Four hampers were carried down the gangplank and set on the grass, about fifty feet ahead of Nissr’s huge beak, that towered in air over the men like an eagle over sparrows.  These hampers contained the chosen apparatus.  Wires were attached, and run back to the ship, and proper connections made at once by Leclair and Menendez, under the Master’s instructions.

The machine-guns were dismounted and taken “ashore,” to borrow a nautical phrase.  These were set up in strategic positions before the liner, and full supplies of ammunition both blank and ball were served to them.

About a quarter of a mile to north of Nissr’s position, one of the small watercourses or irrigating ditches that cut the plain glimmered through a grove of Sayhani dates.[1] To this ditch the Master sent two men in search of the largest stone they could find there.  When they returned with a rock some foot in diameter, he ordered it placed half-way between Nissr and the palm-grove.

[Footnote 1:  Sayhani (the Crier), so called because one of these palms is fabled to have cried aloud in salutation to Mohammed, when the Prophet happened to walk beneath it.]

These preparations made, the Master lined up his Legionaries for inspection and final instructions.  Standing there in military array, fully armed, they made rather a formidable body of fighters despite their paucity of numbers.  Courage, eagerness, and joy—­still unalloyed by all the fatigues and perils of the long trek after adventure—­showed on every face.  Even through the eyeholes of “Captain Alden’s” mask, daring exultation glimmered.

The dead, left behind, could not now depress the Legionaries’ spirits.  To be on solid earth again, in this wonderland with the Golden City fronting them, quickened every man’s pulse.

What though they were but a handful, ringed round by grim, jagged mountains, beyond which lay hundreds of leagues of burning sand?  What though an unknown people of great numbers already had begun to stir in that vast hive of gold?  What though all of Islam, which had already learned of the sacrilege the accursed Feringi had wrought, was lusting their blood?  Nothing of this mattered.  It was enough for the Legionaries that adventure still beckoned onward, ever on!

The Master, standing there before them, called the roll.  We should listen, by way of knowing just how the Legion was now composed.  It consisted of the following:  Adams, “Captain Alden,” Bohannan, Bristol, Brodeur, Cracowicz, Emilio, Enemark, Frazier, Grison, Janina, Lebon, Leclair, L’Heureux, Manderson, Menendez, Prisrend, Rennes, Seres, Simonds, Wallace.  All the wounded had recovered sufficiently to be of some service.  The dead were:  Travers, who had died on the passage of the Atlantic; Auchincloss and Gorlitz, burned to death; Kloof, Daimamoto, Beziers and Sheffield, killed by the Beni Harb; Lombardo, killed by the Meccans; Rrisa, suicide.