Flying Legion

  CHAPTER XLIX

  THE DESERT

  The Desert.

  Four men, one woman.

  Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was thatgreat emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"--that is to say, theland "where there is none but He."

  Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard,unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizonsof lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness.Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far,iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare,scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.

  Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lostyet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the fivefugitives--pitiable handful of the Legion--were plodding south-west,toward the sunset.

  The feet of all were cut and bleeding, in spite of rags torn fromtheir tattered uniforms and bound on with strips of cloth; foreverywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharpstone--the black basalt named by the Arabs _Hajar Jehannum_, or "Rockof Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way inwhich they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they hadbeen drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities.

  Each figure bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filledwith water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was,corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugeeswere clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and oneof the most hideous deaths known to man--the death of thirst in thewilderness.

  The woman's face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retainedits beauty. Her heavy masses of hair, bound up with cloth strips,protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others,they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniouslytied into some semblance of _cherchias_. Above all, the Legionariesknew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of thedesert sun.

  In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, nowoblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No lookof surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was inreality a woman. The Legionaries' anguish, the numbing, brutalizingeffects of their recent experience had been too great for any minoremotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, asone of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, beentrue.

  For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itselfsouth-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclairwas first to utter words.

  "Let us rest a little while, _mon capitaine_," said he in a hoarse,choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Manyhundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gainedby hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events,until that cursed sun has set!"

  In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of thelittle, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were nowtoiling. All did the same, and all sat down--or rather, fell--upon thehot earth.

  Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as theyhad soared above it, at cool altitudes, in the giant air-liner; verydifferent from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim blackline of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward.

  The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently thanany words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours' trek,was strangling the life out of them.

  For a while they lay there motionless, unthinking, brutalized byfatigue and pain. With their present condition as an earnest of whatwas yet to come, what hope had any that even one of them would live tobehold the sparkle of the distant Red Sea? Even though unmolested bypursuit from Jannati Shahr or by attack from any wandering tribes ofthe Black Tent People, what hope could there be?

  Gradually some coherence of thought returned to the Master. He sat up,painfully, and blinked with reddened eyes at the woman. She was lyingbeside her water-bag, seemingly asleep. The Master's face drew intolines of anguish as he looked at her.

  With bruised fingers he loosened the thong of his own water-bag, andtore still another strip from his remnant of shirt. He poured a littleof the precious water on to this rag, lashed the water-sack tightagain, and with the warm, wet rag bathed the woman's face, brow, andthroat.

  Her closed lids did not open. No one paid any attention. No oneeven stirred. The cloth grew dry, almost at once, as the thirsty airabsorbed its moisture. The Master pocketed it. Elbows on knees, headbetween hands, he sat there pondering.

  In thought he was living over again the incredible events of thepast hours, as they had been presented to his own experience. He wasremembering the frightful, dizzying plunge down the black pit into thesteaming waters of the River of Night--waters which, had they been buta few degrees hotter, would incontinently have ended everything on theinstant.

  He was recalling, as in a nightmare, his frenzied battle for life,clinging to the inflated goat-skin--the whirl and thunder ofunseen cataracts in the blind dark--the confusion of deafening,incomprehensible violences.

  He was bringing back to mind the long, swift, smooth rushing of mightywaters through midnight caverns where echoes had told of a rock-roofclose above; then, after an indeterminate time of horror that mighthave been minutes or hours, a weltering maelstrom of leaping waters--agraying of light on swift-fleeing walls; a sudden up-boiling gush ofthe strangling flood that whelmed him--and all at once a glare ofsun, a river broadening out through palm-groves far beyond the IronMountains.

  All these things, blurred, unreal, heartshaking as evil visions offever, the Master was remembering. Then came other happenings: along drift with resistless currents, the strange phenomenon of thelessening stream that dwindled as thirsty sands absorbed it, and theceasing of the palms.

  Last of all, the river had diminished to a shallow, tortuous delta,where the Master's numbed feet had touched bottom. There he haddragged himself ashore, with his goatskin, far more dead than living.And there, for a time he knew not, consciousness had wholly ceased.

  A dull, toneless voice sounded in the Master's ears. Bohannan wasspeaking.

  "Faith, but it's strange how even the five of us found each other, outthere in the sand," said the major. "What happened to the rest of us,God knows--maybe!" He choked, coughed, added: "Or to the boys withNissr. God rest their souls! I wish I had a sackful of that wine!"After a long pause: "Don't you, now? What?"

  The Master gave no heed. He was trying to ease the position in whichthe woman was lying. His jacket was off, now, and he was folding it toput under her head.

  At his touch, she opened vague eyes. She smiled with dry lips, and puthis hand away.

  "No, no!" she protested. "No special favors for me! I'm not a woman,remember. I'm 'Captain Alden,' still--only a Legionary!"

  "But--"

  "If you favor me in any way, to the detriment of any of the othersor your own, I won't go on! I'm just one of you. Just one of thesurvivors, on even terms with the rest. It's give-and-take. I meanthat! You've got to understand me!"

  The Master nodded. He knew that tone. Silently he put on his jacket,again.

  The lieutenant's orderly, Lebon, groaned and muttered a prayer to theVirgin. Leclair sat up, heavily, and blinked with sand-inflamed eyes.

  "Time to drink again, _n'est-ce pas_, my Captain?" asked he. "Drink tothe dead!"

  "I hope they are dead, rather than prisoners!" exclaimed the Master."Yes, we'll drink, and get forward. We've got to make long strides,tonight. Those Jannati Shahr devils may be after us, tomorrow. Surelywill, if they investigate that delta and find only a few bodies.They'll conclude some of us have got through. And if they pick up ourtrail, with those white dromedaries of theirs--"

  "The sacred pigs!" ejaculated Leclair. "Ah, _messieurs_, now you beginto know the Arabs as I have long known them." With eyes of hate andpain he peered back at the darkening line of the Iron Mountains.

  Bohannan,
already loosening the neck of his goat-skin, laughedhoarsely.

  "No wine!" he croaked, "and the water's rationed; even the stinkingwater. But the food isn't--good reason, too; there isn't any. Pocketsfull of gems!" He slapped one hard pocket. "I'd swap the lot for aproper pair of shoes and a skin o' that wine! Faith--that wine, now--"

  The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the otherraised for silence.

  "Hark!" she whispered. "Sh!"

  "What now?" demanded the Master.

  "Bells! Camel-bells!"

  "_Nom d'un, nom!_" And the lieutenant drew his gun.

  The five fugitives stiffened for another battle. They looked well totheir weapons. The Master's weariness and pain were forgotten as hecrawled on hands and knees up the side of the little wady. The soundof distant camel-bells, a thin, far quiver of sound, had now reachedhis ears and those of the other men, less sensitive than the woman's.

  Over the edge of the wady he peered, across a _wa'ar_, or stony groundcovered with mummified scrub. Beyond, a blanched salt-plain gleamedhoar-white in the on-coming dusk; and farther off, the dunes beganagain.

  Strangely enough, the Master laughed. He turned and beckoned,silently. The others joined him.

  "From the west!" he whispered. "This is no pursuit! It is a caravangoing to Jannati Shahr!"

  Bohannan chuckled, and patted his revolver.

  "Faith, but Allah is being good to us!" he muttered. "Now, when itcomes to a fight--"

  "Ten dromedaries--no, nine--" Leclair judged.

  "And six camel-drivers," put in the woman, gun in hand. "A smallcaravan!"

  "Hold your fire, all!" commanded the Master. "They're headed rightacross this wady. Wait till I give the word; then rush them! And--noprisoners!"