Down through this plain extended an irregular depression, a kind of narrow valley, with a few sharply isolated, steep hills on either hand.

The Master’s eyes gleamed.  His jaw set; his hand, on the controls, tightened till the knuckles whitened.

“The Valley of Mina!” he exclaimed.  “Mount Arafat—­and there, beyond, lies Mecca! Labbayk!  Labbayk!”

CHAPTER XXX

OVER MECCA

The descent of the giant air-liner and her crew of masterful adventurers on the Forbidden City had much the quality of a hawk’s raid on a vast pigeon-cote.  As Nissr, now with slowed engines loomed down the Valley of Sacrifice, a perfectly indescribable hurricane of panic, rage, and hate surged through all the massed thousands who had come from the farthest ends of Islam to do homage to the holy places of the Prophet.

The outraged Moslems, in one fierce burst of passion against the invading Feringi, began to swarm like ants when the stone covering their ant-hill is kicked over.  From end to end of the valley, a howling tumult arose.

On the Darb el Ma’ala, or Medina Road, a caravan bearing the annual mahmal gift of money, jewels, fine fabrics, and embroidered coverings for the Ka’aba temple, cut loose with rifles and old blunderbusses.  Dogs began to bark, donkeys to bray, camels to spit and snarl.  The whole procession fell into an anarchy of hate and fear.

The vast camp of conical white tents in the Valley of Mina spewed out uncounted thousands of Hujjaj (pilgrims), each instantly transformed into a blood-lusting fiend.  From the Hill of Arafat; from Jannat el Ma’ale Cemetery; from the dun, bronzed, sun-baked city of a hundred thousand fanatic souls; from the Haram sanctuary itself where mobs of pilgrims were crowded round the Ka’aba and the holy Black Stone; from latticed balcony and courtyard, flat roof, mosque, and minaret, screams of rage shrilled up into the baked air, quivering under the intense sapphire of the desert sky.

Every crowded street of the bowl-shaped city, all converging toward the Sacred Enclosure of the Haram, every caravanserai and square, became a mass of howling ghuzzat, or fighters for the faith.  Mecca and its environs, outraged as never before in the thousands of years of its history, instantly armed itself and made ready for a Jihad, or holy war of extermination.

Where the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents, had tamely enough submitted to the invaders, these Ahl Hayt, or People of the Walls, leaped to arms, eager for death if that could be had in the battle against the infidel dog—­for death, so, meant instant bearing up to Paradise, to cool fountains and sweet fruits, and to the caresses of the seventy entrancing houris that each good Moslem has had promised him by “The Strong Book,” Al Koran.