t, the Legion would give them peace. If war, then by no means
was the Legion to be unprepared.

The gangplank was put down from the starboard port in the lower
gallery. The helicopters were cut off. Nothing was left running but
one engine, at half-speed, to furnish current for the apparatus the
Master had decided to use in dealing with the Jannati Shahr folk in
case of need--some of this having been evolved on the run from Mecca.

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