sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled
with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhàh_,
or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror of
desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale
purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had
witnessed from the windows of _Niss'rosh_, the night his great plan
had come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed
eight years!

Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a
brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague
edge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman
could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene--a
land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these
coasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clans
of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents. Africa, once more seen
under such unexpected circumstances, roused his blood as he peered at
the crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakedness
under the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.

All at once his glass stopped its sweep.

"Smoke, my Captain!" he exclaimed. "See, it curls aloft like a lady's
ringlet. And--beyond the wady--"

"Ah, you see them, too?"

The major's glass, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was now
fixed on the indicated spot, as was "Captain Alden's."