n sun.

All at once Dr. Lombardo inserted the blade of the pick under the
golden spout, pried hard, bent it upward. He stamped it down again
with his boot-heel, dropped the pick and grappled it with both
straining hands. By main force he wrenched it up almost at right
angles. He gave another pull, snapped it short off, dragged it to the
parapet of the Ka'aba, and with a frantic effort swung it, hurled it
into the nacelle.

Down sank the basket, a little, under this new weight.

The doctor leaped, jumped short, caught the edge of the basket and
was just pulling himself up when a slug caught him at the base of the
brain.

His hold relaxed; but the major had him by the wrists. Into the
nacelle he dragged the dying man.

"For the love o' God, _haul up!_" he shouted.

The basket leaped aloft, as the winch--that had been jammed by a
trivial accident to the control--took hold of the steel cable. Up
it soared, still pursued by dwindling screams of rage, by now futile
rifle-fire. Before it had reached the trap in the lower gallery,
the main propellers had begun to whicker into swift revolution, all
gleaming in the afternoon sun. The gigantic shadow of the Eagle of the
Sky began to slide athwart the hill-side streets to south-eastward of
the Haram; and so, away.

Up came the nacelle through the trap. The davit swung it to one side;
the trap was slammed down and bolted. Out of the nacelle tumbled the
major, pale as he had formerly been red, his face all drawn with grief
and pain.

"The damned Moslem swine!" he panted. "Faith, but they--they've killed
him!" He flung a passionate hand at the basket, in which, prone across
the golden spout, the still body of Lombardo was lying. "They've
killed as brave a man--"

"We all saw what he did, Major," the chief said quietly. "Dr. Lombardo
owed us all a debt, and he has paid it. This is Kismet! Control
yourself, Major. The price of such brave adventure--is often death."

They lifted out the limp form, and carried it away to the cabin Dr.
Lombardo had occupied, there to wait some opportune time for burial
in the desert. Mecca, in the meanwhile, was already fading away to
north-westward. The heat-shimmer of that baked land of bare-ribbed
rock and naked, igneous hills had already begun to blur its outlines.
The white minarets round the Haram still with delicate tracery as of
carved ivory stood up against the sky; but of the out-raged people,
the colonnades, the despoiled and viola