The Legionaries assumed their posts, ready for whatever attack might come.  They still moved like men in a trance.  Whether they could quite even realize the true character of Jannati Shahr seemed doubtful.  The Inca’s room of gold stunned Pizarro and his men.  How much more, then, must a whole city of gold numb any concrete thought?

Down, still down sank Nissr, now beginning to circle in broad, descending spirals, seeking where she might land.  The roar of the propellers lessened; and at the same time, the increasing hum of the helicopters made itself heard, counterbalancing the loss of lifting power of the planes, yet gradually letting the air-liner sink.  Came, too, a sighing hiss of the air-intakes as the vacuum-floats filled.

High noon was now at hand.  The sun burned, a copper ball, in the very forehead of a turquoise sky.  A light breeze, lazying over the plain, stirred the fronded tufts of the date-palms’ thick plantations.  Beyond a massy grove, stretching for nearly two miles out from the northernmost gate of the city, a grassy level quite like a parade-ground invited the liner to rest.

As she sank still lower, the Master’s glass again picked up the city wall and ran along it.  Here, there, white dots were visible; human figures, surely—­the figures of men in snowy burnouses, on the ramparts of heavy metal.

The Master smiled, and nodded.

“My men think they are surprised,” he mused.  “What will these Jannati Shahr men think, when I have opened my little box of tricks and shown them what’s inside?”

He pressed a button on the rail.  A bell trilled in the pilot-house; another in the engine-room.  The Norcross-Brails died to inactivity.

With a last long swoop, an abandonment of all the furious energies that for so long had been hurling her over burning sand and black crag, Nissr slanted to the grassy sward.  A sudden, furious hissing burst out beneath her, as the compressed-air valves were thrown and the air-cushions formed beneath her thousands of spiracles.  Then, with hardly a shudder, easily as a tired gull slips down into the quiet of a still lagoon, the vast air-liner took earth.

She slid two hundred yards on her air-cushions, over the close-cropped turf, slowed, came to rest there fronting the northern gate of Bara Jannati Shahr.  And the shimmer of those golden walls, one mile to east of her, painted her all a strangely luminous yellow.

Journey’s end, at last!

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE GREETING OF WARRIORS

Without delay, everything was put in complete readiness for whatever eventualities might develop.  If these strange people meant peace and wanted it, the Legion would give them peace.  If war, then by no means was the Legion to be unprepared.

The gangplank was put down from the starboard port in the lower gallery.  The helicopters were cut off.  Nothing was left running but one engine, at half-speed, to furnish current for the apparatus the Master had decided to use in dealing with the Jannati Shahr folk in case of need—­some of this having been evolved on the run from Mecca.