upper galleries grew vocal with execrations.

Not one was of fear; all voiced disappointment, the passion of baffled
fury. Angrily a boiler-shop clatter of machine-guns vomited useless
frenzy.

Wearily, like a stricken bird that has been forced too long to wing
its broken way, the Eagle of the Sky--still two hundred yards from
shore--lagged down into the high-running surf. Down, in a murderous
hail of fire she sank, into the waves that beat on the stark,
sun-baked Sahara shore.

And from hundreds of barbarous throats arose the killing-cry to
Allah--the battle-cry of Beni Harb, the murder-lusting Sons of War.




CHAPTER XXII


BELEAGUERED

"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, pitiless and wild.

The wolflike, high-pitched howl of the Arab outcasts--the robber-tribe
which all Islam believed guilty of having pillaged the Haram at Mecca
and which had for that crime been driven to the farthest westward