CHAPTER XXXV
INTO THE VALLEY OF MYSTERY
The upraised blade, poised for swift murder, did not descend. With agroan from the heart's core, Rrisa let fall his trembling hand, ashe recoiled toward the vague patch of starlight that marked the cabinwindow.
"_Bismillah_!" he whispered hoarsely. "I cannot! This is mysheik--'and thrice cursed is the hand that slays the sheik.' I cannotkill him!"
For a moment he remained there, pondering. Swift, passionate thoughtssurged through his brain, which burned with fever. In Rrisa'sfighting-blood the supreme battle of his whole existence wasaflame--duty of annihilating the violator of his Faith combating dutyof loyalty absolute to one whose salt he had eaten, to one who hadpreserved his life.
So, in the dark he stood there, a shadow among shadows. He peeredabout with white-rimmed eyes, striving to discover where now the Myzaband the sacred Black Stone might be. The dim bulk of the blanket underthe berth came to his senses. He knelt, touched the blanket, felt thehard solidity within.
Torn with anguish of a great conflict, he pondered, smearing the sweatof agony from his hard-wrinkled forehead. Better was it to fling theseholy things from the cabin window, out into the night? Better thecertainty that the desert sands, far below, would inevitably driftover them, forever burying them from the sight of his people; orbetter the chance that the Master, after all, really intended todeliver them back into Moslem hands at Bara Jannati Shahr?
"Allah, oh, guide thy servant now!" the orderly prayed with tremblinglips. "Allah, show thou me the way!"
The Master, stirring in his sleep, sighed deeply and let his righthand fall outside the berth. Rrisa, fearful of imminent discovery,made up his mind with simple directness. He salaamed in silence, allbut brushing the Master's hand with his lips.
"_Wa'salem!_" (Farewell!) he breathed. Then he got up, turned, laidhis dagger on the table and slid out through the window as soundlesslyas he had come. He crossed the marrow gallery in the gloom, andmounted the rail beyond which yawned black vacancy.
For a moment he stayed there, peering down first at the impenetrableabysses below, then up at the unmoved stars above. The ghostly auraof light in the gallery showed his face wan, deep-graven with lines,agonized, ennobled by strong decisions of self-sacrifice.
"Thou, Allah," he whispered, "dost know life cannot be for both myMaster and thy servant, after what thy servant hath seen. I offer theemy life for his! Thou wilt judge aright, for thou knowest the heartsof men and wilt wrong no man by the weight of a grain of sand. Thouart easy to be reconciled, and merciful! There is no God but Allah,and M'hamed is his Prophet!"
With no further word, he leaped.
Just a fraction of a second, a dim-whirling object plummeted intospace. It vanished.
As best he understood, Rrisa had solved his problem and had paid hisscore.
The Master wakened early, with the late May sun already Slanting infrom far, dun and orange desert-levels, gilding the metal walls of hiscabin. For a few moments he lay there, half dreamily listening tothe deep bass hum of the propellers, the slight give and play ofthe air-liner as she shuddered under the powerful drive of herNorcross-Brail engines.
His thoughts first dwelt a little on yesterday's battle and on thewondrous treasure now in his hands. Then they touched the approachingcampaign beyond the Iron Mountains in regions never yet seen by anywhite man's eye, and for a while enveloped some of the potentialitiesof that campaign.
But "Captain Alden" recurring to his mind, drove away such sternimaginings. The Master's lips smiled, a little; his black eyessoftened, and for a moment his face assumed something that mightalmost have made it akin to those of men who feel the natural passionsof the heart. Never before, in all his stern, hard life, had theMaster's expression been quite as now.
"Who can she be, I wonder?" he mused. "A woman like that, possessed ofthat extraordinary beauty; a woman with education, languages, medicalskill; a woman with courage, loyalty, and devotion beyond compare,and with all the ardor for service and adventure that any man couldhave--who can she be? And--damn it, now! Who am I, to be thinking ofsuch nonsense, after all?"
His eyes fell on the table. Something lay there, agleam with thesunlight flicking blood-red spots from a polished metal surface. Whatcould this thing be? Surely, it had not lain there, the night before.
The Master wrinkled heavy brows, focussing his sight on this metalobject. Puzzled, not yet able to make it out clearly, he raisedhimself on his elbow and looked with close attention at the mysteriousobject.
Suddenly he leaped from the berth, strode to the table and caughtup--Rrisa's dagger.
"Allah! What's this?" he exclaimed. "Rrisa--he's been here--and with aknife?--"
For a second or two he stood there, staring at the _jambiyeh_ in hisgrip. His powerful frame tautened; his thick, corded neck swelled withthe intensity of his emotion as his head went forward, staring.His jaw set hard. Then with a kind of half-comprehension, he turnedquickly toward the window.
Yes, there were traces on the sill, that could not be mistaken. TheMaster's keen eyes detected them, under the morning sun. He stepped tohis desk, dropped the dagger into a drawer, and pressed the button forhis orderly.
No one appeared. The Master rang again. Quite in vain. With moreprecipitation than was customary with him, he dressed and went toRrisa's cabin.
Its emptiness confirmed his suspicions. Returning along the outergallery, a little pale, he reached the railing opposite his ownwindow. Here a scratch on the metal drew his attention. Closely hescrutinized this scratch. A hint of whitish metal told the tale--metalthe Master recognized as having been abraded from a ring the Masterhimself had given him; a ring of aluminum alloy, fashioned from partof a Turkish grenade at Gallipoli.
The Master's face contracted painfully. In his mind he couldreconstitute the scene--Rrisa's hands gripping the rail, his climbover it, his leap. For a moment the Master stood there with blankeyes, peering out over the burning, tawny desolation of the greatsand-barrens that stretched away, away, to boundless immensity.
"Yes, he is surely gone," he whispered. "_Shal'lah! Razi Allahuanhu!_" (It is Allah's will; may Allah be satisfied with him!) "Whatwould I not give to have him back!"
The trilling of his cabin phone startled him to attention. He entered,took the receiver and heard Leclair's voice from the pilot-house:
"Clouds on the horizon, my Captain. And I think there is a mountainrange coming in sight. Would you care to look?"
The Master, very grim and silent, went into the pilot-house. He haddecided to make no mention of what had happened. The suicide mustpass as an accident. He himself must seem to have no knowledge of it.Morale forbade the admission either of treachery or self-destruction,for any member of the Legion.
The sight of vague, pearl-gray clouds on the far south-east horizon,and of a dim, violet line of peaks notched across the heat-quiveringsky in remotest distances, struck him like a blow in the face. Cloudsmust mean moisture; some inner, watered plain wholly foreign to thegeneral character of the Arabian Peninsula. And the peaks must be theIron Mountains that Rrisa had told him about. They seemed to rebuffhim, to be pointing fingers of accusation at him. Had it not been forhis insistence--
"But that is all nonsense!" he tried to assure himself, as he tookhis binoculars from the rack and sighted at the forbidding, mysteriousrange. "Am I responsible for a Moslem's superstitions, or his fanaticirrationality?"
The Master's own narrow escape from death disturbed him not at all.He hardly even thought of it. All he strove for, now, was to exculpatehimself for Rrisa's death. But this he could not do.
A sense of blood-guiltiness clung about him like a garment--the firstthat he had felt on this expedition. His soul, unemotional, practical,hard, was at last touched and wounded by the realization that Rrisa,pushed beyond all limits of endurance, had chosen death rather thaninflict it on his sheik. And the thought that the faithful orderly'sbody was now lying on the flaming sands, hundreds of miles away--thatit was a
lready a prey to jackals, kites, and buzzards--sickened hisshuddering heart and filled him with remorse.
"Allah send a storm of sand--_jinnee_ to bury the poor chap, that'sall I can wish now!" he pondered, as he studied the strange yellowishand orange tints in utmost horizon distances. The air, over theshimmering peaks, seemed of a different quality from that elsewhere.To north, to west, the desert rim of the world veiled itself in magicblue, mysteriously dim. But there, it glowed in golden hues. What,thought the Master, might be the meaning of all this?
The Master had no time for speculation. The urgent problem of locatingthe Bara Jannati Shahr, beyond that inhospitable sierra, banishedthoughts of all else. He inspected his charts, together with theair-liner's record of course and position. He slightly corrected thedirection of flight. "Captain Alden" was already in the pilot-house,with Leclair. The Master summoned Bohannan tersely, and brieflyinstructed him:
"You understand, of course, that we may now be facing perils beyondany yet encountered. We have already upset all Islam, and changed the_kiblah_--the direction of prayer--for more than two hundred millionhuman beings. The 'fronting-place' is now aboard _Nissr_."[1]
[Footnote 1: So long as the Black Stone was at the Ka'aba, thisbuilding was the only spot in the world where the _kiblah_ wascircular, that is, where Moslems could pray all around it. TheLegion's theft of the stone had completely dislocated all the mostimportant beliefs and customs of Islam.]
"The most intense animosity of religious fanaticism will pursue us.If the news of our exploit has, in any unaccountable way such asthe Arabs know how to employ, reached Jannati Shahr, we are in for abattle royal. If not, we still have a chance to use diplomacy. A fewhours now will determine the issue.
"We are approaching what will probably be the final goal of thisexpedition; a city beyond unknown mountains; a city that no white manhas ever yet seen and that few have even heard of. What the conditionswill be there no one can tell; but--"
"Not even Rrisa?" put in the major. "Faith, now's the time, if ever,to consult that lad!"
"Correct, for once," assented the Master. With purpose to deceive,he phoned for Rrisa. No answer coming, he got Simonds on the wire andordered him to find the orderly. The investigation thus started would,he knew, soon bring out the fact of the orderly's disappearance. Thisline of action fairly started, he went on formulating his plans:
"Major, look well to your guns. For once you may have a chance to usethem. I have put my various pieces of apparatus in good condition,and have improvised some new features. In addition, we have the secondkappa-bomb."
"But I trust we shall not be driven to a fight. If diplomacy can win,there will be no bloodshed. Otherwise, our only limit will be thetotal destruction of these unknown people, or our own annihilation.It's a case, now, of win what we are after, or end everything rightthere, beyond those mountains!"
He ascended to the upper port gallery, and concentrated himself onobservation. A certain change in the desert was becoming noticeable,as the air-liner flung herself at high speed into the south-east. Attimes there must be a little rainfall here, or else some hidden sourceof water, for a scrub, of dwarf acacia, of camel-grass, and tamariskhad begun to show.
But as the black, naked mountains drew near, this gave place to flatswhite with salt, to jagged upcroppings of dull, yellowish rock--howlittle they then suspected its true nature!--and to detached cliffssharp as a wolf's teeth, with strata of greenish schist.
It was at 9:30 a.m. of May 28, that _Nissr_ tilted her planes andsoared abruptly over the first crags of the Iron Mountains. At aheight of forty-five hundred feet she sped above them, the heat oftheir sun-baked blackness radiating up against her wings and body. Nomore terrible desolation could be imagined than this rock fortress,split with chasms and unsounded gorges, where here and there more ofthe yellow outcrops showed. No life appeared, not even vultures. Formore than an hour, _Nissr's_ shadow leaped across this utter solitudeof death.
The Master summoned Leclair, Bohannan, and "Captain Alden," and forsome time gave them careful instructions which none but they wereallowed to hear.
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