"If we could only lay hands on the fabled loot of the Haram!" he
whispered, his voice tense with excitement.
Rrisa, wide-eyed, with curling lips of scorn, peered down at the
Sheik. The orderly, bare-headed, was shielding eyes and face from the
sand-blast, with hands that trembled. His teeth were bared with hate
as he peered at the prostrate heretic.
A tall, powerful figure of a man the Sheik was, lying there on his
right side with his robe crumpled under him--the robe now flapping,
whipping its loose ends in the high and rising wind. His _tarboosh_
had been blown away, disclosing white hair.
That hair, too, writhed and flailed in the gusts that drove it full
of sand, that drifted his whole body with the fine and stinging
particles. His beard, full and white, did not entirely conceal the
three parallel scars on each cheek, the _mashali_, which marked him as
originally a dweller at Mecca.
One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the
growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle,
its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with
gold.
"Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his
questing fingers had discovered about the old man's neck.
Pages:
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260