This band of hardy adventurers, stout-hearted and armed with service-revolvers, remained rather closely grouped, with the Arabs flanking and following them.  At their head rode old Bara Miyan with the Master, who well bestrode his saddle with burnished metal peaks and stitching of silver thread.  After them came the three imams, Major Bohannan, Leclair, and “Captain Alden.”

The “captain’s” mask seemed somewhat to impress the Arabs, who whispered among themselves concerning it.  But not one suspected the sex of this Frank.  The “captain” rode as gallantly as any, and with a firm hand reined her slim, white horse.

As the on-thundering swarm of horsemen approached the pointed arch, some sixty feet wide by ninety high, its intaglios and complex arabesques flashing with millions of sunlit sparkles, a clear, sustained chant drifted out over city and plain—­the cry of some unseen muezzin, announcing news of great import to Jannati Shahr.  Came an echoing call of trumpets, from far, hidden places in the city; and kettle-drums boomed with dull reverberation.

“Labbayk, Allahuma!” shouted Bara Miyan, announcing with praise to Allah his entrance into the City of Gold.  A long, great shouting answered him from the massed thousands of white figures on the walls.

The Master saw innumerable dark faces peering down from snowy burnouses and haiks.  He saw the gleam of steel.  Not one of the figures on the wall was veiled.  Not one woman, therefore, had as yet been permitted to leave the perfumed dimness of the harems, even for this stupendous event in the city’s history.  So far as the Master could judge, Captain Alden, lithely galloping close behind him, was the only woman visible in all that multitude.

With a bold clatter of hoofs, now loudly echoed and hurled back by the walls, the cavalcade burst up to the city like the foam-crest of a huge, white wave.  For a moment, as the Master’s horse whirled him in under the gate, he cast a backward glance at the plain and along the battlements.

That glance showed him a small, white-clad band of Arabs trudging afoot over the green expanse—­the men who, dismounting, had given their horses to the Legionaries.  It showed him the pinions of Nissr gleaming like snow on the velvet plain; showed him, too, the vast sweep of the city’s walls.

Those walls, no less than a hundred feet high, were cunningly loopholed for defense.  They presented a slightly concave facade to the plain, and slanted backward at about the angle of the Tower of Pisa.

Through their aureate glimmer, dazzling in the direct rays of the sun now well past its meridian, a glimpse of a flashing river instantaneously impressed itself on the Master’s sight, with cascading rapids among palm-groves, as it foamed from beneath the city walls.  Then all was blotted out by the gleaming side of the stupendous archway.

Up into a broad thoroughfare that rose on a steep slant—­a thoroughfare very different from the usual narrow, tortuous alleys of Arabian cities—­the swarm of horsemen swept, with a dull clatter of hoofs on the soft yellow pavement that gave almost like asphalt.  The utter lack of any ruts well proved that wheeled vehicles were here unknown.  Nothing harder than unshod horses, than goats and sheep, and the soft pads of camels had ever worn these gleaming ways.