[Illustration: A HAIL OF SLUGS BOMBARDED THE VAST-SPREAD WINGS AND
FUSELAGE OF _NISSR_.]
THE FLYING LEGION
BY GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND
Published July, 1920
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I A Spirit Caged.
II "To Paradise--or Hell!"
III The Gathering of the Legionaries.
IV The Masked Recruit.
V In the Night.
VI The Silent Attack.
VII The Nest of the Great Bird.
VIII The Eagle of the Sky.
IX Eastward Ho.
X "I Am the Master's!"
XI Captain Alden Stands Revealed.
XII The Woman of Adventure.
XIII The Enmeshing of the Master.
XIV Storm Birds.
XV The Battle of Vibrations.
XVI Leclair, Ace of France.
XVII Miracles, Scourge of Flame.
XVIII "Captain Alden" Makes Good.
XIX Hostile Coasts.
XX The Waiting Menace.
XXI Shipwreck and War.
XXII Beleaguered.
XXIII A Mission of Dread.
XXIV Angels of Death.
XXV The Great Pearl Star.
XXVI The Sand-Devils.
XXVII Toil and Pursuit.
XXVIII Onward Toward the Forbidden City.
XXIX "Labbayk!"
XXX Over Mecca.
XXXI East Against West.
XXXII The Battle of the Haram.
XXXIII The Ordeal of Rrisa.
XXXIV The Inner Secret of Islam.
XXXV Into the Valley of Mystery.
XXXVI Journey's End.
XXXVII The Greeting of Warriors.
XXXVIII Bara Miyan, High Priest.
XXXIX On, to the Golden City!
XL Into the Treasure Citadel.
XLI The Master's Price.
XLII "Sons of the Prophet, Slay!"
XLIII War in the Depths.
XLIV Into the Jewel-Crypt.
XLV The Jewel Hoard.
XLVI Bohannan Becomes a Millionaire.
XLVII A Way Out?
XLVIII The River of Night.
XLIX The Desert.
L "Where There Is None but Allah."
LI Torture.
LII "Thálassa! Thálassa!"
LIII The Greater Treasure.
The Flying Legion
CHAPTER I
A SPIRIT CAGED
The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed,
in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had
ordered it built from his own plans, to please a whim of his restless
mind, on top of the gigantic skyscraper that formed part of
his properties. Windows boldly fronted all four cardinal
compass-points--huge, plate-glass windows that gave a view unequaled
in its sweep and power.
The room seemed an eagle's nest perched on the summit of a man-made
crag. The Arabic name that he had given it--_Niss'rosh_--meant just
that. Singular place indeed, well-harmonized with its master.
Through the westward windows, umbers and pearls of dying day, smudged
across a smoky sky, now shadowed trophy-covered walls. This light,
subdued and somber though it was, slowly fading, verging toward a
night of May, disclosed unusual furnishings. It showed a heavy black
table of some rare Oriental wood elaborately carved and inlaid with
still rarer woods; a table covered with a prayer-rug, on which lay
various books on aeronautics and kindred sciences, jostling works on
Eastern travel, on theosophy, mysticism, exploration.
Maps and atlases added their note of research. At one end of the
table stood a bronze faun's head with open lips, with hand cupped
at listening ear. Surely that head must have come from some buried
art-find of the very long ago. The faint greenish patina that covered
it could have been painted only by the hand of the greatest artist of
them all, Time.
A book-case occupied the northern space, between the windows. It, too,
was crammed with scientific reports, oddments of out-of-the-way lore,
and travels. But here a profusion of war-books and official documents
showed another bent of the owner's mind. Over the book-case hung two
German gasmasks. They seemed, in the half-dusk, to glower down through
their round, empty eyeholes like sinister devil-fish awaiting prey.
The masks were flanked by rifles, bayonets, knives, maces, all bearing
scars of battle. Above them, three fragments of Prussian battle-flags
formed a kind of frieze, their color softened by the fading sunset,
even as the fading of the dream of imperial glory had dulled and
dimmed all that for which they had stood.
The southern wall of that strange room--that quiet room to which only
a far, vague murmur of the city's life whispered up, with faint blurs
of steamer-whistles from the river--bore Turkish spoils of battle.
Here hung more rifles, there a Kurdish yataghan with two hand-grenades
from Gallipoli, and a blood-red banner with a crescent and one star
worked in gold thread. Aviator's gauntlets draped the staff of the
banner.
Along the eastern side of this eyrie a broad divan invited one to
rest. Over it were suspended Austrian and Bulgarian captures--a lance
with a blood-stiffened pennant, a cuirass, entrenching tools, a steel
helmet with an eloquent bullet-hole through the crown. Some few framed
portraits of noted "aces" hung here and elsewhere, with two or three
photographs of battle-planes. Three of the portraits were framed in
symbolic black. Part of a smashed Taube propeller hung near.
As for the western side of _Niss'rosh_, this space between the two
broad windows that looked out over the light-spangled city, the Hudson
and the Palisades, was occupied by a magnificent Mercator's Projection
of the world. This projection was heavily annotated with scores of
comments penciled by a firm, virile hand. Lesser spaces were occupied
by maps of the campaigns in Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. One map,
larger than any save the Mercator, showed the Arabian Peninsula. A
bold question-mark had been impatiently flung into the great,
blank stretch of the interior; a question-mark eager, impatient,
challenging.
It was at this map that the master of _Niss'rosh_, the eagle's nest,
was peering as the curtain rises on our story. He was half reclining
in a big, Chinese bamboo chair, with an attitude of utter and
disheartening boredom. His crossed legs were stretched out, one heel
digging into the soft pile of the Tabreez rug. Muscular arms folded
in an idleness that irked them with aching weariness, he sat there,
brooding, motionless.
Everything about the man spelled energy at bay, forces rusting,
ennui past telling. But force still dominated. Force showed in the
close-cropped, black hair and the small ears set close to the head;
in the corded throat and heavy jaws; in the well-muscled shoulders,
sinewed hands, powerful legs. This man was forty-one years old,
and looked thirty-five. Lines of chest and waist were those of the
athlete. Still, suspicions of fat, of unwonted softness, had begun to
invade those lines. Here was a splendid body, here was a dominating
mind in process of going stale.
The face of the man was a mask of weariness of the soul, which kills
so vastly more efficiently than weariness of the body. You could see
that weariness in the tired frown of the black brows, the narrowing
of the dark eyes, the downward tug of the lips. Wrinkles of stagnation
had began to creep into forehead and cheeks--wrinkles that no amount
of gymnasium, of club life, of careful shaving, of strict hygiene
could banish.
Through the west windows the slowly changing hues of gray, of
mulberry, and dull rose-pink blurred in the sky, cast softened lights
upon those wrinkles, but could not hide them. They revealed sad
emptiness of purpose. This man was tired unto death, if ever man were
tired.
He yawned, sighed deeply, stretched out his hand and took up a bit
of a model mechanism from the table, where it had lain with other
fragments of apparatus. For a moment he peered at it; then he tossed
it back again, and yawned a second time.
"Business!" he growled. "'Swapped my reputation for a song,' eh?
Where's my commission, now?"
He got up, clasped his hands behind him, and walked a few times up and
down the heavy rug, his footfalls silent.
"The business could have gone on without me!" he added, bitterly.
"And, after all, what's any business, compared to _life_?"
He yawned again, stretched up his arms, groaned and laughed with
mockery:
"A little more money, maybe, when I don't know what to do with what
I've got already! A few more figures on a checkbook--and the heart
dying in me!"
Then he relapsed into silence. Head down, hands thrust deep in
pockets, he paced like a captured animal in bars. The bitterness
of his spirit was wormwood. What meant, to him, the interests and
pleasures of other men? Profit and loss, alcohol, tobacco, women--all
alike bore him no message. Clubs, athletics, gambling--he grumbled
something savage as his thoughts turned to such trivialities. And into
his aquiline face came something the look of an eagle, trapped, there
in that eagle's nest of his.
Suddenly the Master of _Niss'rosh_ came to a decision. He returned,
clapped his hands thrice, sharply, and waited. Almost at once a door
opened at the southeast corner of the room--where the observatory
connected with the stairway leading down to the Master's apartment on
the top floor of the building--and a vague figure of a man appeared.
The light was steadily fading, so that this man could by no means be
clearly distinguished. But one could see that he wore clothing quite
as conventional as his master's. Still, no more than the Master did he
appear one of life's commonplaces. Lean, brown, dry, with a hawk-nose
and glinting eyes, surely he had come from far, strange places.
"Rrisa!" the Master spoke sharply, flinging the man's name at him with
the exasperation of overtensed nerves.
"_M'almé?_" (Master?) replied the other.
"Bring the evening food and drink," commanded the Master, in excellent
Arabic, guttural and elusive with strange hiatuses of breath.
Rrisa withdrew, salaaming. His master turned toward the western
windows. There the white blankness of the map of Arabia seemed mocking
him. The Master's eyes grew hard; he raised his fist against the map,
and smote it hard. Then once more he fell to pacing; and as he walked
that weary space, up and down, he muttered to himself with words we
cannot understand.
After a certain time, Rrisa came silently back, sliding into the soft
dusk of that room almost like a wraith. He bore a silver tray with a
hook-nosed coffee-pot of chased metal. The cover of this coffee-pot
rose into a tall, minaret-like spike. On the tray stood also a small
cup having no handle; a dish of dates; a few wafers made of the
Arabian cereal called _temmin_; and a little bowl of _khat_ leaves.
"_M'almé, al khat aja_" (the khat has come), said Rrisa.
He placed the tray on the table at his master's side, and was about to
withdraw when the other stayed him with raised hand.
"Tell me, Rrisa," he commanded, still speaking in Arabic, "where wert
thou born? Show thou me, on that map."
The Arab hesitated a moment, squinting by the dim light that now had
faded to purple dusk. Then he advanced a thin forefinger, and laid
it on a spot that might have indicated perhaps three hundred miles
southeast of Mecca. No name was written on the map, there.
"How dost thou name that place, Rrisa?" demanded the Master.
"I cannot say, Master," answered the Arab, very gravely. As he stood
there facing the western afterglow, the profound impassivity of his
expression--a look that seemed to scorn all this infidel civilization
of an upstart race--grew deeper.
To nothing of it all did he owe allegiance, save to the Master
himself--the Master who had saved him in the thick of the Gallipoli
inferno. Captured by the Turks there, certain death had awaited him
and shameful death, as a rebel against the Sublime Porte. The Master
had rescued him, and taken thereby a scar that would go with him to
the grave; but that, now, does not concern our tale. Only we say again
that Rrisa's life lay always in the hands of this man, to do with as
he would.
None the less, Rrisa answered the question with a mere:
"Master, I cannot say."
"Thou knowest the name of the place where thou wast born?" demanded
the Master, calmly, from where he sat by the table.
"_A_ (yes), _M'almé_, by the beard of M'hámed, I do!"
"Well, what is it?"
Rrisa shrugged his thin shoulders.
"A tent, a hut? A village, a town, a city?"
"A city, Master. A great city, indeed. But its name I may not tell
you."
"The map, here, shows nothing, Rrisa. And of a surety, the makers of
maps do not lie," the Master commented, and turned a little to pour
the thick coffee. Its perfume rose with grateful fragrance on the air.
The Master sipped the black, thick nectar, and smiled oddly. For a
moment he regarded his unwilling orderly with narrowed eyes.
"Thou wilt not say they lie, son of Islam, eh?" demanded he.
"Not of choice, perhaps, _M'almé_," the Mussulman replied. "But if the
camel hath not drunk of the waters of the oasis, how can he know that
they be sweet? These _Nasara_ (Christian) makers of maps, what can
they know of my people or my land?"
"Dost thou mean to tell me no man can pass beyond the desert rim, and
enter the middle parts of Arabia?"
"I said not so, Master," replied the Arab, turning and facing his
master, every sense alert, on guard against any admissions that might
betray the secret he, like all his people, was sworn by a Very great
oath to keep.
"Not all men, true," the Master resumed. "The Turks--I know they
enter, though hated. But have no other foreign men ever seen the
interior?"
"_A, M'almé_, many--of the True Faith. Such, though they come from
China, India, or the farther islands of the Indian Ocean, may enter
freely."
"Of course. But I am speaking now of men of the _Nasara_ faith. How of
them? Tell me, thou!"
"You are of the _Nasara, M'almé!_ Do not make me answer this! You,
having saved my life, own that life. It is yours. _Ana bermil illi
bedakea!_ (I obey your every command!) But do not ask me this! My head
is at your feet. But let us speak of other things, O Master!"
The Master kept a moment's silence. He peered contemplatively at the
dark silhouette of the Arab, motionless, impassive in the dusk.
Then he frowned a very little, which was as near to anger as he ever
verged. Thoughtfully he ate a couple of the little _temmin_ wafers and
a few dates. Rrisa waited in silent patience.
All at once the Master spoke.
"It is my will that thou speak to me and declare this thing, Rrisa,"
said he, decisively. "Say, thou, hath no man of the _Nasara_ faith
ever penetrated as far as to the place of thy birth?"
"_Lah_ (no), _M'almé_, never. But three did reach an oasis not far to
westward of it, fifty years ago, or maybe fifty-one."
"Ah, so?" exclaimed the Master, a touch of eagerness in his grave,
impassive voice. "Who were they?"
"Two of the French blood, Master, and one of the Russian."
"And what happened to them, then?"
"They--died, Master."
"Thou dost mean, thy people did slay them?"
"They died, all three," repeated Rrisa, in even tones. "The jackals
devoured them and the bones remained. Those bones, I think, are still
there. In our dry country--bones remain, long."
"Hm! Yea, so it is! But, tell me, thou, is it true that in thy country
the folk slay all _Nasara_ they lay hands on, by cutting with a sharp
knife? Cutting the stomach, so?" He made an illustrative gesture.
"Since you do force me to speak, against my will, _M'almé_--you being
of the _Nasara_ blood--I will declare the truth. Yea, that is so."
"A pleasant custom, surely! And why always in the stomach? Why do they
never stab or cut like other races?"
"There are no bones in the stomach, to dull the edges of the knives,
_M'almé_."
"Quite practical, that idea!" the Master exclaimed. Then he fell
silent again. He pressed his questions no further, concerning the
great Central Desert of the land. To have done so, he knew, would have
been entirely futile. Beyond a certain point, which he could gauge
accurately, neither gold nor fire would drive Rrisa. The Arab would at
any hour of night or day have laid down his life for the Master; but
though it should mean death he would not break the rites of his faith,
nor touch the cursed flesh of a pig, nor drink the forbidden drop of
wine, nor yet betray the secret of his land.
All at once the Arab spoke, in slow, grave tones.
"Your God is not my God, Master," said he, impersonally. "No, the God
of your people is not the God of mine. We have our own; and the land
is ours, too. None of the _Nasara_ may come thither, and live. Three
came, that I have heard of, and--they died. I crave my Master's
bidding to depart."
"Presently, yea," the Master answered. "But I have one more question
for thee. If I were to take thee, and go to thy land, but were not to
ask thy help there--if I were not to ask thee to guide me nor yet to
betray any secret--wouldst thou play the traitor to me, and deliver me
up to thy people?"
"My head is at your feet, _M'almé_. So long as you did not ask me
to do such things as would be unlawful in the eyes of Allah and the
Prophet, and seek to force me to them, this hand of mine would wither
before it would be raised against the preserver of my life! I pray
you, _M'almé_, let me go!"
"I grant it. _Ru'c'h halla!_" (Go now!) exclaimed the Master, with a
wave of the hand. Rrisa salaamed again, and, noiseless as a wraith,
departed.