e Flying Legion

CHAPTER I

A SPIRIT CAGED

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 please a whim of his restless
mind, on top of the gigantic skyscraper that formed part of
his properties. Windows boldly fronted all four cardinal
compass-points--huge, plate-glass windows that gave a view unequaled
in its sweep and power.

The room seemed an eagle's nest perched on the summit of a man-made
crag. The Arabic name that he had given it--_Niss'rosh_--meant just
that. Singular place indeed, well-harmonized with its master.

Through the westward windows, umbers and pearls of dying day, smudged
across a smoky sky, now shadowed trophy-covered walls. This light,
subdued and somber though it was, slowly fading, verging toward a
night of May, disclosed unusual furnishings. It showed a heavy black
table of some rare Oriental wood elaborately carved and inlaid with
still rarer woods; a table covered with a prayer-rug, on which lay
various books on aeronautics and kindred sciences, jostling works on
Eastern travel, on theosophy, mysticism, exploration.

Maps and atlases added their note of research. At one end of the
table stood a bronze faun's head with open lips, with hand cupped
at listening ear. Surely that head must have come from some buried
art-find of the very long ago. The faint greenish patina that covered
it could have been painted only by the hand of the greatest artist of
them all, Time.

A book-case occupied the northern space, between the windows. It, too,
was crammed with scientific reports, oddments of out-of-the-way lore,
and travels. But here a profusion of war-books and official documents
showed another bent of the owner's mind. Over the book-case hung two
German gasmasks. They seemed, in the half-dusk, to glower down through
their round, empty eyeholes like sinister devil-fish awaiting prey.

The masks were flanked by rifles, bayonets, knives, maces, all bearing
scars of battle. Above them, three fragments of Prussian battle-flags
formed a kind of frieze, their color softened by the fading sunset,
even as the fading of the dream of imperial glory had dulled and
dimmed all that for which they had stood.

The southern wall of that strange room--that quiet room to which only
a far, vague murmur of the city's life whispered up, with faint blurs
of steamer-whistles