The Master made no gesture with his hands, did not frown or clench his

fists, but remained impassively calm. His words, however, cut Rrisa
like knives. The orderly remained trembling and sweating, with a
piteous expression. Finally he managed to stammer:

"_M'almé_, in our tongue we have a proverb: 'There are two things
colder than ice--a young old man and an old young man.' There is still
a colder thing--the soul that betrays the Hidden City!"

"Speak Rrisa! There is no escape for thee!"

"My sheik, I obey," quavered the unfortunate orderly, shaken with a
palsy of fear. Without a quiver, the Arab would rush a machine-gun
position or face a bayonet-charge; but this betrayal of his kin struck
at the vitals of his faith. Still, the Master's word was law even
above Al Koran. With trembling lips he made answer:

"This city--spare me uttering its name, Master!--lies many hours'
journey, even by this Eagle of the Sky, beyond the Iron Mountains that
no man of the Feringi hath ever seen. It lies beyond the Great Sand
Barrier, in a valley of the Inner Mountains; yea, at the very heart of
Ruba el Khali."

"I hear thee, Rrisa. Speak further. And let thy speaking be truth!"

"It shall be truth, by the Prophet's beard! What doth the Master ask
of me?"

"Is it a large city, Rrisa?"

"Very large."

"And beautiful?"

"As the Jebel Radhwa!" (Mountain of Paradise).

"Thou hast been in that secret city, Rrisa?"

"Once, Master. The wonderful sight still remaineth in mine eyes."

"And, seeing the Iron Mountains again, thou couldst guide us thither?"

"Allah forbid! That is among the black deeds, Master! 'The grave is
darkness and good deeds are its lamps; but for the betrayer, there
shall be no light!' _Wallah, Effendi!_ Do not make me your guide!"

"I have not said I intended to do so, Rrisa. I merely asked thee
if thou _couldst_!" The Master's voice was silken, fine, penetrant.
"Well, Rrisa, tell me if thou couldst!"

"Yea, Master. _Ya gharati!_ (O my calamity!) It is true I could." The
words issued from his unwilling throat as if torn out by main force.
"But I earnestly beg of you, my sheik, do not make me do this thing!"

"Rrisa, if I command, thou must obey me! 'There is only one thing can
ever loose the bonds I have knotted about thee."

"And that is certainty (death), Master?"

"That is certainty! But this, to the oath-breaker and the abuser
of the salt, means a place among the _mujrim_ (sinful). It means
Jehannum, and an unhappy couch shall it be!"

Rrisa's face grew even more drawn and lined. A trembling had possessed
his whole body.

"Master, I obey!" he made submission, then stood waiting with downcast
eyes of suffering.

"It is well," said the chief, rising. He stood for a moment peering at
Rrisa, while the hum and roar of the great air-liner's mechanism, the
dip and sway of its vast body through the upper air, seemed to add a
kind of oppressive solemnity to the tense situation. To the cabin
wall the Master turned. There hung a large-scale map of the Arabian
Peninsula. He laid a hand on the vast, blank interior, and nodded for
Rrisa to approach.

"Listen, thou," said he. "Thy knowledge is sufficient. Thou dost
understand the interpretation of maps, and canst read latitude and
longitude. Mark here the place of the Hidden City!"

"Of the Bara Jannati Shahr, Master? Ah no, _no_!"

"So then, that is its name?" the chief demanded, smiling.

"No, _M'almé_. Thou dost know the Arabic. Thou dost understand this
means only, in thy tongue, the Very Heavenly City."

"True. Well, let it pass. Very Heavenly City it shall be, till the
real name becomes known. Come now, mark the place of the Hidden City
and mark it truly, or the greatest of sins will lie upon thy soul!"

The Arab advanced a brown, quivering hand.

"Give me a pencil, Master, and I obey!" he answered, in a voice hardly
audible.




CHAPTER XXXIV


THE INNER SECRET OF ISLAM

The chief handed him a pencil. Rrisa intelligently studied the map for
nearly two minutes, then raised his hand and made a dot a few miles
north-east of the intersection of fifty degrees east and twenty
degrees north. The Master's eye was not slow to note that the
designated location formed one point of a perfect equilateral
triangle, the other points of which were Bab el Mandeb on the south
and Mecca on the north.

"There, _M'almé_," whispered the Arab, in a choking voice. "Now I
have told you the secret of all secrets, and have lost my soul. I have
revealed the inner mystery of Islam, that to this day no man of the
Feringi hath ever known. I am a very great man of sin, and should have
first torn out my tongue.

"But my life is in your hands, Master, and I have shared your salt.
Allah knows I was forced to speak. _Shal'lah!_ (It is _Allah's_
will!) Allah will weigh my heart and will forgive, for he is the
Compassionate, the Merciful! I beg you, Master, now let me go!"

"Soon, Rrisa," the chief answered, turning away from the map. "But
first there is something of highest import I must show thee."

"And what may that be, my sheik?" the Arab queried, his widening eyes
fixed on the blanket that covered the loot from Mecca. Instinctively
he sensed that some horrible sight was about to be presented to him.
His face paled even more. He licked dry lips with a tongue equally
dry, and leaned against the table to steady himself. "What have you
now to show me, O _M'almé?_"

"Listen!" the chief commanded sternly. "The Meccans are a people
corrupt and accursed. 'Their hearts are black as their skins are
white.' They live by fleecing the _Hujjaj_, by making sale and barter
of relics, by turning the holy places into marts of trade. All this is
well known throughout Islam. Ah, the degenerate breed of the sons of
the Prophet!"

"That is true, Master. And what then?"

"Is it not a fact that they could not even safeguard the Kaukab el
Durri from the hand of the Great Apostate Sheik? How much less, then,
could they protect their other and more sacred things, if some Shiah
dog should come to rob them of the things they value?

"Would it not be better that such things should be carried far from
danger, to the hidden, inner city? I ask thee this, Rrisa; would it
not be better far?"

"And what is the meaning of my master's strange words?" ventured
Rrisa, a sort of dazed horror dawning in his eyes. "The other and more
sacred things of Islam--are they there under that cloth, O Master?"

"Thou hast said it, Rrisa! Now, behold them!"

With a quick, dramatic gesture, well-calculated to strike at the roots
of the superstitious Arab's nature, he flung away the blanket. To
Rrisa's horrified gaze appeared the Myzab and the sacred Black Stone.

"_Ya Allah!_" gulped the orderly, in a choking whisper. His face
became a dull gray. His eyes, rimmed with white, stared in terror. His
teeth began to chatter; and on his forehead appeared little glistening
drops.

"O Master, that is not--."

"Truly, yea! The Golden Waterspout, Rrisa, and the Black Stone
itself! I am carrying them to the Very Heavenly City, far in the Iron
Mountains! They shall be given to the Great Olema, there, who is more
fit to guard and keep them than the Sheriff of Mecca or than his sons
Feisal and the two Alis. No harm shall befall them, and--"

"And your hand--the hands of other Feringi who are not my
masters--have touched these things?" stammered Rrisa. "O my calamity!
O my grief!"

"Thou canst go now, Rrisa," the Master said. "Go, and think well of
what I have told thee, and--"


But Rrisa, falling prone to the metal of the cabin floor, facing the
Black Stone, gave vent to his feelings and burst into a wild cry of
"_La Illaha_--" and the rest of the immemorial formula.

The Master smiled down at him, quizzical and amused yet still more
than a little affected by the terror and devotion of his orderly.
Wise, he waited till Rrisa had made the compulsory prayers of
_Labbayk, Takbir_, and _Tahiti_, as all Moslems must do when coming
near the Black Stone. Then, as the orderly's voice suddenly died away,
he bent and laid a hand on the quivering Arab's shoulder.

"Come, come, Rrisa," said he, not unkindly. "Be thou not so
distressed. Is it not better that these very precious things be kept
in greater safety at the Jannati Shahr? Come, Rrisa! Arise!"

The orderly made no move, uttered no sound. The Master dragged him
up, held him, peered into his face that had gone quite ashen under its
brown.

"Why, Lord! the man has fainted dead away!" exclaimed the Master. He
gathered Rrisa in his powerful arms, carried him to his own cabin and
laid him in the berth, there; then he bathed his face with water and
chafed his hands and throat.

In a few minutes, Rrisa's eyes vaguely opened. He gulped, gasped, made
shift to speak a few feeble words.

"Master!" he whispered.

"Well, what dost thou wish?"

"One favor, only!"

"And what is that?"

"Leave me, a little while. I must be alone, all alone with Allah--to
think!"

The Master nodded.

"It shall be as thou wishest," said he. "Think, yes. And understand
that what I do is best for all of Sunnite Islam! As for the Shiah
dogs, what hast thou to trouble about them?"

Saying no more, he withdrew to his own cabin, wrapped the Myzab and
the Stone in the blanket and laid them carefully under his berth.
Opening his desk-drawer, he assured himself the Pearl Star was still
there. This done, he turned again to the map, carefully studied
the location of the point Rrisa had designated, and--going to the
pilot-house--gave directions for a new course to "Captain Alden," now
at the wheel.

This course, he calculated by allowing for wind and lateral
drift, would carry _Nissr_ directly toward the site of the still
half-mythical Iron Mountains and the Bara Jannati Shahr.

He now returned to his cabin, locked himself in and--pondering over
a few khat leaves--passed the remainder of the afternoon sunk in deep
abstraction.

Evening and night still found him in profound thought, while the giant
air-liner steadily rushed into the south-east, bearing him and the
Legion onward toward dim regions now veiled in purple darkness under
strange stars.

At nine o'clock he ordered _Nissr_ stopped, and had the body of Dr.
Lombardo sent down with six men in the nacelle, for burial. No purpose
could be served by keeping the body, and all unnecessary complications
had to be dispensed with before the morrow. Lombardo, who had fully
atoned for his fault by having given his life in the service of the
now depleted Legion, was buried in his service-uniform, in a fairly
deep grave on which the Legionaries heaped a great tumulus of sand.
The only witnesses were the Arabian Desert stars; the only requiem
the droning of the helicopters far above, where _Nissr_ hung with her
gleaming lights like other, nearer stars in the dense black sky.

By ten o'clock, the air-liner had resumed her course, leaving still
another brave man to his last sleep, alone. The routine of travel
settled down again on the ship and its crew of adventurers.

At half-past eleven, the Master issued from his cabin. All alone, and
speaking with no man, he took a quarter-hour constitutional up and
down the narrow gallery along the side of the fuselage--the gallery
on which his cabin window opened. His face, by the vague light of the
glows in this gallery, looked pale and worn; but a certain gleam of
triumph and proud joy was visible in his dark eyes.

All about him, stretched night unbroken. Far behind, lay vast
confusions involving hundreds of millions of human beings violently
wrenched from their accustomed routines of faith and prayer, with
potential effects beyond all calculation. Ahead lay--what?

"It may be glory and power, wealth past reckoning, incredible
splendor," thought the Master, "and it may be ignominy, torture,
death. 'Allah knows best and time will show.' But whatever it may
be--is it completion? The human heart, alone--can that ever be
complete in this world?"

He bent at the rail, gazing far out into the vague emptiness through
which the air-liner was pushing.

"Come what may," he murmured, "for tonight, at any rate, it is peace.
'It is peace, till the rising of the dawn!'"

In a strange mood, still holding no converse with any man, he returned
to the main corridor and went toward his cabin. His way led past the
door of "Captain Alden." There he paused a moment, all alone in the
corridor. The lights in the ceiling showed a strange look in his eyes.
His face softened, as he laid a hand on the metal panels of the door,
silently almost caressingly.

To himself he whispered:

"I wonder who she really is? What can her name be--who can she be,
and--and--"

He checked himself, impatiently:

"What thoughts are these? What nonsense? Such things are not for me!"

Silently he returned to his cabin, undressed, switched off the light
and turned into his berth, under which lay the incalculable treasures
of Islam. For a long time he lay there, thinking, wondering, angry
with himself for having seemed to give way for a single moment to
softer thoughts than those of conquest and adventure.

Gradually the cradling swing, the quivering power of the airship,
lulled his fevered spirit. Sleep won upon him, dulled the excitements
of the past twenty-four hours, sank him into oblivion. His deep,
regular breathing sounded in the gloom of the cabin that contained
the Great Pearl Star, the Myzab, the sacred Black Stone of infinite
veneration.

An hour he slept. On, on roared _Nissr_, swaying, rising, falling
a little as she hurled herself through the Arabian night toward
the unknown Bara Jannati Shahr, hidden behind the Iron Mountains of
mystery as yet unseen by any unbelieving eye.

Peace, all seemed peace, for one dark hour.

But as the hour ended, a shadow fell along the narrow gallery outside
the cabin window. A silent shadow it was, that crept, paused, came on
again. And now in the dark, had there been any eye to see, the shadow
would have been identified as a barefoot man, lithe, alert, moving
silently forward with the soundless stealth of an Arab versed in the
art of _asar_, or man-stalking.

To the Master's window this shadow crept, a half-invisible thing in
the gloom. It paused there, listening to the deep, regular breathing
within. Then a lean, brown hand was laid on the sill. It still seemed
to hesitate.

Something gleamed vaguely in that hand--a crooked _jambiyeh_,
needle-sharp at the point, keen-edged and balanced for the stroke that
silently slays.

Motionless, unbreathing even, the shadow waited a long minute. Then
all at once over the sill it writhed, quick, lithe as a starved
panther.

Dagger in hand, the shadow slid to the berth where lay the Master of
the Legionaries. There Rrisa paused, listening to the slow respiration
of the White Sheik with whom he had shared the inviolable salt, to
whom he owed life itself.

Up, in the gloom, came the dagger-blade.

Over the unconscious Master it poised, keen, cold, avenging in the
dark of the cabin where lay the three supreme treasures of all Islam.




CHAPTER XXXV


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.




CHAPTER XXXVI


JOURNEY'S END

All this time, the strange, yellowish sheen against the heavens was
increasing. What might lie beyond the mountains--who could tell? But
that its nature was wholly different from anything any white man ever
had beheld seemed obvious.

Quite suddenly, at 10:05, the Master's binoculars detected a break far
to southward, in the craggy wall of rock. He ordered _Nissr's_ beak
turned directly thither. Swiftly the Eagle of the Sky held her course,
speeding like an arrow. And now a vast, open plain was seen to be
spreading away, away to indeterminable distances; a plain the further
limits of which veiled themselves in bister and dull ocher vapors.