INTO THE VALLEY OF MYSTERY
The upraised blade, poised for swift murder, did not descend. With a
groan from the heart's core, Rrisa let fall his trembling hand, as
he recoiled toward the vague patch of starlight that marked the cabin
window.
"_Bismillah_!" he whispered hoarsely. "I cannot! This is my
sheik--'and thrice cursed is the hand that slays the sheik.' I cannot
kill him!"
For a moment he remained there, pondering. Swift, passionate thoughts
surged through his brain, which burned with fever. In Rrisa's
fighting-blood the supreme battle of his whole existence was
aflame--duty of annihilating the violator of his Faith combating duty
of loyalty absolute to one whose salt he had eaten, to one who had
preserved his life.
So, in the dark he stood there, a shadow among shadows. He peered
about with white-rimmed eyes, striving to discover where now the Myzab
and the sacred Black Stone might be. The dim bulk of the blanket under
the berth came to his senses. He knelt, touched the blanket, felt the
hard solidity within.
Torn with anguish of a great conflict, he pondered, smearing the sweat
of agony from his hard-wrinkled forehead. Better was it to fling these
holy things from the cabin window, out into the night? Better the
certainty that the desert sands, far below, would inevitably drift
over them, forever burying them from the sight of his people; or
better the chance that the Master, after all, really intended to
deliver them back into Moslem hands at Bara Jannati Shahr?
"Allah, oh, guide thy servant now!" the orderly prayed with trembling
lips. "Allah, show thou me the way!"
The Master, stirring in his sleep, sighed deeply and let his right
hand fall outside the berth. Rrisa, fearful of imminent discovery,
made up his mind with simple directness. He salaamed in silence, all
but brushing the Master's hand with his lips.
"_Wa'salem!_" (Farewell!) he breathed. Then he got up, turned, laid
his dagger on the table and slid out through the window as soundlessly
as he had come. He crossed the marrow gallery in the gloom, and
mounted the rail beyond which yawned black vacancy.
For a moment he stayed there, peering down first at the impenetrable
abysses below, then up at the unmoved stars above. The ghostly aura
of light in the gallery showed his face wan, deep-graven with lines,
agonized, ennobled by strong decisions of self-sacrifice.
"Thou, Allah," he whispered, "dost know life cannot be for both my
Master and thy servant, after what thy servant hath seen. I offer thee
my life for his! Thou wilt judge aright, for thou knowest the hearts
of men and wilt wrong no man by the weight of a grain of sand. Thou
art easy to be reconciled, and merciful! There is no God but Allah,
and M'hámed is his Prophet!"
With no further word, he leaped.
Just a fraction of a second, a dim-whirling object plummeted into
space. It vanished.
As best he understood, Rrisa had solved his problem and had paid his
score.
The Master wakened early, with the late May sun already Slanting in
from far, dun and orange desert-levels, gilding the metal walls of his
cabin. For a few moments he lay there, half dreamily listening to
the deep bass hum of the propellers, the slight give and play of
the air-liner as she shuddered under the powerful drive of her
Norcross-Brail engines.
His thoughts first dwelt a little on yesterday's battle and on the
wondrous treasure now in his hands. Then they touched the approaching
campaign beyond the Iron Mountains in regions never yet seen by any
white man's eye, and for a while enveloped some of the potentialities
of that campaign.
But "Captain Alden" recurring to his mind, drove away such stern
imaginings. The Master's lips smiled, a little; his black eyes
softened, and for a moment his face assumed something that might
almost have made it akin to those of men who feel the natural passions
of the heart. Never before, in all his stern, hard life, had the
Master's expression been quite as now.
"Who can she be, I wonder?" he mused. "A woman like that, possessed of
that extraordinary beauty; a woman with education, languages, medical
skill; a woman with courage, loyalty, and devotion beyond compare,
and with all the ardor for service and adventure that any man could
have--who can she be? And--damn it, now! Who am I, to be thinking of
such nonsense, after all?"
His eyes fell on the table. Something lay there, agleam with the
sunlight flicking blood-red spots from a polished metal surface. What
could this thing be? Surely, it had not lain there, the night before.
The Master wrinkled heavy brows, focussing his sight on this metal
object. Puzzled, not yet able to make it out clearly, he raised
himself on his elbow and looked with close attention at the mysterious
object.
Suddenly he leaped from the berth, strode to the table and caught
up--Rrisa's dagger.
"Allah! What's this?" he exclaimed. "Rrisa--he's been here--and with a
knife?--"
For a second or two he stood there, staring at the _jambiyeh_ in his
grip. His powerful frame tautened; his thick, corded neck swelled with
the intensity of his emotion as his head went forward, staring.
His jaw set hard. Then with a kind of half-comprehension, he turned
quickly toward the window.
Yes, there were traces on the sill, that could not be mistaken. The
Master's keen eyes detected them, under the morning sun. He stepped to
his desk, dropped the dagger into a drawer, and pressed the button for
his orderly.
No one appeared. The Master rang again. Quite in vain. With more
precipitation than was customary with him, he dressed and went to
Rrisa's cabin.
Its emptiness confirmed his suspicions. Returning along the outer
gallery, a little pale, he reached the railing opposite his own
window. Here a scratch on the metal drew his attention. Closely he
scrutinized this scratch. A hint of whitish metal told the tale--metal
the Master recognized as having been abraded from a ring the Master
himself had given him; a ring of aluminum alloy, fashioned from part
of a Turkish grenade at Gallipoli.
The Master's face contracted painfully. In his mind he could
reconstitute the scene--Rrisa's hands gripping the rail, his climb
over it, his leap. For a moment the Master stood there with blank
eyes, peering out over the burning, tawny desolation of the great
sand-barrens that stretched away, away, to boundless immensity.
"Yes, he is surely gone," he whispered. "_Shal'lah! Razi Allahu
anhu!_" (It is Allah's will; may Allah be satisfied with him!) "What
would I not give to have him back!"
The trilling of his cabin phone startled him to attention. He entered,
took the receiver and heard Leclair's voice from the pilot-house:
"Clouds on the horizon, my Captain. And I think there is a mountain
range coming in sight. Would you care to look?"
The Master, very grim and silent, went into the pilot-house. He had
decided to make no mention of what had happened. The suicide must
pass as an accident. He himself must seem to have no knowledge of it.
Morale forbade the admission either of treachery or self-destruction,
for any member of the Legion.
The sight of vague, pearl-gray clouds on the far south-east horizon,
and of a dim, violet line of peaks notched across the heat-quivering
sky in remotest distances, struck him like a blow in the face. Clouds
must mean moisture; some inner, watered plain wholly foreign to the
general character of the Arabian Peninsula. And the peaks must be the
Iron Mountains that Rrisa had told him about. They seemed to rebuff
him, to be pointing fingers of accusation at him. Had it not been for
his insistence--
"But that is all nonsense!" he tried to assure himself, as he took
his binoculars from the rack and sighted at the forbidding, mysterious
range. "Am I responsible for a Moslem's superstitions, or his fanatic
irrationality?"
The Master's own narrow escape from death disturbed him not at all.
He hardly even thought of it. All he strove for, now, was to exculpate
himself for Rrisa's death. But this he could not do.
A sense of blood-guiltiness clung about him like a garment--the first
that he had felt on this expedition. His soul, unemotional, practical,
hard, was at last touched and wounded by the realization that Rrisa,
pushed beyond all limits of endurance, had chosen death rather than
inflict it on his sheik. And the thought that the faithful orderly's
body was now lying on the flaming sands, hundreds of miles away--that
it was already a prey to jackals, kites, and buzzards--sickened his
shuddering heart and filled him with remorse.
"Allah send a storm of sand--_jinnee_ to bury the poor chap, that's
all I can wish now!" he pondered, as he studied the strange yellowish
and orange tints in utmost horizon distances. The air, over the
shimmering peaks, seemed of a different quality from that elsewhere.
To north, to west, the desert rim of the world veiled itself in magic
blue, mysteriously dim. But there, it glowed in golden hues. What,
thought the Master, might be the meaning of all this?
The Master had no time for speculation. The urgent problem of locating
the Bara Jannati Shahr, beyond that inhospitable sierra, banished
thoughts of all else. He inspected his charts, together with the
air-liner's record of course and position. He slightly corrected the
direction of flight. "Captain Alden" was already in the pilot-house,
with Leclair. The Master summoned Bohannan tersely, and briefly
instructed him:
"You understand, of course, that we may now be facing perils beyond
any yet encountered. We have already upset all Islam, and changed the
_kiblah_--the direction of prayer--for more than two hundred million
human beings. The 'fronting-place' is now aboard _Nissr_."[1]
[Footnote 1: So long as the Black Stone was at the Ka'aba, this
building was the only spot in the world where the _kiblah_ was
circular, that is, where Moslems could pray all around it. The
Legion's theft of the stone had completely dislocated all the most
important beliefs and customs of Islam.]
"The most intense animosity of religious fanaticism will pursue us.
If the news of our exploit has, in any unaccountable way such as
the Arabs know how to employ, reached Jannati Shahr, we are in for a
battle royal. If not, we still have a chance to use diplomacy. A few
hours now will determine the issue.
"We are approaching what will probably be the final goal of this
expedition; a city beyond unknown mountains; a city that no white man
has ever yet seen and that few have even heard of. What the conditions
will be there no one can tell; but--"
"Not even Rrisa?" put in the major. "Faith, now's the time, if ever,
to consult that lad!"
"Correct, for once," assented the Master. With purpose to deceive,
he phoned for Rrisa. No answer coming, he got Simonds on the wire and
ordered him to find the orderly. The investigation thus started would,
he knew, soon bring out the fact of the orderly's disappearance. This
line of action fairly started, he went on formulating his plans:
"Major, look well to your guns. For once you may have a chance to use
them. I have put my various pieces of apparatus in good condition,
and have improvised some new features. In addition, we have the second
kappa-bomb."
"But I trust we shall not be driven to a fight. If diplomacy can win,
there will be no bloodshed. Otherwise, our only limit will be the
total destruction of these unknown people, or our own annihilation.
It's a case, now, of win what we are after, or end everything right
there, beyond those mountains!"
He ascended to the upper port gallery, and concentrated himself on
observation. A certain change in the desert was becoming noticeable,
as the air-liner flung herself at high speed into the south-east. At
times there must be a little rainfall here, or else some hidden source
of water, for a scrub, of dwarf acacia, of camel-grass, and tamarisk
had begun to show.
But as the black, naked mountains drew near, this gave place to flats
white with salt, to jagged upcroppings of dull, yellowish rock--how
little they then suspected its true nature!--and to detached cliffs
sharp as a wolf's teeth, with strata of greenish schist.
It was at 9:30 a.m. of May 28, that _Nissr_ tilted her planes and
soared abruptly over the first crags of the Iron Mountains. At a
height of forty-five hundred feet she sped above them, the heat of
their sun-baked blackness radiating up against her wings and body. No
more terrible desolation could be imagined than this rock fortress,
split with chasms and unsounded gorges, where here and there more of
the yellow outcrops showed. No life appeared, not even vultures. For
more than an hour, _Nissr's_ shadow leaped across this utter solitude
of death.
The Master summoned Leclair, Bohannan, and "Captain Alden," and for
some time gave them careful instructions which none but they were
allowed to hear.