"The city?" asked Bohannan. "That--can"t be the city, can it, now?
Faith, if it _is_, we"re too late. d.a.m.n me, sir, but the whole infernal place is on fire! Just our rotten luck, eh?"
The Master made no reply. As if he would devour the place with his eyes, he was leaning over the rail, boring through those powerful gla.s.ses at the dazzle and bright sheen of the wonder-city now every moment becoming more clearly visible.
That it was in truth a city could no longer be doubted. Long walls came to view, pierced by gates with fantastic arches. Domes rose to heaven. Delicate minarets, carved into a fretwork of amazing fineness, pointed their fingers at the yellow shimmering sky. The contrast of that brilliance, with the soft green gardens and feathery palm-groves before, the grim black cliffs behind, filled the Legionaries with a kind of silent awe.
But most wonderful of all was the metallic shimmer of those walls, domes, minarets, under the high sun of this lost Arabian paradise. So amazing was the prospect that, as _Nissr_ hurled herself in over the last ranges of the mountains and shot out across the open plain itself, only one man found words.
This man was Leclair. Close beside the Master, he said in Arabic:
"I too have heard, my Captain. I too know the story of the Bara Jannati Shahr--but I have always thought it fable. Now, now--."
"Faith!" interrupted the major, with sudden excitement. He smote the rail a blow with an agitated fist. "If that doesn"t look like gold, I"m a--."
"Gold?" burst out the Master, unable longer to control himself. "Of course it"s gold! And we--are the first white men in all the world to look on it--the Golden City of Jannati Shahr!"
Stupefaction overcame the Flying Legion. The sight of this perfectly incredible city, which even yet--despite its obvious character--they could not believe as reality, for a little while deprived all the observers of coherent thought.
Like men in a daze, they stood watching the far-distant ma.s.s of walls, buildings, towers, battlements all agleam with the unmistakable sheen of pure metal. The human mind, confronted by such a phenomenon, fails to react, and for a while lies inert, stunned, prostrate.
"Gold?" stammered the major, and fell to gnawing his mustache, as he stared at the incredible sight. "By G.o.d--gold? Sure, it can"t be _that_!"
"It not only can be, but is!" the Master answered. "The old legend is coming true, that"s all. Have you no eyes in your head, Major? If that shine isn"t the shine of gold, what is it?"
"Yes, but the thing"s impossible, sir!" cried Bohannan. "Why, man alive! If that"s gold, the whole of Arabia would be here after it!
There"d be caravans, miners, swarms of--"
"It"s obvious you know nothing of Moslem severity or superst.i.tion,"
the Master interrupted. "There is no Mohammedan beggar, even starving, who would touch a grain of that metal. Not even if it were given him.
There"s not one would carry an ounce away from the Iron Mountains.
This whole region is under the ban of a most terrific _tabu_, that loads unthinkable curses on any human being who removes a single atom of any metal from it!"
"Ah, that"s it, eh?"
"Yes, that"s very much it! And what is more, Major, no word of this ever gets out to the white races--or hardly any. Nothing more than vague rumors that barely amount to fairy stories. Even though I forced Rrisa to tell me the location of this city, he wouldn"t mention its being gold, and I knew too much to ask him or try to make him. Why, he"d have been torn to bits before he"d have betrayed _that_ Inner Secret. So now you understand!"
"I see, I see," the major answered, mechanically. It was plain, however, that his mind had received a shock from which it had not yet fully recovered. He remained staring and blinking, first chewing at his mustache and then tugging it with blunt, trembling fingers. Now and then he shook his head, like a man just waking from a dream and trying to make himself realize that he is indeed awake.
The others, some to a greater degree, some to a less, shared the major"s perturbation. A daze, a numb stupefaction had fallen on them.
The Master, however, soon recalled them to activity. Not much time now remained before _Nissr_ must make her landing on the plain near the Golden City. None was to be wasted.
Vigorous orders set the Legionaries to work. The machine-guns were loaded and fully manned; several pieces of apparatus that the Master had been perfecting in his cabin were brought into the lower gallery; everyone was commanded to smarten his personal appearance. The psychology of the Oriental was such, well the Master knew, that the impression the Legion should make upon the people of this wonder-city could not fail to be of the very highest importance.
The plain over which _Nissr_ was now sweeping, with the black mountains left far behind, seemed a fairyland of beauty compared with the desolation of the Central Arabian Desert.
"This is surely a fitting spot for the exact geometrical center of Islam," the Master said to Leclair, as they stood looking down. "My measurements show this secret valley to be that center. Mecca, of course, has only been a blind, to keep the world from knowing anything about this, the true heart of the Faith. The Meccans have been usurping the Black Stone, all these centuries, and these Jannati Shahr people have submitted because any conflict would have betrayed their existence to the world. That is my theory. Good, eh?"
"Excellent!" the lieutenant replied. "There must be millions of Mohammedans, themselves, who have hardly learned of this valley.
Certainly, very few from the outside world ever have been able to cross the Empty Abodes, and reach it.
"These people here evidently represent a far higher culture than any other Moslems ever known. Who ever saw a finer city--even not considering its material--or more wonderful cultivation of land?"
His eyes wandered out over the plain, which lost itself to sight in the remote south. Roads in various directions, with here and there a few white dromedaries bearing bright-colored _shugdufs_ (litters), showed there was travel to some other inhabited spots inside the forbidding mountain girdle.
Here, there, herds of antelope and flocks of sheep were grazing on broad meadows, through which trickled sparkling threads of water, half glimpsed among feathery-tufted date-palms. Plantations of fig and pomegranate, lime, apricot, and orange trees, with other fruits not recognized, slid beneath the giant liner as she slowed her pace. And broad fields of wheat, barley, tobacco, and sugar-cane showed that the people of the city had no fear of any lack.
Birds were here--pelicans, cranes, and water-fowl along the brooks and gleaming pools; swift little yellow birds with crownlike crests; doves, falcons, and hawks of unknown species. Here was life abundant, after the death of the Empty Abodes. Here was rich color; here arose a softly perfumed air, balmy, incensed as with strange aromatics. Here was peace--eternal _kayf_--blessed rest--here indeed lay a scene that gave full explanation of the ancient name "Arabia Felix."
And at the left, dominating all this beauty, shone and glimmered in the ardent sun the wondrous Golden City of Jannati Shahr.
_Nissr_ had already begun to slant to lower levels. Now at no more than twenty-five hundred feet, with greatly reduced speed, she was drifting down the valley toward the city, the details of which were every moment becoming more apparent. Its size, the wondering Legionaries saw, must be very considerable; it might have contained three or four hundred thousand inhabitants. Its frontage along the black mountains could not have been less than two and a half miles; and, as it seemed to lose itself up a defile in those crags, no way at present existed of judging its depth.
The general appearance was that of stern simplicity. A long wall of gleaming yellow bounded it, from north to south; this wall being pierced by seven gates, each flanked by minarets. Behind the wall, terraces arose, with _mesjid_ (temple) domes, innumerable houses, and some larger buildings of unknown purpose.
The powerful gla.s.ses on _Nissr_ showed fretwork carving everywhere; but the main outlines of the city, none the less, gave an impression of almost primitive severity. No touch of modernity affected it.
Everything appeared immensely archaic.
"The Jerusalem of Solomon"s day," thought the Master, "must have looked like that--barring only that this is solid gold."
Out from the city, a little less than two-thirds of the way down, issued a rather considerable stream. It seemed to come from under the wall fronting the plain. Its course, straight rather than sinuous, lay toward the south-west, and was marked by long lines of giant date-palms and pale-stemmed eucalyptus trees, till it lost itself in brown distances.
"Faith, but that looks like lotus-eating, all right," said the major, notching up his cartridge-belt another hole. "That looks like "A book of verses underneath the bough," with Fatima or Lalla Rookh, or the like, eh?" He drew at a cigarette, and smiled with sweet visionings of Celtic exuberance. "A golden city! Lord!"
"You"ll do no dallying "with Amaryllis in the shade," in _this_ valley!" the Master flung at him. "Nor any lotus-eating, either. To your stations, men! Wake up! Forget all about this gold, now--remember my orders! That"s all you"ve got to do. The gold will take care of itself, later. For now, there"s stern work ahead!"
The Legionaries a.s.sumed their posts, ready for whatever attack might come. They still moved like men in a trance. Whether they could quite even realize the true character of Jannati Shahr seemed doubtful. The Inca"s room of gold stunned Pizarro and his men. How much more, then, must a whole city of gold numb any concrete thought?
Down, still down sank _Nissr_, now beginning to circle in broad, descending spirals, seeking where she might land. The roar of the propellers lessened; and at the same time, the increasing hum of the helicopters made itself heard, counterbalancing the loss of lifting power of the planes, yet gradually letting the air-liner sink. Came, too, a sighing hiss of the air-intakes as the vacuum-floats filled.
High noon was now at hand. The sun burned, a copper ball, in the very forehead of a turquoise sky. A light breeze, lazying over the plain, stirred the fronded tufts of the date-palms" thick plantations.
Beyond a ma.s.sy grove, stretching for nearly two miles out from the northernmost gate of the city, a gra.s.sy level quite like a parade-ground invited the liner to rest.
As she sank still lower, the Master"s gla.s.s again picked up the city wall and ran along it. Here, there, white dots were visible; human figures, surely--the figures of men in snowy burnouses, on the ramparts of heavy metal.
The Master smiled, and nodded.
"My men think they are surprised," he mused. "What will these Jannati Shahr men think, when I have opened my little box of tricks and shown them what"s inside?"
He pressed a b.u.t.ton on the rail. A bell trilled in the pilot-house; another in the engine-room. The Norcross-Brails died to inactivity.
With a last long swoop, an abandonment of all the furious energies that for so long had been hurling her over burning sand and black crag, _Nissr_ slanted to the gra.s.sy sward. A sudden, furious hissing burst out beneath her, as the compressed-air valves were thrown and the air-cushions formed beneath her thousands of spiracles. Then, with hardly a shudder, easily as a tired gull slips down into the quiet of a still lagoon, the vast air-liner took earth.
She slid two hundred yards on her air-cushions, over the close-cropped turf, slowed, came to rest there fronting the northern gate of Bara Jannati Shahr. And the shimmer of those golden walls, one mile to east of her, painted her all a strangely luminous yellow.
Journey"s end, at last!