. For
more than an hour, _Nissr's_ shadow leaped across this utter solitude
of death.

The Master summoned Leclair, Bohannan, and "Captain Alden," and for
some time gave them careful instructions which none but they were
allowed to hear.

CHAPTER XXXVI

JOURNEY'S END

All this time, the strange, yellowish sheen against the heavens was
increasing. What might lie beyond the mountains--who could tell? But
that its nature was wholly different from anything any white man ever
had beheld seemed obvious.

Quite suddenly, at 10:05, the Master's binoculars detected a break far
to southward, in the craggy wall of rock. He ordered _Nissr's_ beak
turned directly thither. Swiftly the Eagle of the Sky held her course,
speeding like an arrow. And now a vast, open plain was seen to be
spreading away, away to indeterminable distances; a plain the further
limits of which veiled themselves in bister and dull ocher vapors.

The aureate shimmer on the sky kept steadily increasing, from a point
somewhat to the left of _Nissr's_ line of flight. What this might be,
none could guess. None save the Master. More agitated than any had
ever seen him, he stood there at the rail, lips tight, hands clutching
the binoculars at his eyes.

"By Allah!" the major heard him mutter. "It can't be true--the thing
I've heard. Only a fable, surely! And yet--"

Now the vast plain was coming clearly to view. It appeared fully
under cultivation with patches of greenery that denoted gardens,
palm-groves, fruit-orchards; all signs of a well-watered region here
at the center of the world's most appalling desert.

This in itself was a thing of astonishment. But it faded to
insignificance as all at once a far, dazzling sheen burst on the
watchers. Up against the sky a wondrous, yellow blaze seemed to be
burning. Enormously far away as it still was, it filled the heart
of every observer with a strange, quick thrill of wonder, of hope.
Something of wild exultation seemed to leap through the Legionaries'
veins, at sight of that strange fire.

Leclair glanced at the Master. The dark, taciturn man, for all his
self-control, had set teeth into his lip till the blood was all but
starting.

On, on swooped _Nissr._ Now the plain was widening. Now, off at the
left, behind the shimmer of the wondrous sight that seemed a fantastic
city of dreams, long black cliffs had become visible--surely some spur
of the Iron Mountains, making to southward at the eastern