“Ah, nom de Dieu!” cried Leclair, in sudden rage at seeing his chance all gone to pot, of coming to grips with the hated Beni Harb.  From the penetralia of the air-liner, confused shouts burst forth.  The upper galleries grew vocal with execrations.

Not one was of fear; all voiced disappointment, the passion of baffled fury.  Angrily a boiler-shop clatter of machine-guns vomited useless frenzy.

Wearily, like a stricken bird that has been forced too long to wing its broken way, the Eagle of the Sky—­still two hundred yards from shore—­lagged down into the high-running surf.  Down, in a murderous hail of fire she sank, into the waves that beat on the stark, sun-baked Sahara shore.

And from hundreds of barbarous throats arose the killing-cry to Allah—­the battle-cry of Beni Harb, the murder-lusting Sons of War.

CHAPTER XXII

BELEAGUERED

“La Illaha illa Allah!  M’hamed rasul Allah!” Raw, ragged, exultant, a scream of passion, joy, and hate, it rose like the voice of the desert itself, vibrant with wild fanaticism, pitiless and wild.

The wolflike, high-pitched howl of the Arab outcasts—­the robber-tribe which all Islam believed guilty of having pillaged the Haram at Mecca and which had for that crime been driven to the farthest westward confines of Mohammedanism—­this war-howl tore its defiance through the wash and reflux of the surf.

The pattering hail of slugs continued to zoon from the sand-hills, bombarding the vast-spread wings and immense fuselage of Nissr.  For the most part, that bombardment was useless to the Beni Harb.  A good many holes, opened up in the planes, and some broken glass, were about the Arabs’ only reward.

None of the bullets could penetrate the metal-work, unless making a direct hit.  Many glanced, spun ricochetting into the sea, and with a venomous buzzing like huge, angry hornets, lost themselves in quick, white spurts of foam.

But one shot at least went home.  Sheltered though the Legion was, either inside the fuselage or in vantage-points at the gun-stations, one incautious exposure timed itself to meet a notched slug.  And a cry of mortal agony rose for a moment on the heat-shimmering air—­a cry echoed with derision by fifteen score barbarians behind their natural rampart.

There was now no more shooting from the liner.  What was there to shoot at, but sand?  The Arabs, warned by the death of the gaunt fellow in the burnous, had doffed their headgear.  Their brown heads, peeping intermittently from the wady and the dunes, were evasive as a mirage.

The Master laughed bitterly.