The Flying Legion

Well might those Legionaries who had been left behind to protect Nissr and the sacred gifts have envied the more fortunate ones now sweeping into Jannati Shahr. The rear guard,...

The raiding-party, beside its two leaders, consisted of Lombardo, Rennes, Emilio, Wallace, and three others, including Lebon. The lieutenant's orderly, now having recovered stre...

The Spartan simplicity of the proceedings impressed the Master far more than any Oriental ceremony could have done. Here was the Olema, or high priest and chief, of a huge city...

The Olema shook an emphatic head of negation. "_Yafta Allah!_" he exclaimed, using the absolute, decisive formula of refusal in Arab bargaining. "This gold of ours is sacred. Th...

The night was moonless, dark, warm with the inviting softness of late spring that holds out promises of romance. Stars wavered and wimpled in the black waters of the Hudson as a...

A dim and subtly perfumed corridor opened out before them, its walls hung with tapestries, between which, by the light of sandal-oil _mash'als_, or cressets, the glimmer of the...

His form, sitting there at the desk--his face wearing an odd smile--had already begun to grow less distinct. It seemed as if the light surrounding him had faded, though everywhe...

The room was strange as the man, himself, who dwelt there. It seemed, in a way, the outward expression of his inner personality. He had ordered it built from his own plans, to p...

As the little group of four penetrated into the enclosure which but a few moments before had been guarded all round its perimeter by a small army of determined men, more and mor...

Before midnight the storm died with a suddenness even greater than that of its onset. Like a tangible flock of evil birds or of the spirits Victor Hugo has painted in _Les Djinn...

Undismayed by the swift, inexplicable fall of all its companions, it still thrust on for the attack. In a few minutes it had come off the port bows of the giant air-liner, no mo...

Panting, with a slither of dry sand under their laboring feet, the Legionaries charged. At any second, a raking volley might burst from the dunes. The lethal pellets--so few in...

He slid open another door. The three men passed through the captain's cabin and pilot-house. This place measured twelve feet on its longer axis and nine on its shorter, being of...

The crash of six machine-guns clattered into a chattering tumult, muzzles pointed high over the heads of the Jannati Shahr men. Up into the still, hot air jetted vicious spurts...

All this time, the strange, yellowish sheen against the heavens was increasing. What might lie beyond the mountains--who could tell? But that its nature was wholly different fro...

"What else are such apostate fanatics? People who live by robbery and plunder--people who, if they find no gold in your money-belt, will rip your stomach open to see if you've s...

In utter silence, moving only a foot at a time, the trio of man-hunters advanced. They spaced themselves out, dragged themselves forward one at a time, took advantage of every s...

"La Illaha illa Allah! M'hámed rasul Allah!" Raw, ragged, exultant, a scream of passion, joy, and hate, it rose like the voice of the desert itself, vibrant with wild fanaticism...

The major's clenched fist was caught as it drove, by a scientific guard from the Master's right. The Master dropped his lamp, and with a straight left-hander sprawled Bohannan o...

With hands that quivered in unison with his nerves, now no longer impassive, the strange chief of this still stranger expedition took from Rrisa the leather sack. Over the top o...

The upraised blade, poised for swift murder, did not descend. With a groan from the heart's core, Rrisa let fall his trembling hand, as he recoiled toward the vague patch of sta...

One week from that night, twenty-seven other men assembled in the strange eyrie of _Niss'rosh_, nearly a thousand feet above the city's turmoil. They came singly or in pairs, th...

For a time the Master sat in the thickening gloom, eating the dates and _temmin_ wafers, drinking the coffee, pondering in deep silence. When the simple meal was ended, he pluck...

The woman stood pointing into a black recess at the far end of the crypt. All that the Master could discern there, at first, was a darkness even greater than that which shrouded...

Not all the stern discipline that had been enforced by the Master--discipline already like a second nature to this band of adventurous men--could quite prevent a little confusio...

Two, five, a dozen, now a score of tiny specks dotted the mist, some moving right across the broadening face of the sun itself. As _Nissr's_ flight stormed eastward, and these g...

An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacle she made, her wreckage gilded by the infi...

The chief handed him a pencil. Rrisa intelligently studied the map for nearly two minutes, then raised his hand and made a dot a few miles north-east of the intersection of fift...

The Master began to feel a peculiar anxiety. Into the east he peered, where now indeed a low, steady hum was growing audible, as of a million angry spirits swarming nearer. The...

Alone in his cabin with the waterspout of massive gold and with the sacred Black Stone, the Master sat down in front of the table where they had been laid, took a few leaves of...

A moment's utter silence followed. The woman, with another gesture, drew off the aviator's cap she had worn; she pulled away the tight-fitting toupee that had been drawn over he...

Bohannan departed. The droning of the helicopters rose to a shrill hum. The Master switched in the air-pressure system; and far underneath, white fountains of spumy water leaped...

She fell silent, biting her full lip. Something in her eyes shamed the man. Not for all his inflexible sternness could he feel that he had come out a winner in this, their first...

As Nissr slowed near the oasis, the frightened Arabs--who had been at their _ghanda_, or mid-day meal--swarmed into the open. They left their mutton, _cous-cous_, date-paste, an...

The descent of the giant air-liner and her crew of masterful adventurers on the Forbidden City had much the quality of a hawk's raid on a vast pigeon-cote. As _Nissr_, now with...

Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"--that is to say, the land "where there is none but He."

Hardly had the trembling Arab salaamed and departed in terror of soul, knowing not what fearful events might be impending, when Bohannan appeared. The smile on the Master's lips...

The arrival of Simonds, with the spare window-pane, and of Brodeur--one of the boldest flyers out of Saloniki in the last months of the war--broke in upon the Master's reveries....

At the exact instant when the second hand notched to the minute's edge, and in precisely the spot indicated, a slight, luminous spot became dimly visible above the trees. The sp...

A little silence lengthened, while the strange aviator continued to peer out with strangely shining eyes through the holes of his mask. The effect of that human intelligence, sh...

Two of the Legionaries--a woman and a man--were watching that sunset from the western windows of that room where first had been conceived the wonder-flight which had spelled dea...

The first slow light of day, "under the opening eyelids of the morn," found the Master up in the screened observation gallery at the tip of the port aileron. Here were mounted t...

Without delay, everything was put in complete readiness for whatever eventualities might develop. If these strange people meant peace and wanted it, the Legion would give them p...

An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving the gaunt, mange-stained camels. In the sand near the wady lay buried Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with th...

"Ah, sure now, but that's fine!" exclaimed the major with delight, his eyes beginning to sparkle in anticipation. "The best of news! A little action, eh? I ask nothing better. A...

The major, peering down through the trap, swore luridly. Leclair muttered something to himself, with wrinkled brow. "Captain Alden's" eyes blinked strangely, through the holes o...

Another of those horrible, red mornings, with a brass circle of horizon flaming all around in the most extraordinary fireworks topped by an azure zenith, found them still crawli...

The crash of shattered glass mingled with the volley flung by the murderously spitting automatic of the stowaway. From the forward companion, at the top of the ladder, "Captain...

Horrible, unreal as a fever-born nightmare in its sudden frenzy, the Arab's attack drove in at them. The golden passageway flung from wall to wall screams, curses in shrill barb...

Like men in a dream, after the first wild emotions had died, the Legionaries peered down into this sea of light. Smoke from the lamps rose toward the dim, low-arched roof. Blood...

Over blood-colored stretches swept by the volcano-breath of the desert, through acacia barrens and across basaltic ridges the two lonely figures struggled on and on. They fell,...

Men do strange things, at times, when confronted by experiences entirely outside even the limits of imagination. At sight of the perfectly overwhelming masses of wealth that lay...

The Legionaries pressed forward. At the far end of the chamber, another door was indeed visible; smaller than the first, low, almost square, and let into a deep recess in the el...