“What, Rrisa?”

Down into the wady stumbled the Arab, gray-powdered with clinging sand.

“Oh,” he choked, “it has been taken from these yezid, these abusers of the salt!  Now we rescue it from these cut-off ones!  From the swine and brothers of the swine it has been taken by Allah, and put back into the hands of Rrisa, Allah’s slave!  See, M’alme, see!”

The shaking hands extended the leather sack.  At it the Master stared, his face going dead white.

“Thou—­dost not mean—?” he stammered.

“Truly, I do!”

“Not Kaukab el Durri?”

“Aye—­it was lying near that heretic dog!”

“The Great Pearl Star, the sacred loot from the Haram?”

“Kaukab el Durri, M’alme.  The Great Pearl Star itself!”

CHAPTER XXVI

THE SAND-DEVILS

With hands that quivered in unison with his nerves, now no longer impassive, the strange chief of this still stranger expedition took from Rrisa the leather sack.  Over the top of the wady a million sand-devils were screeching.  The slither of the dry snow—­the white, fine snow of sand—­filled all space with a whispering rustle that could be heard through the shouting of the simoom.

Sand was beating on them, everywhere, in the darkness lighted only by the tortured beach-fire.  The stinging particles assailed eyes, ears, mouth; it whitened clothing, sifted into hair, choked breath.  But still the Legionaries could not take shelter under their coats.  In this moment of wondrous finding, they must see the gem of gems that Kismet had thus flung into their grasp.

The Master loosed a knot in the cord, drew the sack open and shook into his left palm a thing of marvellous beauty and wonder.

By the dim, fitful gleam of the fire, probably the strangest and most costly necklace in the world became indistinctly visible.  At sight of it, everything else was forgotten—­the wrecked air-liner, the waiting Legion, the unconscious Arabs now being buried in the resistless charge of the sand-armies.  Even poor Lebon, tortured slave of the Beni Harb, a lay neglected.  For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Star could these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts.

While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tense with joy, held up their treasure-trove.

“The Great Pearl Star!” he cried, in a strange voice.

“Kaukab el Durri!  See, one pearl is missing—­that is the one said to have been sold in Cairo, twelve years ago, for fifty-five thousand pounds!  But these are finer!  And its value as a holy relic of Islam—­who can calculate that?  God, what this means to us!”

Words will not compass the description of this wondrous thing.  As the Master held it up in the sand-lashed dimness, half-gloom and half-light, that formed a kind of aura round the fire—­an aura sheeted through and all about by the aerial avalanches of the sand—­the Legionaries got some vague idea of the necklace.