THE SAND-DEVILS
With hands that quivered in unison with his nerves, now no longer
impassive, the strange chief of this still stranger expedition took
from Rrisa the leather sack. Over the top of the wady a million
sand-devils were screeching. The slither of the dry snow--the white,
fine snow of sand--filled all space with a whispering rustle that
could be heard through the shouting of the simoom.
Sand was beating on them, everywhere, in the darkness lighted only by
the tortured beach-fire. The stinging particles assailed eyes, ears,
mouth; it whitened clothing, sifted into hair, choked breath. But
still the Legionaries could not take shelter under their coats. In
this moment of wondrous finding, they must see the gem of gems that
Kismet had thus flung into their grasp.
The Master loosed a knot in the cord, drew the sack open and shook
into his left palm a thing of marvellous beauty and wonder.
By the dim, fitful gleam of the fire, probably the strangest and most
costly necklace in the world became indistinctly visible. At sight of
it, everything else was forgotten--the wrecked air-liner, the waiting
Legion, the unconscious Arabs now being buried in the resistless
charge of the sand-armies. Even poor Lebon, tortured slave of the Beni
Harb, a lay neglected. For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Star
could these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts.
While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tense
with 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 to
have been sold in Cairo, twelve years ago, for fifty-five thousand
pounds! But these are finer! And its value as a holy relic of
Islam--who can calculate that? God, what this means to us!"
Words will not compass the description of this wondrous thing. As
the Master held it up in the sand-lashed dimness, half-gloom and
half-light, that formed a kind of aura round the fire--an aura sheeted
through and all about by the aerial avalanches of the sand--the
Legionaries 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 had
been. Each of the five pearls was of almost incalculable value; but
one, an iridescent Oman, far surpassed the others.
This pearl was about the size of a man's largest thumb-joint. Its
shape was a smooth oval; its hue, even in that dim, wind-tossed light,
showed a wondrous, tender opalescence that seemed to change and blend
into 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 the
Master--for all his wide travel and experience of life--ever had seen.
By way of strange contrast in values the pearls were separated
from each other by worthless, little, smooth lumps of madrepore,
or unfossilized coral. These lumps were covered with tiny black
inscriptions in archaic Cufic characters; though what the significance
of these might be, the Master could not--in that gloom and howling
drive of the sand-devils--even begin to determine.
The whole adornment, as it lay in the Master's palm, typified the
Orient. For there was gold; there were gems and bits of worthless
dross intermingled; and there about it was drifting sand of infinite
ages, darkness, flashes of light, color, mystery, wonder, beauty.
"God! What this means!" the Master repeated, as the three men cringed
in the wady. "Success, dominion, power!"
"You mean--" put in Leclair, his voice smitten away by the
ever-increasing storm that ravened over the top of the gully.
"What do I _not_ mean, Lieutenant? No wonder the Apostate Sheik had to
flee from Mecca and take refuge here in this impassable wilderness at
the furthest rim of Islam! No wonder he has been hounded and hunted!
The only miracle is that some of his own tribesmen have not betrayed
him before now!"
"Master, no Arab betrays his own sheik, right or wrong!" said Rrisa in
a strange voice. "Before that, an Arab dies by his own hand!" He spoke
in Arabic, with a peculiar inflection.
Their eyes met a second by the light of the gusting fire.
"Right or wrong, _M'almé_!" repeated the Arab. Then he added: "Shall I
not 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, will
breathe sand, will perish."
"It is well, Rrisa. Go, drag in the swine-brother. But have a care to
harm him not. Thou wouldst gladly slay him, eh?"
"More gladly than to live myself! Still, I obey. I go, I bring him
safe 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 an
unconscious man, drew the hood of the woollen _za'abut_ up over the
face 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 ace
turned again to where his chief was still scrutinizing the Pearl Star
as he crouched in the wady, back to the storm-wind, face toward the
fire on the beach.
"Do you realize what this thing is?" demanded the Master, turning the
necklace in his hands. "Do you understand?"
"I have heard of it, my Captain. For years vague rumors have come to
me from the desert-men, from far oases and cities of the Sahara. Now
here, now there, news has drifted in to Algiers--not news, but rather
fantastic tales. Yes, I have often heard of the Kaukab el Durri. But
till 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 gathered
together during many years of looting caravans in the desert and
of capturing _sambuks_ on the Red Sea. Arabia, India, and China all
contributed 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 precious
thing 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 the
partial protection of the wady, while all the evil _jinnee_ of the
sand-storm shrieked blackly overhead. With no further words they
continued to study the wondrous thing. The fire was dying, now, burned
out by the fierce blast of the storm and blown away to sea in long
spindrifts of spark and vapor, white as the sand-drive itself. By the
fading light little could now be seen of the Great Pearl Star. The
Master replaced it in its leather bag, knotted the cord securely about
the 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 old
Sheik over the lip of the gully, down into its half-protection. He
brought the unconscious man to them, and--though bowed by the frenzy
of 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 his
hands. "Now Master, gladden my eyes and expand my breast by letting me
see this old jackal's blood!"
"No, Rrisa," the Master denied him. "I have other use for the old
jackal. 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, thy
preserver, with whom thou hast shared the salt. 'He who violates the
salt shall surely taste Jahannum!'"
"Death shall have me, first!" cried Rrisa, and fell silent. And for
a while the three men crouched in the wady with the two unconscious
ones, 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 on
the way we may be lost. To retrace our journey over the desert would
surely be to invite death."
"We must return, nevertheless. This storm may last all night, and it
may blow itself out in half an hour. That cannot be told. The Legion
may think us lost, and try to search for us. Lives may be sacrificed.
Morale demands that we go back. Moreover, we certainly need not
traverse 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 Arabs
and shoot us down."
"I will see to that. Come, we must go! Carry Lebon, if you like. Rrisa
and I will take Abd el Rahman."
"_M'almé_, not Abd el Rahman, now," ejaculated Rrisa, "but Abd el
Hareth![1] Let that be his title!"
[Footnote 1: The former name signifies "Slave of Compassion;" the
latter, "Slave of the Devil."]
"As thou wishest, Rrisa. But come, take his feet. I will hold him by
the shoulders. So! Now, forward!"
"And have a care not to breathe the sand, Master," Rrisa warned. "Turn
thy face away when the _jinnee_ smite!"
Stumbling, heavy-laden, the three men made their painful way down to
the beach, turned to the left, and plowed southward in deep sand. As
they left the remains of the fire a great blackness fell upon them.
The boisterous exultation of the wind, howling in from a thousand
miles of hot emptiness, out over the invisible sea now chopped into
frothy waves, seemed snatching at them. But the dunes at their left
flung the worst of the sand-storm up and over. And though whirls and
air-eddies, sand-laden, snatched viciously at them, they won along the
beach.
That was lathering toil, burdened as they were, stumbling over
driftwood and into holes, laboring forward, hardly able to distinguish
more than the rising, falling line of white that marked the surf.
Voices of water and of wind conclamantly shouted, as if all the devils
of the Moslem Hell had been turned loose to snatch and rave at them.
Heat, stifle, sand caught them by the throat; the breath wheezed in
their lungs; and on their faces sweat and sand pasted itself into a
kind of sticky mud.
After fifteen minutes of this struggle the Master paused. He dropped
Abd el Rahman's shoulders, and Rrisa the Sheik's feet, while Leclair
stood silently bowed with the weight of Lebon and of the belaboring
storm.
"_Oooo-eeee! Oooooeeee! Oooooo-eeee!_" the Master hailed, three long
times. An answering shout came back, faintly, from the black. The
Master bent, assured himself the old Sheik's mouth and nose were still
covered by the hood of the burnous, and cried: "Forward!" And the
three 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: "The
Master has but to command, and it is done!" Then once more they plowed
on down the shore.
Only a few minutes more brought them, with surprising suddenness, to
the 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, protecting
themselves as best they could with the tunics of their uniforms over
their heads.
They got up and came stumbling in confusion to greet the returning
trio. Peering in the dark, straining their eyes to see, they listened
to a few succinct words of the Master:
"Perfect success! Lethalizing was complete. Sand has buried the entire
tribe. 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 the
night. During this hour both Lebon and the old Sheik recovered
consciousness, but only in a vague manner. There was no attempt to
tell them anything, to make any plans, to start any activities. In a
Sahara simoom, men are content just to live.