From dimness of gloom, within the doorway, two vague figures rained dagger-blows.  Janina, mortally stabbed, practically blew the head off one of these door-keepers.

Cracowicz got the other with a blow from the butt of his empty pistol—­a blow that crushed in the right temporal bone.  Then he, too, and three others, fell and died.

Outside, in the passage, the Maghrabis were wringing the necks of the wounded white men.  The dull sound of crushed and broken bones blent with the turmoil.

“The door—­shut the door!”

The Master’s voice penetrated even this Hell-tumult.  The Master flung himself against the door, and others with him.

The very frenzy of the attack defeated the Arab’s object, for it drove the survivors back into the treasure-crypt.  And in the narrow doorway the white men could for a moment hold back the howling tides of fury.

With cold lead, butts, naked fists, the remaining Legionaries smashed a little clearance-room, corpse-heaped.  They stumbled, fought, fell into the crypt.

The heavy door, swung by panting, sweating men—­while others fired through the narrowing aperture—­groaned shut on massive hinges.

As the space narrowed, frenzy broke loose.  Arabs and Maghrabis crawled and struggled over bodies, flung themselves to sure immolation in the doorway.  As fast as they fell, the Legionaries dragged them inside.  The place became an infernal shambles, slippery, crimson, unreal with horror.

For one fate-heavy moment, the tides of war hung even.  Furiously the remaining Legionaries toiled with straining muscles, swelling veins, panting lungs, to force the door shut, against the shrieking, frenzied drive of Moslem fanatics lashed into fury by the thar, the feud of blood.

“Captain Alden” turned the tide.  She snatched down one of the copper lamps that hung by chains from the dim ceiling of the treasure-crypt.  Over the heads of the Legionaries she flung blazing sandal-oil out upon the white-robed jam of madmen.

The flaming oil flared up along those thin, white robes.  It dripped on wounded and on dead.  Wild howls of anguish pierced the tumult.  In the minute of confusion, the door boomed shut.  Bohannan dropped a heavy teakwood bar into staples of bronze.

“God!” he panted, his right eye misted with blood from a jagged cut on the brow.  Shrieks of rage, from without, were answered by jeers and shouts of exultation from the Legionaries.

“Nom de Dieu!” gasped Leclair.  His neck was blackened with a powder burn, and the tunic was ripped clean off him.  Not one of the Legionaries had uniforms completely whole.  Hardly half of them still kept their slippers.

Torn, barefooted, burned, bleeding, decimated, they still laughed.  Wild gibes penetrated the door of the treasure-crypt, against which the mad attack was already beginning to clash and thunder.