"We can at least share death together!"
Why should those words so powerfully affect him? What were these
uncomprehended, new emotions stirring in his hard soul, tempered by
war and by unnumbered stern adventurings?
The Master had no skill in self-analysis, to tell him. Leader of
others, himself he did not understand. But as that night aboard Nissr,
when he had laid a hand on the woman's cabin door, something unknown
to him seemed drawing him to her, making her welfare and her life
assume a strange import.
"Come, O Frank!" Bara Miyan was saying. The Olema's words recalled the
Master to himself with a start. "Such food and drink as we men of El
Barr have, gladly we share with thee and thine!"
The old man entered the dark doorway of the citadel, noiselessly in
soft sandals. Beside him walked the Master; and, well grouped and
flanked and followed by the Arabs in their white robes--all silent,
grave, watchful--the Legion also entered.
Behind them once more closed the massive doors, silently.
The eighteen Legionaries were pent in solid walls of metal, there in
the heart of a vast city of fighting-men whose god was Allah and to
whom all unbelievers were as outcasts and as pariah dogs--anathema.
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