That it was in truth a city could no longer be doubted.  Long walls came to view, pierced by gates with fantastic arches.  Domes rose to heaven.  Delicate minarets, carved into a fretwork of amazing fineness, pointed their fingers at the yellow shimmering sky.  The contrast of that brilliance, with the soft green gardens and feathery palm-groves before, the grim black cliffs behind, filled the Legionaries with a kind of silent awe.

But most wonderful of all was the metallic shimmer of those walls, domes, minarets, under the high sun of this lost Arabian paradise.  So amazing was the prospect that, as Nissr hurled herself in over the last ranges of the mountains and shot out across the open plain itself, only one man found words.

This man was Leclair.  Close beside the Master, he said in Arabic: 

“I too have heard, my Captain.  I too know the story of the Bara Jannati Shahr—­but I have always thought it fable.  Now, now—.”

“Faith!” interrupted the major, with sudden excitement.  He smote the rail a blow with an agitated fist.  “If that doesn’t look like gold, I’m a—.”

“Gold?” burst out the Master, unable longer to control himself.  “Of course it’s gold!  And we—­are the first white men in all the world to look on it—­the Golden City of Jannati Shahr!”

Stupefaction overcame the Flying Legion.  The sight of this perfectly incredible city, which even yet—­despite its obvious character—­they could not believe as reality, for a little while deprived all the observers of coherent thought.

Like men in a daze, they stood watching the far-distant mass of walls, buildings, towers, battlements all agleam with the unmistakable sheen of pure metal.  The human mind, confronted by such a phenomenon, fails to react, and for a while lies inert, stunned, prostrate.

“Gold?” stammered the major, and fell to gnawing his mustache, as he stared at the incredible sight.  “By God—­gold?  Sure, it can’t be that!”

“It not only can be, but is!” the Master answered.  “The old legend is coming true, that’s all.  Have you no eyes in your head, Major?  If that shine isn’t the shine of gold, what is it?”

“Yes, but the thing’s impossible, sir!” cried Bohannan.  “Why, man alive!  If that’s gold, the whole of Arabia would be here after it!  There’d be caravans, miners, swarms of—­”

“It’s obvious you know nothing of Moslem severity or superstition,” the Master interrupted.  “There is no Mohammedan beggar, even starving, who would touch a grain of that metal.  Not even if it were given him.  There’s not one would carry an ounce away from the Iron Mountains.  This whole region is under the ban of a most terrific tabu, that loads unthinkable curses on any human being who removes a single atom of any metal from it!”

“Ah, that’s it, eh?”

“Yes, that’s very much it!  And what is more, Major, no word of this ever gets out to the white races—­or hardly any.  Nothing more than vague rumors that barely amount to fairy stories.  Even though I forced Rrisa to tell me the location of this city, he wouldn’t mention its being gold, and I knew too much to ask him or try to make him.  Why, he’d have been torn to bits before he’d have betrayed that Inner Secret.  So now you understand!”