Every man and boy in all that tremendous multitude spread over many square miles of rocky, sun-blistered aridity, seized whatever came first to hand, for the impending war, as the black shadow of Nissr lagged down toward the city and the Haram.  Some snatched rifles, some pistols; others brandished spears and well-greased nebut clubs, six feet long and deadly in stout hands.  Even camel-sticks and tent-poles were furiously flung aloft.  Pitiful, impotent defiance, no more effective than the waving of ants’ antennae against the foot that kicks their nest to bits!

Screams, curses, execrations in a score of tongues mounted in one frenzied chorus.  Swarms of white-robed pilgrims came running in masses after the drifting shadow, knocking each other down, falling aver tent-pegs, stampeding pack-animals.  The confusion amazed the Legionaries as they watched all this excitement through their powerful glasses.

“It looks,” thought the Master, with a smile, “as if our little surprise-party might be a lively affair.  Well, I am ready for it.  ‘Allah knows best, and time will show!’”

All over the plain and through the city, myriads of little white puffs, drifting down-wind, showed the profusion of firing.  Now came the boom of a cannon from the Citadel—­an unshotted gun, used only for calling the Faithful to prayer.  Its booming echo across the plain and up against the naked, reddish-yellow hills, still further whipped the blood-frenzy of the mad mobs.

Even the innumerable pigeons, “Allah’s announcers,"[1] swirled in clouds from the arcades, mosques, and minarets surrounding the Haram, and from the Ka’aba itself, and began winging erratic courses all about the Forbidden City.  Men, birds, and animals alike, all shared the terror of this unheard-of outrage when—­according to ancient prophesy—­the Great Devils of Feringistan should desecrate the holy places.

[Footnote 1:  So called because of their habit of cooing and bowing.  Moslems fancy they are praying to Allah and making salaam to him.]

“Slow her!” commanded the Master into the engine-room phone, and began compensating with the helicopters, as Nissr lagged over the crowded city.  “Shut off—­let her drift!  Stand by to reverse!”

Mecca the Unattainable now lay directly beneath, its dun roofs, packed streets, ivory minarets all open to the heretics’ gaze from portholes, from the forward observation pit and from the lower gallery.  As Nissr eased herself down to about one thousand feet, the plan of the city became visible as on a map.  The radiating streets all started from the Haram.  White mobs were working themselves into frenzy, trampling the pilgrims’ shrouds that had been dipped in the waters of the well, Zem Zem, and laid out to dry.

Not even the Master’s aplomb could suppress a strange gleam in his eye, could keep his face from paling a little or his lips from tightening, as he now beheld the inmost shrine of two hundred and thirty million human beings.  Nor did any of the Legionaries, bold as they were, look upon it without a strange contraction of the heart.  As for the Apostate Sheik, that old jackal of the desert was crouched in his place of confinement, with terror clutching at his soul; with visions of being torn to pieces by furious Sunnite mobs oppressing him.