final plunge. But the sound of the body striking the waves rocketed up to them with sickening distinctness. Lightened a little, Nissr seemed to rally for a few minutes. The altimeter needle ceased its drop, trembled and even rose .275 degrees. "God!
She had disobeyed his orders. She had flatly thrown down the gage of battle to him, that she would never leave Nissr alive. And last, she had forced him into planning to disseminate falsehoods among his crew falsehoods the secret of which only she shared with him. Unwilling as this man was to have anything in common with her, he had been obliged to have something in common to have much.
The Master's were first to lower. "Your life is spared," he answered. "That is a concession to your sex, madam. Had you been a man, I would inevitably have put you to death. As it is, you shall live. And you shall remain with us " "Thank God for that!" "Till we reach land. There you must leave Nissr."
He prostrated himself, with groans and cries to Allah. The Legionaries, from galleries and gun-stations waving derisive arms, raised shouts and hurrahs. Sweaty, spent, covered with grease and dirt, they cheered with leaping hearts. Another shell, bursting in mid-air not fifty yards away, rocked Nissr, keeled her to port, and for a moment sent her staggering down.
A violent detonation flung echoes from sea and shore; and bits of splintered wreckage spun down past the windows, to plunge into the still swirling, bubbling sea. The Master made no answer, but rang for the propellers to be clutched in. Nissr obeyed their quickening whirl. Her altitude was already four hundred and fifty feet, as marked by the altimeter.
Enough power was still left in her storage-batteries to operate the air-pressure system through the floats. This air, with a huge boiling and seething of the white surf, loosened the floats from the cling of the sand; and a score of men at the tackles succeeded at high-tide in hauling Nissr far up on the beach.
An astonishing change, however, swept over the infuriated mob in the Haram and throughout the radiating streets. One would have thought a bolt from heaven had struck the Moslems dumb. The angry tumult died; the vast hush that rose to Nissr was like a blow in the face, so striking was its contrast with the previous uproar. Most of the furious gesticulation ceased, also.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking