He began feeling in the bosom of the old man, opening the cloaklike burnous and exploring the neck and chest with eager fingers.

“If we could only lay hands on the fabled loot of the Haram!” he whispered, his voice tense with excitement.

Rrisa, wide-eyed, with curling lips of scorn, peered down at the Sheik.  The orderly, bare-headed, was shielding eyes and face from the sand-blast, with hands that trembled.  His teeth were bared with hate as he peered at the prostrate heretic.

A tall, powerful figure of a man the Sheik was, lying there on his right side with his robe crumpled under him—­the robe now flapping, whipping its loose ends in the high and rising wind.  His tarboosh had been blown away, disclosing white hair.

That hair, too, writhed and flailed in the gusts that drove it full of sand, that drifted his whole body with the fine and stinging particles.  His beard, full and white, did not entirely conceal the three parallel scars on each cheek, the mashali, which marked him as originally a dweller at Mecca.

One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the growing sand-drift.  The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle, its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with gold.

“Ah!” exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his questing fingers had discovered about the old man’s neck.  With hands that trembled a little, he drew out this cord.  Then he uttered an exclamation of intense disappointment.

There was nothing at the end of the crimson loop, save a lamail, or pocket Koran.  Leclair muttered a curse, and moved away, peering toward the fire, spying out the wady through the now almost choking sand-drive—­the wady where they certainly must soon take refuge or be overwhelmed by the buffeting lash of sand whirled on the breath of the shouting tempest.

Even in the Master’s anger, he did not throw the Koran away.  Too astute, he, for any such act in presence of Rrisa.  Instead, he bound the Arab to fresh devotion by touching lips and forehead, and by handing him the little volume.  The Master’s arm had to push its way against the wind as against a solid thing; and the billion rushing spicules of sand that swooped in upon him from the desert emptiness, stung his flesh like tiny scourges.

“This Koran, Rrisa, is now thine!” he cried in a loud voice, to make the Arab hear him.  “And a great gift to thee, a Sunnite, is the Koran, of this desecrating son of the rejected!”

Bowed before the flail of the sand—­while Rrisa uttered broken words of thanks—­the Master called to Leclair: 

“By Corsi (Allah’s throne), now things assume a different aspect!  This old dog of dogs is a prize, indeed!  And—­what now—­”

Leclair did not answer.  The Frenchman was not even near him.  The Master saw him in the wady, dimly visible through the ghostly white sand-shrouds spinning in the blue-whipped fire-glare.  There on hands and knees the lieutenant was huddled.  With eager hands he was tearing the hood of a za’abut—­a rough, woolen slave cloak, patched and ragged—­from the face of a prostrate figure more than half snowed under a sand-drift.