The streets themselves were clear of people as the cavalcade thundered
on and on with many turnings; but every doorway, shop, arch, roof,
terrace, and tower was packed with these silent, white-clad folk,
bronze-faced and motionless, all armed with pistols, rifles, and cold
steel.
What some poet has called "a joyous fear" thrilled the Legion. No,
not fear, in the sense of timidity, but rather a realization of the
immense perils of this situation, and an up-springing of the heart to
meet those perils, to face and overcome them, and from out their very
maw to snatch rewards beyond all calculation.
Even the Master himself, tempered in the fires of war's Hell, sensed
this tremendous potentiality of death as the tiny handful of white men
galloped on and on behind Bara Miyan. Here the Legion was, hemmed and
pent by countless hordes of fanatics whom any chance word or look,
construed as a religious insult, might lash to fury. Five men remained
outside. The rest were now as drops of water in a hostile ocean. In
the Master's breast-pocket still lay Kaukab el Durri--and might not
that possession, itself, be enough to start a jihad of extermination?
Was not the fact of unbelieving dogs now for the first time being in
the Sacred City--was not this, alone, cause for a massacre? What, in
sober reason, stood between the Legion and death? Only two factors:
first, the potential destruction of the Myzab and the Black Stone
in case of treachery; and second, two tiny pinches of salt exchanged
between the Master and old Bara Miyan!
The situation, calmly reviewed, was one probably never paralleled in
the history of adventure--more like the dream of a hashish-smoking
addict than cold reality.
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