The Desert.
Four men, one woman.
Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"—that is to say, the land "where there is none but He."
Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard, unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness. Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far, iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare, scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.
Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lost yet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the five fugitives—pitiable handful of the Legion—were plodding south-west, toward the sunset.
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 ArabsHajar Jehannum, or "Rock of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities.
Each figure bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was, corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one of the most hideous deaths known to man—the death of thirst in the wilderness.
The woman's face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retained its beauty. Her heavy masses of hair, bound up with cloth strips, protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others, they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniously tied into some semblance ofcherchias. Above all, the Legionaries knew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of the desert sun.
In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, now oblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No look of surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was in reality a woman. The Legionaries' anguish, the numbing, brutalizing effects of their recent experience had been too great for any minor emotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, as one of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, been true.
For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itself south-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclair was first to utter words.
"Let us rest a little while,mon capitaine," said he in a hoarse, choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Many hundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gained by hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events, until that cursed sun has set!"
In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of the little, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were now toiling. All did the same, and all sat down—or rather, fell—upon the hot earth.
Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as they had soared above it, at cool altitudes, in the giant air-liner; very different from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim black line of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward.
The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently than any words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours' trek, was strangling the life out of them.
For a while they lay there motionless, unthinking, brutalized by fatigue and pain. With their present condition as an earnest of what was yet to come, what hope had any that even one of them would live to behold the sparkle of the distant Red Sea? Even though unmolested by pursuit from Jannati Shahr or by attack from any wandering tribes of the Black Tent People, what hope could there be?
Gradually some coherence of thought returned to the Master. He sat up, painfully, and blinked with reddened eyes at the woman. She was lying beside her water-bag, seemingly asleep. The Master's face drew into lines of anguish as he looked at her.
With bruised fingers he loosened the thong of his own water-bag, and tore still another strip from his remnant of shirt. He poured a little of the precious water on to this rag, lashed the water-sack tight again, and with the warm, wet rag bathed the woman's face, brow, and throat.
Her closed lids did not open. No one paid any attention. No one even stirred. The cloth grew dry, almost at once, as the thirsty air absorbed its moisture. The Master pocketed it. Elbows on knees, head between hands, he sat there pondering.
In thought he was living over again the incredible events of the past hours, as they had been presented to his own experience. He was remembering the frightful, dizzying plunge down the black pit into the steaming waters of the River of Night—waters which, had they been but a few degrees hotter, would incontinently have ended everything on the instant.
He was recalling, as in a nightmare, his frenzied battle for life, clinging to the inflated goat-skin—the whirl and thunder of unseen cataracts in the blind dark—the confusion of deafening, incomprehensible violences.
He was bringing back to mind the long, swift, smooth rushing of mighty waters through midnight caverns where echoes had told of a rock-roof close above; then, after an indeterminate time of horror that might have been minutes or hours, a weltering maelstrom of leaping waters—a graying of light on swift-fleeing walls; a sudden up-boiling gush of the strangling flood that whelmed him—and all at once a glare of sun, a river broadening out through palm-groves far beyond the Iron Mountains.
All these things, blurred, unreal, heartshaking as evil visions of fever, the Master was remembering. Then came other happenings: a long drift with resistless currents, the strange phenomenon of the lessening stream that dwindled as thirsty sands absorbed it, and the ceasing of the palms.
Last of all, the river had diminished to a shallow, tortuous delta, where the Master's numbed feet had touched bottom. There he had dragged himself ashore, with his goatskin, far more dead than living. And there, for a time he knew not, consciousness had wholly ceased.
A dull, toneless voice sounded in the Master's ears. Bohannan was speaking.
"Faith, but it's strange how even the five of us found each other, outthere in the sand," said the major. "What happened to the rest of us,God knows—maybe!" He choked, coughed, added: "Or to the boys withNissr. God rest their souls! I wish I had a sackful of that wine!"After a long pause: "Don't you, now? What?"
The Master gave no heed. He was trying to ease the position in which the woman was lying. His jacket was off, now, and he was folding it to put under her head.
At his touch, she opened vague eyes. She smiled with dry lips, and put his hand away.
"No, no!" she protested. "No special favors for me! I'm not a woman, remember. I'm 'Captain Alden,' still—only a Legionary!"
"But—"
"If you favor me in any way, to the detriment of any of the others or your own, I won't go on! I'm just one of you. Just one of the survivors, on even terms with the rest. It's give-and-take. I mean that! You've got to understand me!"
The Master nodded. He knew that tone. Silently he put on his jacket, again.
The lieutenant's orderly, Lebon, groaned and muttered a prayer to theVirgin. Leclair sat up, heavily, and blinked with sand-inflamed eyes.
"Time to drink again,n'est-ce pas, my Captain?" asked he. "Drink to the dead!"
"I hope they are dead, rather than prisoners!" exclaimed the Master. "Yes, we'll drink, and get forward. We've got to make long strides, tonight. Those Jannati Shahr devils may be after us, tomorrow. Surely will, if they investigate that delta and find only a few bodies. They'll conclude some of us have got through. And if they pick up our trail, with those white dromedaries of theirs—"
"The sacred pigs!" ejaculated Leclair. "Ah,messieurs, now you begin to know the Arabs as I have long known them." With eyes of hate and pain he peered back at the darkening line of the Iron Mountains.
Bohannan, already loosening the neck of his goat-skin, laughed hoarsely.
"No wine!" he croaked, "and the water's rationed; even the stinking water. But the food isn't—good reason, too; there isn't any. Pockets full of gems!" He slapped one hard pocket. "I'd swap the lot for a proper pair of shoes and a skin o' that wine! Faith—that wine, now—"
The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the other raised for silence.
"Hark!" she whispered. "Sh!"
"What now?" demanded the Master.
"Bells! Camel-bells!"
"Nom d'un, nom!" And the lieutenant drew his gun.
The five fugitives stiffened for another battle. They looked well to their weapons. The Master's weariness and pain were forgotten as he crawled on hands and knees up the side of the little wady. The sound of distant camel-bells, a thin, far quiver of sound, had now reached his ears and those of the other men, less sensitive than the woman's.
Over the edge of the wady he peered, across awa'ar, or stony ground covered with mummified scrub. Beyond, a blanched salt-plain gleamed hoar-white in the on-coming dusk; and farther off, the dunes began again.
Strangely enough, the Master laughed. He turned and beckoned, silently. The others joined him.
"From the west!" he whispered. "This is no pursuit! It is a caravan going to Jannati Shahr!"
Bohannan chuckled, and patted his revolver.
"Faith, but Allah is being good to us!" he muttered. "Now, when it comes to a fight—"
"Ten dromedaries—no, nine—" Leclair judged.
"And six camel-drivers," put in the woman, gun in hand. "A small caravan!"
"Hold your fire, all!" commanded the Master. "They're headed right across this wady. Wait till I give the word; then rush them! And—no prisoners!"
An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving the gaunt, mange-stained camels. In the sand near the wady lay buried Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them so as to leave as little trace as possible.
Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have most abominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab. Not all his long experience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a dead camel-driver. The dead man had suddenly revived from his feigned death and driven ajambiyehinto the base of the lieutenant's throat. That the lieutenant's orderly had instantly shattered the cameleer's skull with a point-blank shot had not saved Leclair.
The four survivors, in addition to burying all the bodies, had buried the copper bars the caravan had been freighting to Jannati Shahr. They had saved the scant food and water of the drivers, also their clothing, slippers, daggers, long rifles, and ammunition.
Now, dressed like Arabs—the best of all disguises in case of being sighted by pursuers or by wandering Black Tent tribes, from far off—they were trekking westward again, riding four of the camels and leading the others.
For a week of Hell the failing beasts, already half dead of thirst when captured, bore them steadily south-west, toward the coast. Twice there rose spirals of smoke, in the desert distances; but whether these were from El Barr pursuers or were merely Bedouin encampments they could not tell.
Merciless goading kept the camels going till they dropped dead, one by one.
By the end of the fourth day only three remained. Lebon methodically cut up every one that perished, for water, but found none in any stomach.
The fugitives sighted no oasis. They found no wady other than stone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by day they grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain that possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their bodies racked by the swaying jolt of camel-riding.
But they still kept organization and coherence. Still, guided by the stars that burned with ardent trembling in the black sky, they followed their chosen course.
Morning heat-mist, noontide glare, wind like a beast with flaming breath, a sky terrible in its stainless beauty, an inescapable sun-furnace that seemed to boil the brains in their skulls—all these and the mockery of mirages that made every long white line of salt efflorescence a lake of cooling waters, brought the four tortured Legionaries close to death.
Awaking toward evening of the fifth day, the Master discovered one of the three camels gone—the one on which he had been riding with the woman, lest she fall fainting to the sand. With this camel, Major Bohannan had likewise disappeared. His big-shouldered, now emaciated figure in its dirty-white burnous was nowhere visible. Only prints of soft hoof-pads, leading off to north-eastward, betrayed the line of flight.
The Master pondered a while as he sat there, dazed, blinking at the desert all purple, gold, and tawny-red. His inflamed eyes, stubbly beard and gaunt cheeks made him a caricature of the man he had been, ten days before. After a little consideration, he awakened the woman and Lebon.
The verdict on Bohannan was madness, mirage, desertion.
For two days the major had been babbling of wine and water, been beholding things that were not, been hurling jewels at imaginary vultures. Now, well, the desert had got him.
To pursue would have been insanity. They got the two remaining camels up, by dint of furious beating and of hoarse eloquence in Arabic from the Master and Lebon. Once more, knowing themselves doomed, they pushed into the eye of the flaming west, over the savage gorgeousness of the Empty Abodes. In less than an hour the double-laden camel fell to its knees and incontinently died.
Lebon dismounted from the one surviving animal, and stepped fair into a scorpion's nest. The horrible little gray creature, striking up over its back with spiked tail, drove the deadly barb half an inch into the orderly's naked ankle.
The Master scarified, sucked, and cauterized the wound. Nothing availed. Lebon, in his depleted condition, could not fight off the poison. Thirty minutes later, swollen and black, he died in a frothing spasm, his last words a hideous imprecation on the Arabs who had enslaved and tortured him-a curse on the whole race of Moslems.
Shaken with horror, the woman and the man buried Lebon, loaded the remaining water-bags, the guns and food on to the one camel and dragged themselves away on foot, driving the spent beast. Obviously this camel could not go far. Blindness had stricken it, and its black lips were retracted with the parch of thirst.
They gave it half a skin of water, and goaded it along with desperation. Everything now depended on this camel. Even though it could not carry them, it could bear the burden of their scant supplies. Without it, hope was lost.
All that night they drove the tortured camel. It fell more and more often. The Master spared it not. For on its dying strength depended the life of the woman he loved.
The camel died an hour before dawn. Not even vultures wheeled across the steely sky. The Master cut from its wasted flanks a few strips of meat and packed them into one of the palm-stick baskets that had held the cameleers' supplies. With them he packed all the remaining food—a few lentils, a little goat's-milk cheese, and a handful of dates fried in clarified butter.
This basket, with a revolver and a handful of cartridges, also the extra slippers taken from Leclair and the orderly, made all the burden the woman could carry. The Master's load, heavier far, was one of the water-skins.
This load, he knew, would rapidly lighten. As it should diminish, faster than the woman's, he would take part of hers. Thus, as best they could, they planned the final stage of their long agony.
Before starting again, they sat a while beside the gaunt, mangled camel, held council of war and pledged faith again. They drank a little of the mordant water that burned the throat and seemed in no wise to relieve the horrible thirst that blackened their lips and shriveled all their tissues.
"I think," the Master gasped, "we can make an hour or so before the sun gets too bad." He squinted at the crimson and purple banderoles of cloud through which, like the eye of a fevered Cyclops, the sun was already glowering. Already the range of obsidian hills ahead of them, the drifted sands all fretted with wind-waves, the whole iron plain of the desert was quivering with heat. "Every hour counts, now. Before we start, let us agree to certain things."
She nodded silently, crouching beside him on the sand. He drew an emaciated arm about her and for a moment peered down into her face. But he did not kiss her. A kiss, as they both were—some fine delicacy of the soul seemed telling him—would have been mockery.
"Listen," he commanded. "We must strictly ration the food and water. You must help me keep to that ration. I will help you. We must be careful about scorpions. Above all, we must beware of mirages. You understand?"
"I understand," she whispered.
"If either of us sees palms or water, that one must immediately tell the other. Then, if the other does not also see them, that is a mirage. We must not turn aside for anything like that, unless we both see it. I am speaking rationally, now that I can. Remember what I say!"
Silently she nodded. He went on:
"Now that we can still think, we must weigh every contingency. Our only hope lies in our helping each other. Alone, either of us will be led away by mirages in a little while. That kind of death must be spared us. We both live or die, together."
She smiled faintly, with parched lips.
"Do you think I would leave you," she asked, "any more than you would leave me? The pact is binding."
He pressed her hand.
"Come," said he. "Let us go!"
Once more they got to their feet, and set out to south-westward, over a scorching plain of crumbling, nitrous mud-flakes. Laden as they were, they could barely shuffle one foot after the other. But blessed lapses of consciousness now and then relieved their agony.
Conscious or not, the life within them drove them onward, ever onward; slow, crawling things that all but blindly moved across the land of death,La Siwa Hu—"where there is none but Allah."
How that day passed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony grows too keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion.
Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of the desert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the two lonely figures struggled on and on. They fell, rested, slept a nightmare sleep under the furious heat, got up again and dragged themselves once more along.
Now they were conscious of plains all whitened with saltpeter, now of scudding sand-pillars—wind-jinneeof the Empty Abodes—that danced and mocked them. Again, one or the other beheld paradisical, gleaming lakes, afar.
But though they had lost the complete rationality that would have bidden them lie quiet all day, and trek only at night, they still remembered the pact of the mirages. And since never both beheld the same lake, they held each other from the fatal madness that had slain Bohannan.
Their only speech was when discussing the allurements of beckoning waters which were but air.
At nightfall, toiling up over the lip of a parched, chalkynullahthat sunset turned to amethyst, a swarm of howling Arabs suddenly attacked them. The Master flung himself down, and fired away all his ammunition, in frenzy. The woman, catching his contagion, did likewise.
No shots came back; and suddenly the Arabs vanished from the man's sight. When he stumbled forward to the place where they had been, he discovered no dead bodies, not even a footprint.
Nothing was there but a clump of acacias, their twisted thorns parched white. They had been shooting at only fantasms of their own brains. Now, even the mercy-bullets were gone.
Bitterly the man cursed himself, as he thrust the now useless pistol back into its holster. The woman, however, smiled with dry lips, and from her belt took out a little, flattened piece of lead—the bullet which, fired atNissrfrom 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. More than half mad as they now were, neither one thought of the fact that they had no percussion-caps.
Still laughing, they sat down in the hot sand, near the clawlike distortions of the acacias. Consciousness lapsed. They slept. The sun's anger faded; and a steel moon, long after, slid up the sky.
Next day, many miles to south-westward of the acacias, Kismet—toying with them for its own delectation—respited them a little while by stumbling them on to a deserted oasis. They turned aside to this only after a long, irrational discussion. The fact that they could both see the same thing, and that they had really come to palm trees—trees they could touch and feel—gave them fresh courage.
Little enough else they got there. The cursed place, just a huddle of blind, mud huts under a dozen sickly trees, had been swept clean some time ago by the passage of a swarm of those voracious locusts known asjarad Iblis(the locusts of Satan).
Nothing but bare branches remained in thenakhil, or grove. Nothing at all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well now choked with masses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalid settlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as if the sun's flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the village to dust and ashes.
All the sufferers found, of any worth, was a few handfuls of dry dates in one of the hovels and a water-jar with about two quarts of brackish water.
This water the Master discovered, groping half blind through the hut. Stale as it was, it far surpassed the strongly chemicalized water of the River of Night, still remaining in the goat-skin. It smote him with the most horrible temptation of his life. All the animal in his nature, every parched atom of his body shouted.
"Take it! Drink, drink your fill! She will never know. Take it, and drink!"
He seized the water-jar, indeed, but only to carry it with shaking hands to her, where she lay in the welcome shadow of the hut. His lips were black with thirst as he raised her head and cried to her:
"Here is water—real water! Drink!"
She obeyed, hardly more than half conscious. He gave her all he dared to have her drink at once, nearly half. Then he set down the jar, loosened the sack from his shoulders which were cut raw with the chafing of the thongs, and bathed her face with a little of that other water which, though bad, still might keep life in them.
"This may be an insane waste," he was thinking, "but it will help revive her. And—maybe—we shall find another, better oasis."
Out across the plain he peered, over the sun-dried earth, out into the distances shrouded with purple mists. His blurred eyes narrowed.
"Why, my God! There's one, now!" he muttered. "A green one—cool—fresh—"
The Master laid the woman down again in the shadow, got up and staggered out into the blinding sun. He tottered forward, laughing hoarsely.
"Cool—fresh—" The words came from between parched lips.
All at once the oasis faded to a blur in the brilliant tapestry of the desert that beckoned: "Come to me—and die!"
The Master recoiled, hands over eyes, mouthing unintelligible words. Back beside the woman he crouched, fighting his own soul to keep it from madness. Then he heard her voice, weak, strange:
"Have you drunk, too?"
"Of course!"
"You are not—telling me the truth."
"So help me God!" His fevered lips could hardly form the words."There, in the hut—I drank. All I needed."
She grew silent. His conscience lapsed. They lay as if dead, till almost evening, under the shelter of the blessed shadow.
The rest, even in that desolation, put fresh life into them. At nightfall they bound up their feet again, ate the dry dates and again set their blistered faces toward the Red Sea.
The woman's basket was now light, indeed, across her shoulders. Not all her begging had induced the Master to let her carry the water-jug there. This, too, he was carrying.
All night long, stopping only when one or the other fell, they ploughed over basalt and hornblende schist that lacerated their feet, over blanched immensities under the steel moon, across grim, black ridges and through a basin of clay, circled by hills.
Strange apparitions mocked and mowed before them, but grimly they gave no heed. This, they both realized in moments of lucidity, was the last trek. Either they must find the sea, before another night, or madness would sink its fangs into their brains. And madness meant—the end.
Their whole consciousness was pain. This pain localized itself especially in their heads, round which somejinneeof the waste had riveted red-hot iron bands. There was other pain, too, in the limping feet cased in the last of thebabooches, now stiffened with blood. And in the throat and lungs, what was this burning?
"Thálassa! Thálassa!"
Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a brass circle of horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped by an azure zenith, found them still crawling south-westwards making perhaps a mile an hour.
Disjointed words and sentences kept framing themselves in the man's mind; above all, a sentence he had read long ago in Greek, somewhere. Where had he read that? Oh, in Xenophon, of course. InThe Retreat of the Ten Thousand.The Master gulped it aloud, in a dead voice:
"Most terrible of all is—the desert—for it is full-of a great want."
After a while he knew that he was trying to laugh.
"A great want!" he repeated. "A great—"
Presently it was night again.
The Master's mind cleared. Yes, there was the woman, lying in the sand near him. But where was the date-stick basket? Where was the last of the food? He tried to think.
He could remember nothing. But reason told him they must have eaten the last of the food and thrown the basket away. His shoulders felt strangely light. What was this? The water-bag was gone, too?
But that did not matter. There had been only a little of that chemicalized water left, anyhow. Perhaps they had drunk it all, or bathed their faces and necks with it. Who could tell? The water-sack was gone; that was all he knew.
A great fear stabbed him. The water-jar! Was that still on his back? As he felt the pull of a thong, and dragged the jar around so that he could blink at it, a wonderful relief for a moment deadened his pain.
"Allah isélmak!" he croaked, blessing the scant water the jar still held. He realized the woman was looking at him.
"Water!" he whispered. "Let us drink again—and go on!"
She nodded silently. He loosed the thong, took the jar and peered into its neck, gauging the small amount of water still there. Then he held it to her lips.
She seemed to be drinking, but only seemed. Frowning, as she finished, he once more squinted into the jar with bleared eyes. His voice was even, dull, ominous as he accused:
"You drank nothing. You are trying to save water for me!"
She shook her head in negation, but he penetrated the lie. His teeth gleamed through his stubble of beard, and his eyes glinted redly under the hood of his ragged burnous as he cried:
"Will you drink?"
"I tell you—I have drunk!"
Slowly he tilted the jar toward the thirsty sands.
"Drink, now, or I pour all this on the ground!"
Beaten, she extended a quivering hand. They shared the last of the water. The man took less than a third. Then they set out again on the endless road of pain.
Was it that same day, or the next, that the man fell and could not rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray scorpion, too—but no,thathad been crushed to a pulp by the man's heel. Or had it not? Well—
The man! Was there a man? Where was he? Here, of course, on the baked earth.
As she cradled his head up into her lap and drew the shelter of her burnous over it, she became rational again. Her hot, dry hand caressed his face. After a while he was blinking up at her.
"Bara Miyan! Violator of the salt!" he croaked, and struck at her feebly. And after another time, she perceived that they were staggering on and on once more.
The woman wondered what had happened to her head, now that the sun had bored quite through. Surely that must make a difference, must it not?
A jackal barked. But this, they knew, must be illusion.
No jackals lived so far from any habitation of mankind. The man blinked into the glare, across which sand-devils of whirlwinds were once more gyrating over a whiteness ending in dunes that seemed to be peppered with camel-grass.
Another mirage! Grass could grow only near the coast. And now that they had both been tortured to death by Jannati Shahr men and been flung into Jehannum, how could there be any coast? It seemed so preposterous.
It was all so very simple that the man laughed—silently.
Where had that woman gone to? Why, he thought there surely had been a woman with him! But now he stood all alone. This was very strange.
"I must remember to ask them if there wasn't a woman," thought he."This is an extraordinary place! People come and go in such a manner!"
The man felt a dull irritation, and smeared the sand out of his eyes. How had that sand got there? Naturally, from having laid on one of those dunes. There seemed to be no particular reason for lying on a dune, under the fire-box of an engine, so the man sat up and kept blinking and rubbing his eyes.
"This is the best mirage, yet," he reflected. "The palms look real. And the water—it sparkles. Those white blotches—one would say they were houses!"
Indifferent, yet interested, too, in the appearance of reality, the man remained sitting on the dune, squinting from under his torn burnous.
The mirage took form as a line of dazzling white houses along a sea of cobalt and indigo. And to add to the reality of the mirage, some miles away, he could see two boats with sails all green and blue from the reflection of the luster of the water.
The man's eyes fell. He studied his feet. They were naked, now, cut to the bone, caked with blood and sand. Odd, that they did not hurt. Where were his babooches? He seemed to remember something about having taken some ragged ones from the feet of some woman or other, a very long time ago, and having bound his own upon her mangled feet.
"I'll ask the people in those houses, down there," thought he; and on hands and knees started to crawl down the slope of the dunes toward the dazzling white things that looked like houses.
Something echoed at the back of his brain:
"You must ask her if this is real! Unless you both see it, you must not go!"
He paused. "There was a woman, then!" he gasped. "But—where is she now?"
Realization that she had disappeared sobered him. He got up, groped with emaciated hands before his face as he turned back away from the white houses and stumbled eastward.
All at once he saw something white lying on the sand, under a cooking glare of sunlight. Memory returned. He fell on his knees beside the woman and caught her up in quivering arms.
After a while, he noticed there was blood on her left arm. Blood, in the bend of the elbow, coagulated there.
This puzzled him. All he could think was that she might have cut herself on herjambiyeh, when she had fallen. He did not know then, nor did he ever know, that he himself had fallen at this spot; that she had thought him dying; that she had tried to cut her arm and give him her blood to drink; that she had fainted in the effort. Some last remnants of strength welled up in him. He stooped, got her across his shoulder, struggled to his feet and went staggering up the dune.
Here he paused, swaying drunkenly.
Strange! The very same mirage presented itself to his eyes—blue sails, turquoise sea, feathery palms, white houses.
"By God!" he croaked. "Mirages—they don't last, this way! That's real—that's real water, by the living God!"
Up from dark profundities of tortured memory arose the cry of Xenophon's bold Greeks when, after their long torment, they had of a sudden fronted blue water. At sight of the little British consular station of Batn el Hayil, on the Gulf of Farsan:
"Thálassa!" he cried. "Thálassa, thálassa!" (The sea, the sea!)
New York, months later.
Spring had long departed—the spring of the year in which the Eagle of the Air had flung itself aloft from the Palisades, freighted with such vast hopes.
Summer was past and gone. The sparkling wine of autumn had already begun to bubble in the cup of the year.
Sunset, as when this tale began. Sunset, bronzing the observatory ofNiss'rosh, on top of the huge skyscraper.
Two of the Legionaries—a woman and a man—were watching that sunset from the western windows of that room where first had been conceived the wonder-flight which had spelled death for so many a stout heart.
You could see great changes had come upon the man, as he paced slowly up and down the singular room, hands deep in the pockets of his riding-trousers. His hair was grayer, for one thing, his face leaner; a certain sinewy strength had come to him that had not been there before.
Some marks of suffering still remained on him, that not all of life could take away. His eyes looked deeper and more wise, his mouth more human in its smile. That he had learned to smile, at all, meant much. And the look in his eyes, as he glanced at the woman, meant vastly more. Yes, this man had learned infinitely much.
From a big, bamboo Chinese chair the woman was watching him.
Her eyes were musing, reminiscent. Her riding-costume well became her; and by the flush on her cheek you might have guessed they had both just come in from a long gallop together.
The costume gave her a kind of boyish charm; yet she remained entirely feminine. A kind of bronze mist seemed to envelop her head, as the dull-tawny sunset light fell on her from those broad windows. Near her riding-crop stood a Hindu incense-holder, with joss-sticks burning. As she took one of these and twirled it contemplatively, the blue-gray vapor spiraling upward was no more dreamy than her eyes.
"The invincible Orient!" she said, all at once. "It absorbs everything and gives back nothing. And we thought, we hoped, we might conquer part of it! Well—no—that's not done."
The man stopped his slow pacing, sat on the edge of the table and drummed with his fingers on the teak.
"Not at the first attempt, anyhow," said he, after a little thought. "I think, though, another time—but there's no use dreaming. Of course, it's not the treasure I'm thinking about. That was just a detail. It's the men. Good men!"
She peered into the incense-smoke, as if exorcising the powers of darkness.
"They're not dead, not all of them!" she exclaimed with conviction.
"I wish I could believe you!"
"But youmustbelieve me! Something tells me some of our good chaps are still alive. All of them perhaps."
"Impossible!" He shook his head. "Even if they escaped the explosion, the Jannati Shahr devils must have massacred them." He shuddered slightly. "That's the worst of it. Death is all right. But the crucifixion, and all—"
"Cold reason paints a cruel picture, I admit," the woman answered, laying a hand on the man's. "But you know—a woman's intuition. I don't believe as you do. And the major—and that rumor we got from old Nasr ed Din, the Hejaz rug-merchant down on Hester Street, how about that?"
"Yes, I know. But—"
"How could a rumor like that come through, about a big, white-skinned, red-hairedAjamslave held by that tribe near Jeddah? How could it, unless there were some truth back of it?"
"He wandered away into the desert, quite insane. It's not impossible he might have been captured. By Allah!" And the man struck the table hard. "If I really believed Nasr ed Din—"
"Well?"
"I'd go again, if I died for it!"
"The pronoun's wrong.We'dgo!"
"Yes,we!" He took her hand. "We'd trail that rumor down and have Bohannan out of there, and the others too, if—but no, no, the thing's impossible!"
"Nothing is impossible, I tell you, in the East. And haven't we had miracles enough? After we were judged pirates and condemned to die, by the International Aero Tribunal, wasn't it a miracle about that pardon? That immunity, for your vibratory secrets that have revolutionized the defensive tactics of the League's air-forces?"
She smiled up at him, through the vapor. "It's the impossible that happens, these days! The soul within me tells me some of our chaps are still alive, out there!"
She waved her smoky wand toward the large-scale map of Arabia on the wall.
"But Rrisa," said he. "About the others, there's no sense of guilt. I feel, though, like a murderer about Rrisa."
"Rrisa still lives!"
He shook his head.
"The incense tells me." She insisted. "My heart tells me!"
"Allah make it so! But even if he is dead, he died like the others—a man!"
"In pursuit of an ideal. We all had that, a dream and an ideal."
"Yes. It wasn't the treasure, of course," he mused. "It wasn't material things. It was adventure. Well—you and I have had that, at all events. And they had it too. They and we—all of us—we changed the course of history for more than two hundred million human beings. And as for you and me—"
He turned, looking at the map. Then he got up from the table, went to that map and laid a hand on the vast, blank expanse across which was printed only "Ruba el Khali"—the Empty Abodes.
"It would wreck the whole structure of civilization if we told," said he. The woman put back the incense-stick into its holder, got up and came to stand beside him. "Imagine the horrible, vulture-like scramble of capitalism to exploit that dyke of gold! There'd be expeditions, pools, combines, wars—we'd have the blood of uncounted thousands on our heads!
"It's not the treacherous El Barr people I'm thinking of. If they perished, as they would to the last man defending their gold, all well and good. But in case any of our men are still alive there,they'dbe butchered. And then, the destruction of gold as a medium of exchange, by its gross plenty, would wreck the world with panics. And the greatest catastrophe of history would lie on our shoulders. That is why—"
"Why the secret must remain here," she said, touching her breast.
"But!" he exclaimed, and turned and took a pencil from the table.
In a bold hand he wrote, across the blank white spaces of the map, these characters in Arabic:
[Illustration]
"Nac'hna arivna!" he exclaimed. "'We know!'"
A long silence followed. Both, with deep memories, were peering at those words, as the light slowly faded in the west over the Palisades. The man was first to speak.
"This secret is ours," said he. "I have another, that even you don't know!"
"You have kept something from—me?"
"Only until I have quite dared tell you."
"Dared?"
"It isn't the mere, simple thing itself. It's the symbolism back of it. Maybe even now I'm premature in telling you. But, somehow—"
He hesitated. This man of action, hard, determined, strong, seemed afraid.
"Somehow," he added, "you and I-have come so near to each other-and tonight, here in this room where it all started, we have seemed to understand each other so well, through the revocation of the past, that—yes, I'll show you—"
He thrust a hand into his breast-pocket and brought out a small leather sack. Startled, she looked at it as he drew open the cord. He took from the sack a wondrous thing, luminous with nacreous hues.
"The Great Pearl Star," she cried. "Kaukab el Durri!"
"Yes, the Great Pearl Star, itself!"
She looked in silence. Then she reached out a hand and touched it, as if unbelieving.
"Why, you never told me!"
"I had a reason."
"And—through all that inferno, when every ounce had to be considered—"
"I was keeping this for—you."
There were tears in her eyes as he laid a hand on her shoulder.
"For you," he repeated. "It was mine, but it is mine no longer. This crown-jewel of Islam is yours, now—if you will have it."
"If I will have it!" she whispered. "There's only one thing in this whole world I more dearly long for!"
"I am offering you that, too," said the man, in a trembling voice. "I knew nothing of it, nothing whatever, until I came to understand what a woman really could be. I fought against it—and lost.
"It came to me not sought after and welcomed, but storming over the ramparts of my soul. Yes, I fought love—and lost."
"I understand that, too," she said.
"I put the Great Pearl Star in my breast, sacred to you. I said to myself: 'If we ever live through this, and I feel worthy to give this gem to her, I'll ask her to complete it.'"
"To complete it?"
"Yes. You see, one pearl was missing. The most wonderful of all. Now, as I clasp this necklace round your throat, the Great Pearl Star is completed."
"I—don't understand—"
"Ah, butIdo! The missing pearl of great price-you are that pearl.In giving the Great Pearl Star to you, I make it whole."
"And I give it back to you, completed!"
Her head lay on his heart. His lips were on her hair.
"Completion," he whispered. "Peace, to the troubled heart. Peace, after the night that life has been to me. Peace, till the dawn!"
"'Peace,'" she said, in the line of the ancient Arabic poem. "'Peace, until the coming of the stars.'"
"'Peace,'" he breathed. "'It is peace until the rising of the day!'"
End of Project Gutenberg's The Flying Legion, by George Allan England