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.
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