"Nothing," the Master answered. "Nothing definite."
He could, in fact, be sure of nothing. But it seemed to him that, very
far below, he could make out something like a swift, liquid blackness,
streaked with dim-speeding lines of white that dissolved with
phantasmagoric rapidity; a racing flood that roared and set the solid
rock a-quiver in its mad tumult.

"Faith, an underground river of hot water!" ejaculated the Irishman
with an oath. "Some river!"

"Warm water, at any rate," the Master judged, getting up again. A
strange smile was in his eyes, by the smoky lamplight. "Well, men,
this is our way out. The Arabs are not going to have any slaughter
of victims, here. And what is more, they'll capture no dead bodies
of white men, in _this_ trap! There'll be at least ten skulls missing
from that interesting golden Pyramid of Ayeshah!"

"For God's sake!" the major stammered. "What--what are you going
to--do, now? Jump down that shaft?"

"Exactly. Your perspicacity does you credit, Major."

"Sure, you'll never catch _me_ jumping!"

"Gentlemen," the Master said, in a low, quiet voice, "I regret to
state that we have one coward among us."




CHAPTER XLVIII


THE RIVER OF NIGHT

The major's clenched fist was caught as it drove, by a scientific
guard from the Master's right. The Master dropped his lamp, and with a
straight left-hander sprawled Bohannan on the slimy pave. Impersonally
he stood over the crazed Celt.

"Will you jump, voluntarily," demanded he, "or shall we be under the
painful necessity of having to throw you down that pit?"

Enough rationality remained in the major to spur his pride. He crawled
to his feet, chastened.

"You win, sir," he answered. "Who goes first?"

A dull reverberation shuddered the rock, the air.

"_Vive Nissr_!" exulted Leclair. "Ah, now our men, they attack the
city!"

"I'm sorry to disillusion you," the Master answered, "but my explosive
produces an entirely different type of concussion. What we have just
heard is the blowing-in of the treasure-crypt door. There's no time to
lose, now. Who jumps, first?"

"Wait a minute!" cried "Captain Alden." Her eyes were gleaming through
the mask, with keen excitement. "Why neglect any chance of possibly
surviving?"

"What do you mean?" the Master demanded.

"Those wine-sacks!"

"Well?"

"Emptied, inflated, and tied up again, they'll float us! It's the
oldest kind of device used in the Orient!"

"By Allah, inspiration! Quick, men, the wine-skins!"

Himself, he set the example. Knife in hand, while Emilio held the lamp
for him, he crumbled the seals on one of the goat-skins, then cut
the leather thong that secured the neck, and quickly unwound it. He
dragged the sack to the black pit and tipped it up.

With a gulp and a gurgle, the precious old wine, clear ruby under the
dim light, gushed away down the steaming shaft that plunged to the
River of Night.

"Oh, faith now, but that's a damned shame, sir!" Bohannan protested,
rubbing an ugly welt on his brow. His voice was thick, dull,
unnatural. Madness glimmered in his blinking eyes. "With the blessed
tongue of me parched to a cinder! And wine like that! Here, sir--take
a handful of diamonds, or whatever, and give me just one little
drink!"

'"'Bristol! Restrain that man!" the Master ordered. "If you can't
handle him, get help!"

As a couple of Legionaries laid hands on the major, another voice
spoke up. It was that of Ferrara, the Italian ace:

"The major is right, sir, in spite of all! Good wine in our throats
would make death less bitter. 'We who are about to die, salute
thee'--and ask wine!"

The Master peered sharply from beneath black brows. Discipline seemed
crumbling. Now at what might be, perhaps, the last minute of his
command, was the Master's word to be made light of? Were his orders to
be gainsaid?

"No wine!" he flung at all of them, his voice tense as wire. "Who says
we are about to die? Why, there may be a fighting chance, even yet!
This underground river may come to light, somewhere. And if it does,
it may bear us back to day, again.

"But the confusion of wine may just turn the scale against our getting
through. No wine! We started on that basis. That's the basis we're going
through on. No wine, I say--no wine!"

Murmurs answered him, but no man dared rebel. Discipline still gripped
the Legionaries. The Master drove them to labor. "Come, quick now!
Prepare a sack, apiece! I'll show you how!"

He set lips to the emptied skin, and with many lungfuls of strong
breath inflated it. The leather thong tightly wrapped the neck. He
doubled that neck over, and took more turns with the thong, then tied
it in a tight square knot.

"Get to work, men!" he ordered. "To work!"

They obeyed. Even the major, brain-shaken as he was, fell in with
the orders. The floor, all round the black pit, ran red with precious
wine, a single cupful of which would have delighted the heart of the
world's most Lucullian gourmet.

Up from that floor and from the jetty, steaming walls of the pit
drifted ambrosial perfume that evoked visions of ancient vineyards
where, under the Eastern sun, bloomy clusters of grape--mayhap even
the very grape sung by the Tent-maker--hung ripening.

Still, none stooped to the mouths of the wine-skins, to taste. None
drank from cupped palm. Dry-mouthed, hot, panting, the Legionaries
still obeyed. And thus the rare wine of Araby ran guttering to the
unseen blackness of the mystery river far below.

The Master, hands on hips, watched this labor; and as he watched he
laughed.

"Whatever comes to us, men," judged he, "we are here and now doing
great evil to the men of El Barr. My only regret is that we haven't
time to return up through the labyrinth, to the jewel-crypt, fill the
skins with jewels and dump them all down this shaft like the wine.
These Moslem swine would then remember us, many a long day. Ah, well,
some day we may come back--who knows?"

He fell silent, while the last of the skins were being filled and
lashed. The last, that is to say, needed by the Legionaries. Ten in
all, were now blown up and securely tied. But a good many more still
remained full of the rare wine.

With his simitar, the Master slashed these quickly, one by one.

"They took our blood," he cried. "We have taken theirs--and their
wine, too. And have destroyed Myzab and the Black Stone, no doubt.
Well, it's a bargain!"

"C'est égal!" exclaimed Leclair. "More than that, eh, my Captain?"

The Master returned to the shaft, his bare feet red through the run
and welter of the wine on the stone floor.

"Now men," said he, crisply, as he flung down the pit his simitar
which could have no further use, "this may be the final chapter. Our
Legion was organized for adventure. We've had it. No one can complain.
If it's good-bye, now--so be it.

"There may be a chance, however, of winning through. Hold fast to
your goat-skins; and if the hidden river isn't too hot, and if there's
head-room, some of us may get through to daylight. Let us try to
reassemble where we find the first practicable stopping-place. If the
Jannati Shahr men are waiting for us, there, don't be taken alive.
Remember!

"Now, give me your hand, each one, and--down the shaft with you!"

Simonds went first, boldly, without a quiver of fear. Silently and
with set jaw, he shook hands with the Master, clutched a distended
wine-bag in both arms, and quickly leaped.

His body vanished, instantly, from sight. Steam and darkness swallowed
it. Far below, a dull splash told of his disappearance.

Lebon followed, after having given his torture-twisted hand to his
beloved lieutenant, as well as to the Master.

"Notre Père qui êtes aux cieux!" he stammered, as the pit received
him.

Then went Wallace, Ferrara, and Emilio. Of these three, only the last
showed anything resembling the white feather. Emilio's face was waxen,
with staring eyes reflecting unspeakable horror, as he took the leap
into the River of Night. But he went mutely, with no outcry.

Bristol, sheathed in imperturbable British aplomb, remarked:

"Well, so long, boys! This is jolly beastly, eh? But we'll meet on
that beautiful shore!"

Then he, too, jumped into the black.

Leclair, inappropriately enough, leaped with a shout of: "Vive la
France!"

Now only Bohannan, "Captain Alden," and the Master were left.

"You're next, Major!" the Master ordered, pointing at
the inexorable black mouth of the pit, whence rose the thin,
wraith-spirals of vapor.

"I'm ready!" exclaimed the major. "Sure, what's better than a hot bath
after the heavy exercise we've been having?" His voice rose buoyantly
over the drumming roar of the mysterious, underground torrent. "Ready,
sir! But if you'll only give me one wee sup of good liquor, sir, I'll
die like an Irishman and a gentleman--of fortune!"

"No, liquor, Major," the Master answered, shaking his head. "Can't you
see for yourself all the wine-sacks are cut?"

"Cut, is it? Well, well, so they are!" The major blinked redly.
Obviously his confused mind had not grasped the situation. "Well,
sure, that's a pity, now." And he fell to gnawing that tawny mustache
of his.

"Come Major, you're next!" the Master bade him. "Take your wine-skin
and jump!"

Clarity of mind for a moment returned to Bohannan. Gallantly he shook
hands with the Master, saluted "Captain Alden," and picked up his
wine-sack.

"It's a fine whirl we've had," he affirmed, with one of his old-time
smiles, his teeth gleaming by the light of the silver lamp in the
Master's hand. "No man could ask a better."

I'd rather have seen what I've seen, and done what I've done, and now
jump to Hell and gone, than be safe and sound this minute on Broadway.

"Please overlook any little irregularities of conduct, sir My brain,
you know, and--well, good-bye!"

Calmly he picked up his sack and without more ado jumped into the
void.

"Now," said the Master, when "Captain Alden" and he remained alone.
"Now--you and I!"

"Yes," the woman answered. "You and I, at last!"

The Master set down his lamp on the floor all wet with condensed vapor
and wine. He loosened the buckles of her mask, took the mask off and
tossed it into the pit.

"Finis, for _that_!" said he, and smiled strangely. "You aren't going
to be handicapped by any mask, in whatever struggle lies ahead of us.
If you get through to the world, and to life again, you get through as
a woman.

"If not, you die as one. But the disguise is done with, and gone. You
understand me!"

"Yes. I understand," she answered, and stood peering up at him. Not
even the white welts and ridges cut in her flesh by the long wearing
of the mask could make her face anything but very beautiful. Her
wonderful eyes mirrored far more, as they looked into this strange
man's, than would be easy to write down in words.

"I understand," she repeated. "If this is death, I couldn't have
dreamed or hoped for a better one. In that, at least, we can be
eternally together--you and I!"

Silence fell, save for the shuddering roar of the black river, that
rose with vapors from the dark pit. Man and woman, they searched out
each other's souls with their gaze.

Then all at once the Master took her hand, and brought it to his heart
and held it there. The lamp-shine, obliquely striking upward from the
floor, cast deep shadows over their faces; and these shadows seemed
symbolic of the shadows of death closing about them at this hour of
self-revelation.

"Listen," said the Master, in a wholly other voice from any that
had ever come from his lips. "I am going to tell you something. At a
moment like this, a man speaks only the exact truth. This is the exact
truth.

"In all the years of my life and in all my wanderings up and down this
world, I have never seen a woman--till now--whom I felt that I could
love. I have lived like an anchorite, celled in absolute isolation
from womankind. Incredible as it may seem to you, I have never even
kissed a woman, with a kiss of love. But--I am going to kiss you,
now."

He took her face in both his hands, drew it up for a moment, gazed
at it with a fixity of passion that seemed to burn. The woman's eyes
drooped shut. Her lips yearned to his. Then his stern arms in-drew her
to his breast, and for a moment she remained there, silently.

All at once he put her from him.

"Now, go!" he commanded. "I shall follow, close. And wait for me--if
there is any waiting!"

He picked up one of the two remaining wine-sacks, and put it into her
hands.

"Cling to this, through everything!" he commanded. "Cling, as you love
life. Cling, as you share my hope for what may be, if life is granted
us! And--the mercy-bullet, if it comes to that!

"Now--good-bye!"

She smiled silently and was gone.

The Master, now all alone, stood waiting yet a moment. His face was
bloodless. His lower lip was mangled, where his teeth had nearly met,
through it.

Already, a confused murmur of sound was developing, from the black
opening of the passage that had led the Legionaries down to this crypt
of the wine-sacks and the pit.

He smiled, oddly.

"Many a corpse has been flung down this _oubliette_," said he. "I hate
to go, without emptying my pistol into a few more of the Moslem swine,
and dropping them down here to join my people. But--I must!"

He bent, gathered together the silver lamps left by his men, and threw
them all into the abyss. Blackness, absolute, blotted the reeking
chamber from his sight.

The faintest possible aura of light began to loom from the mouth
of the passage. More distinctly, now, the murmur of Arab voices was
becoming audible.

The Master leaped.

Far below, at the bottom of the pit, as the Arabs burst into the
wine-vault, sounded a final impact of some heavy body striking swift
water that swept it instantly away.

Then silence filled the black, rock-hewn chamber in the labyrinthine
depths of Jannati Shahr.




CHAPTER XLIX


THE DESERT

The Desert.

Four men, one woman.

Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that
great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"--that is to say, the
land "where there is none but He."

Over terrible spaces, over immense listening silences of hard,
unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons
of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness.
Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far,
iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare,
scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.

Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lost
yet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the five
fugitives--pitiable handful of the Legion--were plodding south-west,
toward the sunset.

The feet of all were cut and bleeding, in spite of rags torn from
their tattered uniforms and bound on with strips of cloth; for
everywhere through the sand projected ridges of vertical, sharp
stone--the black basalt named by the Arabs _Hajar Jehannum_, or "Rock
of Hell." As for their uniforms, though now dry as bone, the way in
which they were shrunken and wrinkled told that not long ago they had
been drenched in water of strongly mordant qualities.

Each figure bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled
with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was,
corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees
were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one
of the most hideous deaths known to man--the death of thirst in the
wilderness.

The woman's face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retained
its beauty. Her heavy masses of hair, bound up with cloth strips,
protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others,
they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniously
tied into some semblance of _cherchias_. Above all, the Legionaries
knew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of the
desert sun.

In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, now
oblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No look
of surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was in
reality a woman. The Legionaries' anguish, the numbing, brutalizing
effects of their recent experience had been too great for any minor
emotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, as
one of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, been
true.

For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itself
south-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclair
was first to utter words.

"Let us rest a little while, _mon capitaine_," said he in a hoarse,
choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Many
hundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gained
by hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events,
until that cursed sun has set!"

In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of the
little, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were now
toiling. All did the same, and all sat down--or rather, fell--upon the
hot earth.

Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as they
had soared above it, at cool altitudes, in the giant air-liner; very
different from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim black
line of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward.

The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently than
any words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours' trek,
was strangling the life out of them.

For a while they lay there motionless, unthinking, brutalized by
fatigue and pain. With their present condition as an earnest of what
was yet to come, what hope had any that even one of them would live to
behold the sparkle of the distant Red Sea? Even though unmolested by
pursuit from Jannati Shahr or by attack from any wandering tribes of
the Black Tent People, what hope could there be?

Gradually some coherence of thought returned to the Master. He sat up,
painfully, and blinked with reddened eyes at the woman. She was lying
beside her water-bag, seemingly asleep. The Master's face drew into
lines of anguish as he looked at her.

With bruised fingers he loosened the thong of his own water-bag, and
tore still another strip from his remnant of shirt. He poured a little
of the precious water on to this rag, lashed the water-sack tight
again, and with the warm, wet rag bathed the woman's face, brow, and
throat.

Her closed lids did not open. No one paid any attention. No one
even stirred. The cloth grew dry, almost at once, as the thirsty air
absorbed its moisture. The Master pocketed it. Elbows on knees, head
between hands, he sat there pondering.

In thought he was living over again the incredible events of the
past hours, as they had been presented to his own experience. He was
remembering the frightful, dizzying plunge down the black pit into the
steaming waters of the River of Night--waters which, had they been but
a few degrees hotter, would incontinently have ended everything on the
instant.

He was recalling, as in a nightmare, his frenzied battle for life,
clinging to the inflated goat-skin--the whirl and thunder of
unseen cataracts in the blind dark--the confusion of deafening,
incomprehensible violences.

He was bringing back to mind the long, swift, smooth rushing of mighty
waters through midnight caverns where echoes had told of a rock-roof
close above; then, after an indeterminate time of horror that might
have been minutes or hours, a weltering maelstrom of leaping waters--a
graying of light on swift-fleeing walls; a sudden up-boiling gush of
the strangling flood that whelmed him--and all at once a glare of
sun, a river broadening out through palm-groves far beyond the Iron
Mountains.

All these things, blurred, unreal, heartshaking as evil visions of
fever, the Master was remembering. Then came other happenings: a
long drift with resistless currents, the strange phenomenon of the
lessening stream that dwindled as thirsty sands absorbed it, and the
ceasing of the palms.

Last of all, the river had diminished to a shallow, tortuous delta,
where the Master's numbed feet had touched bottom. There he had
dragged himself ashore, with his goatskin, far more dead than living.
And there, for a time he knew not, consciousness had wholly ceased.

A dull, toneless voice sounded in the Master's ears. Bohannan was
speaking.

"Faith, but it's strange how even the five of us found each other, out
there in the sand," said the major. "What happened to the rest of us,
God knows--maybe!" He choked, coughed, added: "Or to the boys with
Nissr. God rest their souls! I wish I had a sackful of that wine!"
After a long pause: "Don't you, now? What?"

The Master gave no heed. He was trying to ease the position in which
the woman was lying. His jacket was off, now, and he was folding it to
put under her head.

At his touch, she opened vague eyes. She smiled with dry lips, and put
his hand away.

"No, no!" she protested. "No special favors for me! I'm not a woman,
remember. I'm 'Captain Alden,' still--only a Legionary!"

"But--"

"If you favor me in any way, to the detriment of any of the others
or your own, I won't go on! I'm just one of you. Just one of the
survivors, on even terms with the rest. It's give-and-take. I mean
that! You've got to understand me!"

The Master nodded. He knew that tone. Silently he put on his jacket,
again.

The lieutenant's orderly, Lebon, groaned and muttered a prayer to the
Virgin. Leclair sat up, heavily, and blinked with sand-inflamed eyes.

"Time to drink again, _n'est-ce pas_, my Captain?" asked he. "Drink to
the dead!"

"I hope they are dead, rather than prisoners!" exclaimed the Master.
"Yes, we'll drink, and get forward. We've got to make long strides,
tonight. Those Jannati Shahr devils may be after us, tomorrow. Surely
will, if they investigate that delta and find only a few bodies.
They'll conclude some of us have got through. And if they pick up our
trail, with those white dromedaries of theirs--"

"The sacred pigs!" ejaculated Leclair. "Ah, _messieurs_, now you begin
to know the Arabs as I have long known them." With eyes of hate and
pain he peered back at the darkening line of the Iron Mountains.

Bohannan, already loosening the neck of his goat-skin, laughed
hoarsely.

"No wine!" he croaked, "and the water's rationed; even the stinking
water. But the food isn't--good reason, too; there isn't any. Pockets
full of gems!" He slapped one hard pocket. "I'd swap the lot for a
proper pair of shoes and a skin o' that wine! Faith--that wine, now--"

The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the other
raised for silence.

"Hark!" she whispered. "Sh!"

"What now?" demanded the Master.

"Bells! Camel-bells!"

"_Nom d'un, nom!_" And the lieutenant drew his gun.

The five fugitives stiffened for another battle. They looked well to
their weapons. The Master's weariness and pain were forgotten as he
crawled on hands and knees up the side of the little wady. The sound
of distant camel-bells, a thin, far quiver of sound, had now reached
his ears and those of the other men, less sensitive than the woman's.

Over the edge of the wady he peered, across a _wa'ar_, or stony ground
covered with mummified scrub. Beyond, a blanched salt-plain gleamed
hoar-white in the on-coming dusk; and farther off, the dunes began
again.

Strangely enough, the Master laughed. He turned and beckoned,
silently. The others joined him.

"From the west!" he whispered. "This is no pursuit! It is a caravan
going to Jannati Shahr!"

Bohannan chuckled, and patted his revolver.

"Faith, but Allah is being good to us!" he muttered. "Now, when it
comes to a fight--"

"Ten dromedaries--no, nine--" Leclair judged.

"And six camel-drivers," put in the woman, gun in hand. "A small
caravan!"

"Hold your fire, all!" commanded the Master. "They're headed right
across this wady. Wait till I give the word; then rush them! And--no
prisoners!"




CHAPTER L


"WHERE THERE IS NONE BUT ALLAH"

An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving the
gaunt, mange-stained camels. In the sand near the wady lay buried
Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them so
as to leave as little trace as possible.

Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have most
abominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab. Not all his long
experience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a dead
camel-driver. The dead man had suddenly revived from his feigned death
and driven a _jambiyeh_ into the base of the lieutenant's throat. That
the lieutenant's orderly had instantly shattered the cameleer's skull
with a point-blank shot had not saved Leclair.

The four survivors, in addition to burying all the bodies, had buried
the copper bars the caravan had been freighting to Jannati Shahr.
They had saved the scant food and water of the drivers, also their
clothing, slippers, daggers, long rifles, and ammunition.

Now, dressed like Arabs--the best of all disguises in case of being
sighted by pursuers or by wandering Black Tent tribes, from far
off--they were trekking westward again, riding four of the camels and
leading the others.

For a week of Hell the failing beasts, already half dead of thirst
when captured, bore them steadily south-west, toward the coast. Twice
there rose spirals of smoke, in the desert distances; but whether
these were from El Barr pursuers or were merely Bedouin encampments
they could not tell.

Merciless goading kept the camels going till they dropped dead, one by
one.

By the end of the fourth day only three remained. Lebon methodically
cut up every one that perished, for water, but found none in any
stomach.

The fugitives sighted no oasis. They found no wady other than
stone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by day
they grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain that
possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their
bodies racked by the swaying jolt of camel-riding.