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A hard, frozen moonlight, from the steely disk sinking down the western sky, had slashed ink-black shadows of struts and stanchions across the gallery, and had flung Nissr's larger shadow down the hungering abysses of the sky that yawned beneath.
And now a vast, open plain was seen to be spreading away, away to indeterminable distances; a plain the further limits of which veiled themselves in bister and dull ocher vapors. The aureate shimmer on the sky kept steadily increasing, from a point somewhat to the left of Nissr's line of flight. What this might be, none could guess. None save the Master.
Wind began to rise up against the glass of the pilot-house; the wind of Nissr's own making. Cool as if in his own easy-chair in the observatory, the Master sat there, hand on wheel. Then all at once he reached for the rising-plane control, drew it over, and into the telephone spoke sharply: "Full speed ahead, now! Give her all she's got!" A shout, was it? Many shouts, cries, execrations!
The machine-guns were dismounted and taken "ashore," to borrow a nautical phrase. These were set up in strategic positions before the liner, and full supplies of ammunition both blank and ball were served to them. About a quarter of a mile to north of Nissr's position, one of the small watercourses or irrigating ditches that cut the plain glimmered through a grove of Sayhani dates.
But that its nature was wholly different from anything any white man ever had beheld seemed obvious. Quite suddenly, at 10:05, the Master's binoculars detected a break far to southward, in the craggy wall of rock. He ordered Nissr's beak turned directly thither. Swiftly the Eagle of the Sky held her course, speeding like an arrow.
Confidently he came into the wind-shielded gallery on top of Nissr's port plane. He advanced to within about six feet, stopped, gave the military salute which they both returned and in a throaty French that marked him as from Paris, demanded: "Which of you gentlemen is in command, here?" "Moi, monsieur!" answered the Master, also speaking French. "And what is your errand?"
The Master laughed again, and strode out into the main corridor, with Leclair close behind him. "Men!" he called, his voice blaring a trumpet-call to action. "Volunteers for a shore-party to clean out that kennel of dogs!" None held back. All came crowding into the spacious corridor, its floor now laterally level but sloping toward the stern, as Nissr's damaged aft-floats had filled and sunk.
That one plane should, unaided, drive on at Nissr's huge, rushing bulk, seemed as preposterous as a mosquito trying to lance a rhinoceros. The major directed a careful lens at this survivor. "He has his nerve right in his baggage with him," announced the Celt. "Sure, he's 'there. There can be no doubt he's seen the others fall. Yet what now? He's turning tail, eh? He's on the run?"
Four hampers were carried down the gangplank and set on the grass, about fifty feet ahead of Nissr's huge beak, that towered in air over the men like an eagle over sparrows. These hampers contained the chosen apparatus. Wires were attached, and run back to the ship, and proper connections made at once by Leclair and Menendez, under the Master's instructions.
Twenty-three men were still fit and active for service; and both Enemark and Lebon would in a few days be of help. "Man-power enough," thought the Master, as he laid out his campaign. "The only troublesome factors, are, first, Nissr's condition; second, our lack of water and supplies; and third, the possibility of interference from Arabs or European forces, by land or sea.
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