“Watch Fouad,” Price told him, in a low voice. “If he runs out on us, with the camels, we’re ditched. I’m going up in the tank, where I can watch the results of our fire and signal corrections.”
As the little mountain guns delivered their first bracketing shots, Price delivered final instructions, sprang upon the iron deck of the tank and climbed down through the manhole to the gunner’s seat. He spoke swiftly to Sam Sorrows, the lanky Kansan, who had been driving the machine, and it lurched into roaring motion.
Up the defile it lumbered, past the clustered, frightened Arabs, still mounted, under Jacob Garth’s guard, past the thudding little mountain guns, past the Hotchkiss guns and snipers that protected them.
Below the fallen megalith, beside which Mustafa stood white in statuesque rigidity, Price left the tank, crept forward again to scan the upper gorge. No enemy was in view. He watched the yellow bursts of dust and smoke about the base of the sandstone column as the shells exploded, called corrections out to Sam Sorrows, at the tank, who wigwagged them back to the gun crews.
A score of shells whined over: still the enemy did not appear.
Price slipped back to the tank.
“Signal them to stop firing,” he said. “Probably just wasting ammunition. And let’s go ahead, to where we can see, anyhow. Do you mind?”
“You’re the captain,” grinned the man.
“It will be risky. I don’t know what we’ll find. Our guns may have scared them off; they may be waiting. The thing that hit Mustafa—”
Sam Sorrows was clambering back into the tank.
“Risks are up my street, or I’d be back in Kansas,” he said. “Let’s go!”
Price climbed in after him smiling. Here was a man! Price, himself, never tried too hard to avoid danger; he had a fatalistic faith in the Durand luck. His philosophy was simple: play the game; leave the dealing of the cards to fate, to kismet, as the Arabs said. And he rejoiced to find another of the same reckless stamp.
Lurching, clanging, treads ringing upon bare rock, the tank roared upward between narrowing granite walls, on to the sandstone pillar. And chill fingers of fear snatched at Price’s heart: the shells had fallen short!
Bright metal glittered a full hundred yards beyond the group of ragged, smoking, shell-torn craters, a fantastic device of glistening brass, of shimmering crystal, surmounted with a huge, ellipsoid mirror, scintillant with a silvery fulgor.
A single man in blue bent behind the machine.
This uncanny mechanism, Price knew, was what had killed Mustafa. Would the tank’s light armor be sufficient protection against the terrific cold that had frozen the Arab rigid in a split second? He thought not.
Fear numbed him, the deadliest he had ever known. Icy feet raced up his spine. Chill sweat beaded his face. Grim, tense, he bent to the machine-gun.
The harsh stutter of it rose above the song of the racing engine. But, tossing from side to side in the lurching, rocking tank, he could not aim. Splinters of rock danced about the strange glittering machine, but the old, blue-robed man behind it seemed invulnerable.
Violet light gleamed suddenly on the ellipsoid mirror. And the air in the tank was deathly cold. Price’s breath crackled, as he expelled it in an involuntary gasp of terror.
With numbed hands, he kept the gun hammering. At last a stream of bullets swept the bright machine. A vivid flare of purple light enveloped it, an explosive burst of flame that left but a twisted wreck of bent metal and broken crystal. Flung back by the blast, the blue-robe fell, lay motionless.
The man was still alive when they left the tank and went to him, though burned by the explosion and riddled with bullets. He lay in his gory robe, and stared up at Price with a red grin of hate.
He had been tall. His features were of the familiar Arab type, hawk-nosed, thin-lipped, cruel. He might have been some ensanguined, dying Bedouin.
Price bent beside him. His black eyes filmed with hate, and he whispered, in the strangely inflected Arabic of an unfamiliar dialect:
“I die. But on you, intruder, is the curse of the golden folk. By Vekyra, and by the tiger and the snake, and by Malikar the master—you shall follow me!”
He coughed blood, and died with a leer of bloody horror on his face.
Only when his final struggles had ceased did Price find the sign of the snake—a brand on his forehead, that had been hidden by the hood of his burnoose-like blue robe. Printed in gold on the dark skin was the figure of a coiled snake. It seemed burned into the skin, indelible.
Price studied it with wonder strangely akin to horror. What did it mean? Was the dead man a branded member of some grim snake-cult?
“Let’s go on through the pass,” Sam Sorrows proposed suddenly.
“A good idea. Might be more of them.”
They clambered back in the tank, which was now silvery with its bright armor of frost where the ray of deadly cold had touched it. The defile narrowed before them, then broadened, and they lumbered across a high sandstone plateau.
They looked beyond the range.
Price had half expected to see a fertile, inhabited oasis, but the endless plain that stretched away beyond the Jebel Harb, shimmering in a smoky haze of heat, was grim and lifeless desolation.
Long drear dunes of red sand, like stilled seas of death. Dark gravel-barrens. Lurid streaks of yellow clay. Salt-pans, glaring leprous white. Low and age-worn hills of livid limestone and black basalt; grim, denuded skeletons of ancient ranges.
The accursed land, indeed! All its swart vastness showed no hint of life. Nothing moved upon it save the ceaseless, silent flicker of heat, like waves of ghost-seas. Or perhaps, when the winds blew, red and ancient sands, whispering secrets of the immemorial past.
Across those wastes of desolation led the road of skulls. With his binoculars, Price could trace the white gleams of the grisly landmarks for many miles, far out into the dead solitude of the forbidden land.
What would they find at the end of that road? That is, he thought, if they lived to reach it! The perils of alien science—the encounter in the pass had assured him of that. The peril that had been promised in the yellow man’s flourish of the great mace, in the mirage about the mountains. And the peril Price had read in the taunting, tawny-greenish eyes of the golden woman.
Jacob Garth met them, alone and on foot, as the tank lumbered back down the gorge. Icy apprehension had dawned in Price’s heart before they heard him speak. The pale eyes in his fat, bland face were coldly unreadable as ever; his deep, suave voice carried neither concern nor self-reproach, when he said:
“Durand, Fouad got away.”
Throat suddenly dry, Price managed to whisper, “The camels?”
“Gone. We’re stranded. As the Spaniard was.”
Price’s despair gave way to a flame of useless anger.
“I told you to watch! How—”
“We were watching the tank. When it turned white, and stopped, the Arabs wheeled and dashed off, before we could stop them. Drove off the baggage-camels too. We’re on foot.”
Scathing criticism was on Price’s tongue, but he checked it. It would do no good. Nothing, now, would do any good. Only a hopeless battle remained; battle, not with man but with the world’s cruelest desert.
6. THE WHITE DROMEDARY
THE BLACK GRANITE massif of the Jebel Harb was six days behind. Still the order of march was the same: old sheik Fouad el Akmet upon his hejin, leading the caravan along the road of skulls; the endless line of weary camels behind, carrying the Bedouin renegades, the whites of the “Secret Legion,” the paraphernalia of modern war; the tank roaring and clanging in the rear.
Two days they had rested at the well in the mountains; the white men, during the first bitter night, alone, unmounted, helpless. But dawn had brought the fugitive Arabs back from their panic-stricken flight, slipping up cautiously to see how the battle had gone. Their situation was nearly as desperate as that of the others, for both camels and men were suffering for water, obvi
ously unable to cover the distance back to the last alkaline well. Convinced, to his own amazement, that the whites had been victorious over the evil djinn of the accursed land, old Fouad had been glad to rejoin the expedition.
Twice since they left the range the trail of skulls had led them to brackish, bitter pools. But no living thing had they seen, in this domain of death within the mountain barrier.
The fleet gazelles, the hyenas and prowling jackals, the occasional ostriches of the desert’s fringes had long been left behind. In this lifeless land, even the tamarisks and acacia and sere camel-grass were lacking. The ubiquitous desert insects, ants, spiders, scorpions, were rare. The rakham, the black-winged vultures that had followed ominously from the mountains, had long since deserted.
It was late afternoon, and the long caravan was winding across one of the ever more frequent red-sand strips, into the selected camping-place for the night, when Price saw the white dromedary.
A magnificent, pure-white animal, resembling the Unamiya camels which the El Murra breed in the borders of the Rub’ Al Khali, it stood upon a bare red dune two miles off the track. Its rider, a slim, white-clad figure, appeared to be watching the caravan.
Price fumbled quickly for his binoculars, but he had hardly focussed them when the unknown rider vanished silently beyond the red dune.
At the moment Price, as the expedition’s leader, was busy with the old sheikh, settling one of the difficulties that had risen as a result of the Arabs’ thievish dispositions and the frayed nerves of the whites. Mawson, a little Cockney machine-gunner, had attacked the Arab Hamed with his fists, accusing him of stealing a gold watch and other trinkets from his pockets, while he slept. Hamed, unable to deny possession of the articles in question, swore that he had found them on the ground, after camp was broken that morning, producing perjured witnesses to substantiate his story.
A routine affair, but one that required diplomatic settling to maintain the harmonious discipline of the expedition. The tents were already up, on a sand-rimmed plane of shale, before the case was finally adjusted, Mawson’s valuables being returned, and Hamed dismissed with a warning.
Only then did Jacob Garth inform Price that he had sent three Arabs in pursuit of the lone rider they had seen.
“Don’t want our arrival broadcast,” the big man said. “Promised the men they could divide the spoil.”
The three Bedouins had already returned with the white dromedary, which was a priceless animal, and its rider. The captive was a woman.
“She’s something of a beauty,” Garth added. “Don’t blame de Castro for wanting her.”
“What have they done with her?” asked Price.
“The three divided their loot into three shares, and distributed them by lot. Kanja won the girl. He felt rather cheated, because Nur got the camel, which is much more valuable. Alie’s share was her outfit: saddle and her clothing and a long golden knife—a sort of straight jambiyah.
“Kanja wasn’t especially pleased with his share of the spoil. But de Castro saw the woman, while they were dividing up. It seems she struck his fancy; he gave Kanja his binoculars for her. Must have been hit hard—you know how he prized those glasses.”
“Where is she now?”
“Joao has her tied in his tent.”
“Look here!” cried Price. “We can’t tolerate anything like that!”
It was Price’s nature to sympathize with the under-dog, with any one mistreated or imposed upon or oppressed merely because some one else was stronger. Jacob Garth’s account of the bound girl roused a dull anger in him. And because Price Durand was essentially a man of action, that resentment was to find physical expression.
“We’re a long way,” Garth observed placidly, “from the white man’s law.” The pale eyes, the broad, suave, white face, held no feeling.
“But we’re still white men!” Price insisted, hotly. Then, realizing that the other was unimpressed, he sought for arguments. “And even with honor and decency aside, it’s an unwise way to treat the first citizen of this country that we meet.”
“She can’t be a very important citizen,” Garth opposed, “or she wouldn’t be out here alone, half dead for a drink.”
“Anyhow, if we treated her fairly, she might be able to give us valuable information.”
“She’s going to,” the huge man said calmly. “Just now she’s in a huff, and doesn’t want to talk. But Joao de Castro is an artist at coaxing reluctant tongues.”
“You don’t mean he’d torture a woman!”
“You don’t know him.”
Price said decisively, “I’m going to see her.”
“Better leave her alone,” Garth advised, in the same expressionless voice. “Joao will be irritated if you interrupt his amusement. We can’t afford to have any trouble.”
Without answering, Price strode away toward de Castro’s tent, a small, hot flame of anger in his heart.
A little group of men, whites and Arabs, were gathered in front of the tent. The captured white camel was tied down, near by. Ali was proudly displaying his share of the loot—abha of soft white wool, kamis and cherchis of fine-woven silk, and a thin, golden dagger, whose temper, he was declaring excitedly, was good as any steel. Nur, with gestures and elaborate pantomime, was telling the story of the chase, of the fierceness with which the girl had fought, baring his side to show a skin wound he had received from the yellow dagger.
Kanja stood aside, delightedly fondling the newly won binoculars, grinning with childish pleasure as he peered through them, first from one end of the tubes and then the other.
Price strode through the group to where the Eurasian stood at the lifted flap of the tent, his swarthy, pock-marked face evil with lust. Beside him was his henchman, Pasic, a Montenegrin, who had been mate of the Iñez, Joao’s schooner. Black, hairy, powerful as a bull, he deserved his usual appellation, “Black Ape.”
“I’d like,” Price said, “to see your prisoner, de Castro.”
“D’ bitch, she ess mine,” the little Macanese muttered, rather belligerently, in his awkward English.
A moment he stood in front of Price, but his shifty, furtive, oblique eyes fell before Price’s stern blue ones. He stepped aside.
The girl lay upon the rough shale beneath the tent. Most of the clothing had been stripped from her—being part of Ali’s loot—and her wrists and slender ankles were trussed with rough halter-ropes of camel’s hair. Price had known she must be attractive, to tempt the Eurasian to part with his prized binoculars. But her loveliness astonished him.
Young, she was; no more, he guessed, than nineteen. The skin of her fresh, smooth body was whiter than his own. Even the oval face was not deeply tanned; she must, he thought, have worn a veil.
Bound as the girl was, she could not rise. But as Price peered into the tent she twisted into a half-upright position and glared at him in regal rage. Framed in disordered brown hair, her face was delicately strong, red-lipped. Dark her eyes were, violet-blue, and quite devoid of fear.
Without stopping to analyze his emotions—which was a thing he seldom did—Price knew at once that he could not leave her in the hands of the Macanese. And he realized at the same time that Joao would make trouble, rather than lose her.
He started impulsively into the tent, to loosen her ropes. She flung her half-bare body at him, grazed his hand with strong, flashing teeth.
De Castro seized his arm, jerked him from the tent before he could resist. Dark, slanted eyes were snapping with jealous passion.
“She ess mine!” he hissed. “Damn you, keep ’way!”
“De Castro,” Price said, “I want you to turn her loose.”
The thin yellow hands of the Eurasian trembled.
“Turn ’er loose?” he screamed. “Turn ’er loose, when I geeve for ’er my ver’ fine binoc’lar? D’ hell!”
“That’s all right. I’ll pay you for the glasses. Or even give you mine, if you want.”
“I want ’er, not d’ dam’ binoc
’lar!”
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars—”
“D’ hell! What ess money, ’ere?”
“Listen, de Castro,” Price said, a new note of authority in his voice. He realized that mild measures had been a mistake. “I’m head of this expedition. I order you to untie that girl.”
“Dios!” the Eurasian screamed, shaking in a fit of passion.
“Then I’ll do it, for you.”
Price started into the tent again. De Castro’s yellow hand darted into his shirt front. A thin knife flashed up and down.
But Price, knowing well the familiarity of Joao’s kind with knives, was alert. He evaded the slashing blade, drove a heavy fist into the pock-marked face. Savage joy filled him at the dull crunch of teeth beneath the blow.
With a bull-like bellow, the Montenegrin charged to the aid of his crony. Leaping upon the unprepared Price, he wound his long, ape-like arms around him, pinioning his arms in a savage embrace, driving his knees up in vicious blows at the loins.
Twisting furiously, but helpless in the arms of the “Black Ape,” Price butted uselessly at his flat, hairy face. The Arabs gathered in a ring, applauding enthusiastically.
Pasic threw back his shoulders, dragging Price clear of the ground, helpless and gasping in the ape-like embrace that was forcing the breath from his body. The Montenegrin hitched him up, dexterously changing his hold, and Price knew that the man was about to throw him over his head, probably to fall with a broken back.
Desperately he struggled for a leg-hold, failed, kicked vainly at Pasic’s legs. Then an abrupt, savage lunge tore his left arm free from that crushing grasp. Instantly he drove his elbow, with a short, jabbing blow, into the Montenegrin’s solar plexus.
The man gasped; the constricting embrace relaxed for an instant. Price tore himself free of the terrible arms, darted away to hitting distance.
The “Black Ape,” better provided with strength and savagery than with science, charged again, long arms flinging. A quick one-two to the brutish body stopped him, a dazed expression on his flat face. Another blow, to the jaw, deliberately timed and with all Price’s hundred and eighty-two pounds behind it, and the man’s knees weakened. He sprawled heavily beside the groaning Eurasian.
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