Rrisa, wide-eyed, with curling lips of scorn, peered down at the Sheik. The orderly, bare-headed, was shielding eyes and face from the sand-blast, with hands that trembled. His teeth were bared with hate as he peered at the prostrate heretic.
A tall, powerful figure of a man the Sheik was, lying there on his right side with his robe crumpled under him--the robe now flapping, whipping its loose ends in the high and rising wind. His _tarboosh_ had been blown away, disclosing white hair.
That hair, too, writhed and flailed in the gusts that drove it full of sand, that drifted his whole body with the fine and stinging particles. His beard, full and white, did not entirely conceal the three parallel scars on each cheek, the _mashali_, which marked him as originally a dweller at Mecca.
One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle, its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with gold.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his questing fingers had discovered about the old man"s neck. With hands that trembled a little, he drew out this cord. Then he uttered an exclamation of intense disappointment.
There was nothing at the end of the crimson loop, save a _lamail_, or pocket Koran. Leclair muttered a curse, and moved away, peering toward the fire, spying out the wady through the now almost choking sand-drive--the wady where they certainly must soon take refuge or be overwhelmed by the buffeting lash of sand whirled on the breath of the shouting tempest.
Even in the Master"s anger, he did not throw the Koran away. Too astute, he, for any such act in presence of Rrisa. Instead, he bound the Arab to fresh devotion by touching lips and forehead, and by handing him the little volume. The Master"s arm had to push its way against the wind as against a solid thing; and the billion rushing spicules of sand that swooped in upon him from the desert emptiness, stung his flesh like tiny scourges.
"This Koran, Rrisa, is now thine!" he cried in a loud voice, to make the Arab hear him. "And a great gift to thee, a Sunnite, is the Koran, of this desecrating son of the rejected!"
Bowed before the flail of the sand--while Rrisa uttered broken words of thanks--the Master called to Leclair:
"By _Corsi_ (Allah"s throne), now things a.s.sume a different aspect!
This old dog of dogs is a prize, indeed! And--what now--"
Leclair did not answer. The Frenchman was not even near him. The Master saw him in the wady, dimly visible through the ghostly white sand-shrouds spinning in the blue-whipped fire-glare. There on hands and knees the lieutenant was huddled. With eager hands he was tearing the hood of a _za"abut_--a rough, woolen slave cloak, patched and ragged--from the face of a prostrate figure more than half snowed under a sand-drift.
"_Nom de Dieu!_" the Master heard him cry. "_Mais, nom de_--"
"What have you found, Lieutenant?" shouted the Master, letting the simoom drive him toward the wady. In their excitement none of the men would yet take cover, lie down and hide their faces under their coats as every dictate of prudence would have bidden. "Who is it, now?
What--"
"Ah, my Captain! Ah! the pity of it! Behold!"
The Frenchman"s voice, wind-gusted, trembled with grief and pa.s.sionate anger; yet through that rage and sorrow rang a note of joy.
"Tell me, Leclair! Who, now?" demanded the Master, as he came close and peered down by the fire-gleam roaring on the beach, sending sheaves of sparks in comet-tails of vanishing radiance down-wind with rushing sand.
"It is impossible, my Captain," the lieutenant answered in French. His voice could now make itself heard more clearly; for here in the wady a certain shelter existed from the roaring sand-cyclone. "Impossible, but--_Dieu_!--it is true!"
"What is true?"
"Incredible, yet--_voila_!"
"In Allah"s name, Lieutenant!" the Master e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "compose yourself! Explain! Who is this Arab, here?"
"No Arab, sir! No, no!"
"Not an Arab? Well, what is he, then?"
"Ah, these scars, my Captain! Behold--see the slave dress, the weals of the branding-iron on cheek and brow! Ah, for pity! See the starved body, the stripes of the lash, the feet mangled by the bastinado! What horrible things they have done to him--ah, G.o.d have pity on us!"
Tears gleamed on the stern fighter"s cheeks, there in the ghostly blue firelight--tears that washed little courses through the dust and sand now griming his face. The French airman, hard in battle and with heart of steel and flame, was crying like a child.
"What now? Who is it?" shouted the Master. "A European?"
"Yes, my Captain! A Frenchman!"
"A Frenchman. You don"t mean to say it--is--"
"Yes, yes! My orderly! Lebon!"
"G.o.d!" exclaimed the Master. "But--"
A cry from Rrisa interrupted him, a cry that flared down-wind with strange, wild exultation. The Arab had just risen from the sand, near the unconscious, in-drifting form of the Sheik, Abd el Rahman.
In his hands he was holding something--holding a leather sack with a broken cord attached to it. This cord in some way had been severed by the Sheik"s rifle when the old man had fallen. The leather sack had rolled a few feet away. Now, with hands that shook so that the Arab could hardly control them, Rrisa was holding out this sack as he staggered through the blinding sand-storm towards his chief.
"_Al Hamdu Lillah!_" (Praise to the Lord of the Three Worlds!) choked Rrisa in a strange voice, fighting for his very breath. "See--see what I--have found!"
Staring, blinking, trying to shelter his eyes against the demons of the storm, the Master turned toward him.
"What, Rrisa?"
Down into the wady stumbled the Arab, gray-powdered with clinging sand.
"Oh," he choked, "it has been taken from these _yezid_, these abusers of the salt! Now we rescue it from these cut-off ones! From the swine and brothers of the swine it has been taken by Allah, and put back into the hands of Rrisa, Allah"s slave! See, _M"alme_, see!"
The shaking hands extended the leather sack. At it the Master stared, his face going dead white.
"Thou--dost not mean--?" he stammered.
"Truly, I do!"
"Not Kaukab el Durri?"
"Aye--it was lying near that heretic dog!"
"The Great Pearl Star, the sacred loot from the Haram?"
"Kaukab el Durri, _M"alme_. The Great Pearl Star itself!"
CHAPTER XXVI
THE SAND-DEVILS
With hands that quivered in unison with his nerves, now no longer impa.s.sive, the strange chief of this still stranger expedition took from Rrisa the leather sack. Over the top of the wady a million sand-devils were screeching. The slither of the dry snow--the white, fine snow of sand--filled all s.p.a.ce with a whispering rustle that could be heard through the shouting of the simoom.
Sand was beating on them, everywhere, in the darkness lighted only by the tortured beach-fire. The stinging particles a.s.sailed eyes, ears, mouth; it whitened clothing, sifted into hair, choked breath. But still the Legionaries could not take shelter under their coats. In this moment of wondrous finding, they must see the gem of gems that Kismet had thus flung into their grasp.