By the dim, fitful gleam of the fire, probably the strangest and most
costly necklace in the world became indistinctly visible. At sight of
it, everything else was forgotten--the wrecked air-liner, the waiting
Legion, the unconscious Arabs now being buried in the resistless
charge of the sand-armies. Even poor Lebon, tortured slave of the Beni
Harb, a lay neglected. For nothing save the wondrous Great Pearl Star
could these three adventurers find any gaze whatever, or any thoughts.
While Leclair and Rrisa stared with widening eyes, the Master, tense
with joy, held up their treasure-trove.
"The Great Pearl Star!" he cried, in a strange voice.
"Kaukab el Durri! See, one pearl is missing--that is the one said to
have been sold in Cairo, twelve years ago, for fifty-five thousand
pounds! But these are finer! And its value as a holy relic of
Islam--who can calculate that? God, what this means to us!"
Words will not compass the description of this wondrous thing. As
the Master held it up in the sand-lashed dimness, half-gloom and
half-light, that formed a kind of aura round the fire--an aura sheeted
through and all about by the aerial avalanches of the sand--the
Legionaries got some vague idea of the necklace.
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