The Master had no skill in self-analysis, to tell him.  Leader of others, himself he did not understand.  But as that night aboard Nissr, when he had laid a hand on the woman’s cabin door, something unknown to him seemed drawing him to her, making her welfare and her life assume a strange import.

“Come, O Frank!” Bara Miyan was saying.  The Olema’s words recalled the Master to himself with a start.  “Such food and drink as we men of El Barr have, gladly we share with thee and thine!”

The old man entered the dark doorway of the citadel, noiselessly in soft sandals.  Beside him walked the Master; and, well grouped and flanked and followed by the Arabs in their white robes—­all silent, grave, watchful—­the Legion also entered.

Behind them once more closed the massive doors, silently.

The eighteen Legionaries were pent in solid walls of metal, there in the heart of a vast city of fighting-men whose god was Allah and to whom all unbelievers were as outcasts and as pariah dogs—­anathema.

CHAPTER XLI

THE MASTER’S PRICE

A dim and subtly perfumed corridor opened out before them, its walls hung with tapestries, between which, by the light of sandal-oil mash’als, or cressets, the glimmer of the dull-gold walls could be distinguished.

Pillars rose to the roof, and these were all inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing complexity.  Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had been added to fill out any portion.  The imagination was staggered at thought of the infinite skill and labor required for such a task.  The creation of this city of El Barr seemed far beyond the possible; yet here it was, all the result of the graver’s chisel.[1]

[Footnote 1:  If any reader doubts the existence of El Barr, as a city of gold carved from a single block, on the ground that such a work would be impossible, I refer him to an account of Petra, in the National Geographic Magazine for May, 1907.  Petra, in all details, was carved from granite—­a monolithic city.]

Blase as the Legionaries were and hardened to wonders, the sight of this corridor and of the vast banquet-hall opening out of it, at the far end, came near upsetting their aplomb.  The major even muttered an oath or two, under his breath, till Leclair nudged him with a forceful elbow.

Not thus must Franks, from Feringistan, show astonishment or admiration.

“May the peace be upon thee,” all at once exclaimed Bara Miyan, gesturing for the Master to enter the vast hall.  “Peace, until the rising of the day!”

“And upon thee, the peace!” the Master answered, with the correct Arabic formula.  They entered, and after them the other Legionaries and the sub-chiefs of Jannati Shahr.

The banquet-hall was enormous.  The Master’s glance estimated it as about two hundred and fifty feet long by one hundred and seventy-five wide, with a height from golden floor to flat-arched roof of some one hundred and twenty-five.  Embroidered cloths of camel’s-hair and silk covered the walls.  Copper braziers, suspended from the pillars, sent dim spirals of perfumed smoke aloft into the blue air.