ravages wrought by flame.

Bohannan could not long be silent. The exuberance of his nature burst
forth with a half-defiant:

"If _I_ were in charge, which I'm not, I'd stop those damned
helicopters, let her down, turn what power we've got into the
remaining propellers, and taxi ashore!"

"And probably sink, or break up in the surf, on the beach, there!"
curtly rejoined the Master. "Ah! _What_?"

His binoculars checked their sweep along the coast, which in its
absolute barrenness looked a place of death for whatever might have
life there.

"You see something, _mon capitaine?_" asked Leclair, blowing smoke
from his cigarette. "Allow me also to look! Where is it?"

"Just to north of that gash--that wady, or gully, making down to the
beach. You see it, eh?"

Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes
of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise
of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grass
could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory
nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat,
by the beatings of surf eternal.

Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of