“It’s a British destroyer, sir!  She’s just rounded the point, three miles south.  Signals up for us to surrender!”

“Machine-guns against naval ordnance!” gritted the Master savagely.  “Surrender?” He laughed with hot defiance.

The first shell flung a perfect tornado of brine into air, glistening; it ricochetted twice, and plunged into the dunes.  A “dud,” it failed to burst.

Nissr rose again as the second shell hit fair in the hard clay of the wady, cascading earth and sand a hundred feet in air.  Both reports boomed in, rolling like thunder over the sea.

“Shoot and be damned to you!” cried the Master. Nissr was rising now, clearing herself from the water like a wounded sea-bird.  A tremendous cascade of water sluiced from her hissing floats, swirling in millions of sun-glinted jewels more brilliant even than Kaukab el Durri.

Higher she mounted, higher still.  The destroyer was now driving in at full speed, with black smoke streaming from four funnels, perfectly indifferent to possible shoals, rocks or sand-bars along this uncharted coast.  Another shell screamed under the lower gallery and burst in a deluge of sand near one of the mooring-piles.

“Very poor shooting, my Captain,” smiled Leclair, leaning far out the port window of the pilot-house.  “But then, we can’t blame the gunners for being a bit excited, trying to bag a bit of international game like this Legion.”

“And beside,” put in Alden coolly, “our shifting position makes us rather a poor target.  Ah!  That shell must have gone home!”

Nissr quivered from nose to tail.  A violent detonation flung echoes from sea and shore; and bits of splintered wreckage spun down past the windows, to plunge into the still swirling, bubbling sea.

The Master made no answer, but rang for the propellers to be clutched in. Nissr obeyed their quickening whirl.  Her altitude was already four hundred and fifty feet, as marked by the altimeter.  Lamely she moved ahead, sagging to starboard, badly scarred, ill-trimmed and awry, but still alive.

Her great black shadow, trailing behind her in the water, passed on to the beach, wrinkled itself up over the dunes and slid across the sand-drifts where little flutters of cloth, uncovered by the ghoulish jackals, showed from the burning stretch of tawny desert.

Flocks of vultures rose and soared away.  Jackals and hyenas cowered and slunk to cover.  The tumult of the guns and this vast, drifting monster of the air had overcome even their greed for flesh.

Another shot, puffing white as wool from the bow-chaser of the destroyer, screeched through the vultures, scattering them all ways, but made a clean miss of Nissr.

The air-liner gathered speed as the west wind got behind her, listed her, pushed her forward in its mighty hands.  Swifter, ever swifter, her shadow slipped over dune and wady, over hillock and nullah, off away toward the pellucidly clear-golden tints of the horizon beyond which lay the unknown.