THE GREAT PEARL STAB
The Master began to feel a peculiar anxiety. Into the east he peered,
where now indeed a low, steady hum was growing audible, as of a
million angry spirits swarming nearer. The stars along that horizon
had been blotted out, and something like a dark blanket seemed to be
drawing itself across the sky.
"My Captain," said the lieutenant, "there may be trouble brewing,
close at hand. A sand-storm, unprotected as we are--"
"Men with stern work to do cannot have time to fear the future!"
Leclair grew silent. Rrisa alone was speaking, now. With a call of
"_Ya Latif!_" (O Merciful One!) he had begun the performance of his
ceremony, with rigid exactness. He ended with another prostration and
the usual drawing down of the hands over the face. Then he arose, took
up his javelin again, and with a clear conscience--since now his rites
had all been fulfilled--cried aloud:
"Now, Master, I am ready for the work of helping Azraël, the
death-angel, separate the souls and bodies of these Shiah heretics!"
A sudden howling of a jackal startled Rrisa. He quivered and
stood peering into the night, where now the unmistakable hum of
an approaching sand-storm was drawing near. His superstitious soul
trembled with the old belief of his people that creatures of the
dog breed can see Azraël, invisible to human eyes. At thought of
the death-angel standing nigh, his heart quaked; but rage and hate
inspired him, and he muttered:
"Fire to your bellies, broiling in white flame! Fuel of Jehannum, may
Eblis be your bed, an unhappy couch! Spawn of Shaytan (Satan), boiling
water to cool your throats! At Al Hakkat (judgment day) may the
_jinnee_ fly away with you!"
"To work, men!" cried the Master. "There is great work to do!"
As if in answer to his command, a blustering, hot buffet of wind
roared down with amazing suddenness, filling the dark air with a
stinging drive of sand. The fire by the beach flailed into long
tongues of flame, throwing black shadows along the side of the wady.
No stars were now visible. From empty spaces, a soughing tumult leaped
forth; and on the instant a furious gust of fine, cutting particles
whirled all about, thicker than driven snow in a northern blizzard.
"Iron, O thou ill-omened one!" cried Rrisa, with the ancient
invocation against the sand-storm. He stretched out his forefinger,
making the sign of protection. Neither the meaning of his cry nor
of the gesture could he have explained; but both came to him
involuntarily, from the remote lore of his people.
He turned from the oncoming storm, leaning against the wind, clutching
for his cap that the wind-devil had just whirled away. After it he
stumbled; and, falling to his knees, groped for it in the gloom.
"Thousand devils!" ejaculated the Frenchman. "No time, now, for
killing! Lucky if we get back ourselves, alive, to the beach! My
Captain!"
"What now?" the Master flung at him, shielding mouth and eyes with
cupped hands.
"To the wady, all of us! That may give protection till this blast of
Hell passes!"
A startled cry from Rrisa forestalled any answer. The Arab's voice
rose in a wild hail from the sand-filled dark:
"O _M'almé_, _M'almé!_"
"What, Rrisa?"
"Behold! I--_I have found him!_"
"Found--?" shouted the Master, plunging forward.
Leclair followed close, staggering in the sudden gale. "_Abd el
Rahman?_"
"The old hyena, surely! _M'almé, M'almé! See!_"
The white men stumbled with broken ejaculations to where Rrisa was
crouched over a gaunt figure in the drifting sand.
"Is that he, Rrisa?" cried the Master. "Art thou sure?"
"As that my mother bore me! See the old jackal, the son of Hareth!
(the devil). Ah, see, see!"
"_Dieu_!" exclaimed the Frenchman, in his own tongue. "It is none
other!" With a hand of great rejoicing, he stirred the unconscious
Sheik--over whom the sand was already sifting as the now ravening
simoom lashed it along.
Forgotten now were all his fears of death in the sand-storm. This
delivery of the hated one into his hands had filled him with a savage
joy, as it had the two others.
"Ah, _mon vieux!_" he cried. "It is only the mountains that never
meet, in time!"
The Master laughed, one of those rare flashes of merriment that
at infrequent intervals pierced his austerity. Away on the growing
sand-storm the wind whipped that laugh. Simoom and sand now appeared
forgotten by the trio. Keen excitement had gripped them; it held them
as they crouched above the Sheik.
"Allah is being good to us!" exulted the Master, peering by the
gale-driven fire-glare. "This capture is worth more to the Legion than
a hundred machine-guns. What will not the orthodox tribes give for
this arch-Shiah, this despoiler of the sacred Haram at Mecca?"
He began feeling in the bosom of the old man, opening the cloaklike
burnous and exploring the neck and chest with eager fingers.
"If we could only lay hands on the fabled loot of the Haram!" he
whispered, his voice tense with excitement.
Rrisa, wide-eyed, with curling lips of scorn, peered down at the
Sheik. The orderly, bare-headed, was shielding eyes and face from the
sand-blast, with hands that trembled. His teeth were bared with hate
as he peered at the prostrate heretic.
A tall, powerful figure of a man the Sheik was, lying there on his
right side with his robe crumpled under him--the robe now flapping,
whipping its loose ends in the high and rising wind. His _tarboosh_
had been blown away, disclosing white hair.
That hair, too, writhed and flailed in the gusts that drove it full
of sand, that drifted his whole body with the fine and stinging
particles. His beard, full and white, did not entirely conceal the
three parallel scars on each cheek, the _mashali_, which marked him as
originally a dweller at Mecca.
One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the
growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle,
its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with
gold.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his
questing fingers had discovered about the old man's neck. With hands
that trembled a little, he drew out this cord. Then he uttered an
exclamation of intense disappointment.
There was nothing at the end of the crimson loop, save a _lamail_, or
pocket Koran. Leclair muttered a curse, and moved away, peering
toward the fire, spying out the wady through the now almost choking
sand-drive--the wady where they certainly must soon take refuge or be
overwhelmed by the buffeting lash of sand whirled on the breath of the
shouting tempest.
Even in the Master's anger, he did not throw the Koran away. Too
astute, he, for any such act in presence of Rrisa. Instead, he bound
the Arab to fresh devotion by touching lips and forehead, and by
handing him the little volume. The Master's arm had to push its way
against the wind as against a solid thing; and the billion rushing
spicules of sand that swooped in upon him from the desert emptiness,
stung his flesh like tiny scourges.
"This Koran, Rrisa, is now thine!" he cried in a loud voice, to make
the Arab hear him. "And a great gift to thee, a Sunnite, is the Koran,
of this desecrating son of the rejected!"
Bowed before the flail of the sand--while Rrisa uttered broken words
of thanks--the Master called to Leclair:
"By _Corsi_ (Allah's throne), now things assume a different aspect!
This old dog of dogs is a prize, indeed! And--what now--"
Leclair did not answer. The Frenchman was not even near him. The
Master saw him in the wady, dimly visible through the ghostly white
sand-shrouds spinning in the blue-whipped fire-glare. There on hands
and knees the lieutenant was huddled. With eager hands he was tearing
the hood of a _za'abut_--a rough, woolen slave cloak, patched and
ragged--from the face of a prostrate figure more than half snowed
under a sand-drift.
"_Nom de Dieu!_" the Master heard him cry. "_Mais, nom de_--"
"What have you found, Lieutenant?" shouted the Master, letting the
simoom drive him toward the wady. In their excitement none of the men
would yet take cover, lie down and hide their faces under their coats
as every dictate of prudence would have bidden. "Who is it, now?
What--"
"Ah, my Captain! Ah! the pity of it! Behold!"
The Frenchman's voice, wind-gusted, trembled with grief and passionate
anger; yet through that rage and sorrow rang a note of joy.
"Tell me, Leclair! Who, now?" demanded the Master, as he came close
and peered down by the fire-gleam roaring on the beach, sending
sheaves of sparks in comet-tails of vanishing radiance down-wind with
rushing sand.
"It is impossible, my Captain," the lieutenant answered in French. His
voice could now make itself heard more clearly; for here in the wady
a certain shelter existed from the roaring sand-cyclone. "Impossible,
but--_Dieu_!--it is true!"
"What is true?"
"Incredible, yet--_voilà_!"
"In Allah's name, Lieutenant!" the Master ejaculated, "compose
yourself! Explain! Who is this Arab, here?"
"No Arab, sir! No, no!"
"Not an Arab? Well, what is he, then?"
"Ah, these scars, my Captain! Behold--see the slave dress, the weals
of the branding-iron on cheek and brow! Ah, for pity! See the starved
body, the stripes of the lash, the feet mangled by the bastinado! What
horrible things they have done to him--ah, God have pity on us!"
Tears gleamed on the stern fighter's cheeks, there in the ghostly blue
firelight--tears that washed little courses through the dust and sand
now griming his face. The French airman, hard in battle and with heart
of steel and flame, was crying like a child.
"What now? Who is it?" shouted the Master. "A European?"
"Yes, my Captain! A Frenchman!"
"A Frenchman. You don't mean to say it--is--"
"Yes, yes! My orderly! Lebon!"
"God!" exclaimed the Master. "But--"
A cry from Rrisa interrupted him, a cry that flared down-wind with
strange, wild exultation. The Arab had just risen from the sand, near
the unconscious, in-drifting form of the Sheik, Abd el Rahman.
In his hands he was holding something--holding a leather sack with a
broken cord attached to it. This cord in some way had been severed by
the Sheik's rifle when the old man had fallen. The leather sack had
rolled a few feet away. Now, with hands that shook so that the Arab
could hardly control them, Rrisa was holding out this sack as he
staggered through the blinding sand-storm towards his chief.
"_Al Hamdu Lillah!_" (Praise to the Lord of the Three Worlds!) choked
Rrisa in a strange voice, fighting for his very breath. "See--see what
I--have found!"
Staring, blinking, trying to shelter his eyes against the demons of
the storm, the Master turned toward him.
"What, Rrisa?"
Down into the wady stumbled the Arab, gray-powdered with clinging
sand.
"Oh," he choked, "it has been taken from these _yezid_, these abusers
of the salt! Now we rescue it from these cut-off ones! From the swine
and brothers of the swine it has been taken by Allah, and put back
into the hands of Rrisa, Allah's slave! See, _M'almé_, see!"
The shaking hands extended the leather sack. At it the Master stared,
his face going dead white.
"Thou--dost not mean--?" he stammered.
"Truly, I do!"
"Not Kaukab el Durri?"
"Aye--it was lying near that heretic dog!"
"The Great Pearl Star, the sacred loot from the Haram?"
"Kaukab el Durri, _M'almé_. The Great Pearl Star itself!"