The Flying Legion Part 35

The Master loosed a knot in the cord, drew the sack open and shook into his left palm a thing of marvellous beauty and wonder.

By the dim, fitful gleam of the fire, probably the strangest and most costly necklace in the world became indistinctly visible. At sight of it, everything else was forgotten--the wrecked air-liner, the waiting Legion, the unconscious Arabs now being buried in the resistless charge of the sand-armies. Even poor Lebon, tortured slave of the Beni Harb, a lay neglected. For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Star could these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts.

While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tense with joy, held up their treasure-trove.

"The Great Pearl Star!" he cried, in a strange voice.

"Kaukab el Durri! See, one pearl is missing--that is the one said to have been sold in Cairo, twelve years ago, for fifty-five thousand pounds! But these are finer! And its value as a holy relic of Islam--who can calculate that? G.o.d, what this means to us!"

Words will not compa.s.s the description of this wondrous thing. As the Master held it up in the sand-lashed dimness, half-gloom and half-light, that formed a kind of aura round the fire--an aura sheeted through and all about by the aerial avalanches of the sand--the Legionaries got some vague idea of the necklace.

Three black pearls and two white were strung on a fine chain of gold.

A gap in their succession told where the missing pearl formerly had been. Each of the five pearls was of almost incalculable value; but one, an iridescent Oman, far surpa.s.sed the others.

This pearl was about the size of a man's largest thumb-joint. Its shape was a smooth oval; its hue, even in that dim, wind-tossed light, showed a wondrous, tender opalescence that seemed to change and blend into rainbow iridescences as the staring Legionaries peered at it.

The other pearls, black and white alike, ranked as marvelous gems; but this crown-jewel of the Great Pearl Star eclipsed anything the Master--for all his wide travel and experience of life--ever had seen.

By way of strange contrast in values the pearls were separated from each other by worthless, little, smooth lumps of madrepore, or unfossilized coral. These lumps were covered with tiny black inscriptions in archaic Cufic characters; though what the significance of these might be, the Master could not--in that gloom and howling drive of the sand-devils--even begin to determine.

The whole adornment, as it lay in the Master's palm, typified the Orient. For there was gold; there were gems and bits of worthless dross intermingled; and there about it was drifting sand of infinite ages, darkness, flashes of light, color, mystery, wonder, beauty.

"G.o.d! What this means!" the Master repeated, as the three men cringed in the wady. "Success, dominion, power!"

"You mean--" put in Leclair, his voice smitten away by the ever-increasing storm that ravened over the top of the gully.

"What do I _not_ mean, Lieutenant? No wonder the Apostate Sheik had to flee from Mecca and take refuge here in this impa.s.sable wilderness at the furthest rim of Islam! No wonder he has been hounded and hunted!

The only miracle is that some of his own tribesmen have not betrayed him before now!"

"Master, no Arab betrays his own sheik, right or wrong!" said Rrisa in a strange voice. "Before that, an Arab dies by his own hand!" He spoke in Arabic, with a peculiar inflection.

Their eyes met a second by the light of the gusting fire.

"Right or wrong, _M'alme_!" repeated the Arab. Then he added: "Shall I not now go to drag in the swine-brother Abd el Rahman?"

"Thou sayst, if he be left there--"

"Yes, Master, he will surely die. All who are not sheltered, now, will die. All who lie there on the dune, will be drifted under, will breathe sand, will perish."

"It is well, Rrisa. Go, drag in the swine-brother. But have a care to harm him not. Thou wouldst gladly slay him, eh?"

"More gladly than to live myself! Still, I obey. I go, I bring him safe to you, O Master!"

He salaamed, turned, and vanished up over the edge of the wady.

The lieutenant, warned of the danger of sand-breathing by an unconscious man, drew the hood of the woollen _za'abut_ up over the face of Lebon. There was nothing more he could do for the poor fellow.

Only with the pa.s.sage of time could he be reawakened. The French ace turned again to where his chief was still scrutinizing the Pearl Star as he crouched in the wady, back to the storm-wind, face toward the fire on the beach.

"Do you realize what this thing is?" demanded the Master, turning the necklace in his hands. "Do you understand?"

"I have heard of it, my Captain. For years vague rumors have come to me from the desert-men, from far oases and cities of the Sahara. Now here, now there, news has drifted in to Algiers--not news, but rather fantastic tales. Yes, I have often heard of the Kaukab el Durri. But till now I have always believed it a story, a myth."

"No myth, but solid fact!" exulted the Master, with a strange laugh.

"This, Lieutenant, is the very treasure that Mohammed gathered together during many years of looting caravans in the desert and of capturing _sambuks_ on the Red Sea. Arabia, India, and China all contributed to it. The Prophet gave it to his favorite wife, Ayeshah, as he lay dying at Medina in the year 632, with his head in her lap.

"Next to the Black Stone, itself, it is possibly the most precious thing in Islam. And now, now with this Great Pearl Star in our hands, what is impossible?"

Silence fell between the two men. They still huddled there in the partial protection of the wady, while all the evil _jinnee_ of the sand-storm shrieked blackly overhead. With no further words they continued to study the wondrous thing. The fire was dying, now, burned out by the fierce blast of the storm and blown away to sea in long spindrifts of spark and vapor, white as the sand-drive itself. By the fading light little could now be seen of the Great Pearl Star. The Master replaced it in its leather bag, knotted the cord securely about the mouth of the receptacle, and pocketed it.

A rattle of pebbles down the side of the wady, and a grunting call, told them Rrisa had returned. Dimly they saw him dragging the old Sheik over the lip of the gully, down into its half-protection. He brought the unconscious man to them, and--though bowed by the frenzy of the storm--managed a salute.

"Here, Master, I have saved him from the _jinnee_ of the desert,"

Rrisa pantingly announced. His voice trembled with a pa.s.sionate hate; his eyes gleamed with excitement; his nails dug into the palms of his hands. "Now Master, gladden my eyes and expand my breast by letting me see this old jackal's blood!"

"No, Rrisa," the Master denied him. "I have other use for the old jackal. Other punishments await him than death at my hands."

"What punishments, Master?" the Arab cried with terrible eagerness.

"Wait, and thou shalt see. And remember always, I am thy sheik, thy preserver, with whom thou hast shared the salt. 'He who violates the salt shall surely taste Jahannum!'"

"Death shall have me, first!" cried Rrisa, and fell silent. 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. To retrace our journey over the desert would surely be to invite death."

"We must return, nevertheless. This storm may last all night, and it may blow itself out in half an hour. That cannot be told. The Legion may think us lost, and try to search for us. Lives may be sacrificed.

Morale demands that we go back. Moreover, we certainly need not traverse the desert."

"How, then?"

"We can descend the wady to the beach, and make southward along it, under the shelter of the dunes."

"In the noise and confusion of the storm they may take us for Arabs and shoot us down."

"I will see to that. Come, we must go! Carry Lebon, if you like. Rrisa and I will take Abd el Rahman."

"_M'alme_, not Abd el Rahman, now," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Rrisa, "but Abd el Hareth![1] Let that be his t.i.tle!"

[Footnote 1: The former name signifies "Slave of Compa.s.sion;" the latter, "Slave of the Devil."]

"As thou wishest, Rrisa. But come, take his feet. I will hold him by the shoulders. So! Now, forward!"

"And have a care not to breathe the sand, Master," Rrisa warned. "Turn thy face away when the _jinnee_ smite!"

Stumbling, heavy-laden, the three men made their painful way down to the beach, turned to the left, and plowed southward in deep sand. As they left the remains of the fire a great blackness fell upon them.