CHAPTER XXVI
THE SAND-DEVILS
With hands that quivered in unison with his nerves, now no longerimpassive, the strange chief of this still stranger expedition tookfrom Rrisa the leather sack. Over the top of the wady a millionsand-devils were screeching. The slither of the dry snow--the white,fine snow of sand--filled all space with a whispering rustle thatcould be heard through the shouting of the simoom.
Sand was beating on them, everywhere, in the darkness lighted only bythe tortured beach-fire. The stinging particles assailed eyes, ears,mouth; it whitened clothing, sifted into hair, choked breath. Butstill the Legionaries could not take shelter under their coats. Inthis moment of wondrous finding, they must see the gem of gems thatKismet had thus flung into their grasp.
The Master loosed a knot in the cord, drew the sack open and shookinto his left palm a thing of marvellous beauty and wonder.
By the dim, fitful gleam of the fire, probably the strangest and mostcostly necklace in the world became indistinctly visible. At sight ofit, everything else was forgotten--the wrecked air-liner, the waitingLegion, the unconscious Arabs now being buried in the resistlesscharge of the sand-armies. Even poor Lebon, tortured slave of the BeniHarb, a lay neglected. For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Starcould these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts.
While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tensewith 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 tohave been sold in Cairo, twelve years ago, for fifty-five thousandpounds! But these are finer! And its value as a holy relic ofIslam--who can calculate that? God, what this means to us!"
Words will not compass the description of this wondrous thing. Asthe Master held it up in the sand-lashed dimness, half-gloom andhalf-light, that formed a kind of aura round the fire--an aura sheetedthrough and all about by the aerial avalanches of the sand--theLegionaries 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 hadbeen. Each of the five pearls was of almost incalculable value; butone, an iridescent Oman, far surpassed the others.
This pearl was about the size of a man's largest thumb-joint. Itsshape was a smooth oval; its hue, even in that dim, wind-tossed light,showed a wondrous, tender opalescence that seemed to change and blendinto 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 theMaster--for all his wide travel and experience of life--ever had seen.
By way of strange contrast in values the pearls were separatedfrom each other by worthless, little, smooth lumps of madrepore,or unfossilized coral. These lumps were covered with tiny blackinscriptions in archaic Cufic characters; though what the significanceof these might be, the Master could not--in that gloom and howlingdrive of the sand-devils--even begin to determine.
The whole adornment, as it lay in the Master's palm, typified theOrient. For there was gold; there were gems and bits of worthlessdross intermingled; and there about it was drifting sand of infiniteages, darkness, flashes of light, color, mystery, wonder, beauty.
"God! What this means!" the Master repeated, as the three men cringedin the wady. "Success, dominion, power!"
"You mean--" put in Leclair, his voice smitten away by theever-increasing storm that ravened over the top of the gully.
"What do I _not_ mean, Lieutenant? No wonder the Apostate Sheik had toflee from Mecca and take refuge here in this impassable wilderness atthe furthest rim of Islam! No wonder he has been hounded and hunted!The only miracle is that some of his own tribesmen have not betrayedhim before now!"
"Master, no Arab betrays his own sheik, right or wrong!" said Rrisa ina strange voice. "Before that, an Arab dies by his own hand!" He spokein 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 Inot 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, willbreathe sand, will perish."
"It is well, Rrisa. Go, drag in the swine-brother. But have a care toharm him not. Thou wouldst gladly slay him, eh?"
"More gladly than to live myself! Still, I obey. I go, I bring himsafe 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 anunconscious man, drew the hood of the woollen _za'abut_ up over theface of Lebon. There was nothing more he could do for the poor fellow.Only with the passage of time could he be reawakened. The French aceturned again to where his chief was still scrutinizing the Pearl Staras he crouched in the wady, back to the storm-wind, face toward thefire on the beach.
"Do you realize what this thing is?" demanded the Master, turning thenecklace in his hands. "Do you understand?"
"I have heard of it, my Captain. For years vague rumors have come tome from the desert-men, from far oases and cities of the Sahara. Nowhere, now there, news has drifted in to Algiers--not news, but ratherfantastic tales. Yes, I have often heard of the Kaukab el Durri. Buttill 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 gatheredtogether during many years of looting caravans in the desert andof capturing _sambuks_ on the Red Sea. Arabia, India, and China allcontributed 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 preciousthing 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 thepartial protection of the wady, while all the evil _jinnee_ of thesand-storm shrieked blackly overhead. With no further words theycontinued to study the wondrous thing. The fire was dying, now, burnedout by the fierce blast of the storm and blown away to sea in longspindrifts of spark and vapor, white as the sand-drive itself. By thefading light little could now be seen of the Great Pearl Star. TheMaster replaced it in its leather bag, knotted the cord securely aboutthe 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 oldSheik over the lip of the gully, down into its half-protection. Hebrought the unconscious man to them, and--though bowed by the frenzyof 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 passionate hate;his eyes gleamed with excitement; his nails dug into the palms of hishands. "Now Master, gladden my eyes and expand my breast by letting mesee this old jackal's blood!"
"No, Rrisa," the Master denied him. "I have other use for the oldjackal. 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, thypreserver, with whom thou hast shared the salt. 'He who violates thesalt shall surely taste Jahannum!'"
"Death shall have me, first!" cried Rrisa, and fell silent. And fora while the three men crouched in the wady with the two unconsciousones, 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 onthe way we may
be lost. To retrace our journey over the desert wouldsurely be to invite death."
"We must return, nevertheless. This storm may last all night, and itmay blow itself out in half an hour. That cannot be told. The Legionmay think us lost, and try to search for us. Lives may be sacrificed.Morale demands that we go back. Moreover, we certainly need nottraverse 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 Arabsand shoot us down."
"I will see to that. Come, we must go! Carry Lebon, if you like. Rrisaand I will take Abd el Rahman."
"_M'alme_, not Abd el Rahman, now," ejaculated Rrisa, "but Abd elHareth![1] Let that be his title!"
[Footnote 1: The former name signifies "Slave of Compassion;" thelatter, "Slave of the Devil."]
"As thou wishest, Rrisa. But come, take his feet. I will hold him bythe shoulders. So! Now, forward!"
"And have a care not to breathe the sand, Master," Rrisa warned. "Turnthy face away when the _jinnee_ smite!"
Stumbling, heavy-laden, the three men made their painful way down tothe beach, turned to the left, and plowed southward in deep sand. Asthey left the remains of the fire a great blackness fell upon them.The boisterous exultation of the wind, howling in from a thousandmiles of hot emptiness, out over the invisible sea now chopped intofrothy waves, seemed snatching at them. But the dunes at their leftflung the worst of the sand-storm up and over. And though whirls andair-eddies, sand-laden, snatched viciously at them, they won along thebeach.
That was lathering toil, burdened as they were, stumbling overdriftwood and into holes, laboring forward, hardly able to distinguishmore than the rising, falling line of white that marked the surf.Voices of water and of wind conclamantly shouted, as if all the devilsof the Moslem Hell had been turned loose to snatch and rave at them.Heat, stifle, sand caught them by the throat; the breath wheezed intheir lungs; and on their faces sweat and sand pasted itself into akind of sticky mud.
After fifteen minutes of this struggle the Master paused. He droppedAbd el Rahman's shoulders, and Rrisa the Sheik's feet, while Leclairstood silently bowed with the weight of Lebon and of the belaboringstorm.
"_Oooo-eeee! Oooooeeee! Oooooo-eeee!_" the Master hailed, three longtimes. An answering shout came back, faintly, from the black. TheMaster bent, assured himself the old Sheik's mouth and nose were stillcovered by the hood of the burnous, and cried: "Forward!" And thethree men stumbled on and on.
Five minutes later the Master once more paused.
"Remember, both of you," he cautioned, "not one word of the find!"
"The Great Pearl Star?" asked Leclair gruntingly.
Their voices were almost inaudible to each other in that mad tumult."That is to be a secret, my Captain?"
"Between us three; yes. Let that be understood!"
"I pledge my honor to it!" cried the Frenchman. Rrisa added: "TheMaster has but to command, and it is done!" Then once more they plowedon down the shore.
Only a few minutes more brought them, with surprising suddenness, tothe end of the Legionaries' trench. Trench it no longer was, however.All the paltry digging had been swiftly filled in by the sand-devils;and now the men were lying under the lee of the dunes, protectingthemselves as best they could with the tunics of their uniforms overtheir heads.
They got up and came stumbling in confusion to greet the returningtrio. Peering in the dark, straining their eyes to see, they listenedto a few succinct words of the Master:
"Perfect success! Lethalizing was complete. Sand has buried the entiretribe. Leclair found his former orderly, who had been their slave.We have here their Sheik, Abd el Rahman. Nothing more to fear. Down,everybody--tunics over heads again--let the storm blow itself out!"
The Legion lay for more than an hour, motionless, waiting in thenight. During this hour both Lebon and the old Sheik recoveredconsciousness, but only in a vague manner. There was no attempt totell them anything, to make any plans, to start any activities. In aSahara simoom, men are content just to live.