aracter of Jannati Shahr seemed doubtful. The
Inca's room of gold stunned Pizarro and his men. How much more, then,
must a whole city of gold numb any concrete thought?

Down, still down sank _Nissr_, now beginning to circle in broad,
descending spirals, seeking where she might land. The roar of the
propellers lessened; and at the same time, the increasing hum of the
helicopters made itself heard, counterbalancing the loss of lifting
power of the planes, yet gradually letting the air-liner sink. Came,
too, a sighing hiss of the air-intakes as the vacuum-floats filled.

High noon was now at hand. The sun burned, a copper ball, in the very
forehead of a turquoise sky. A light breeze, lazying over the plain,
stirred the fronded tufts of the date-palms' thick plantations.
Beyond a massy grove, stretching for nearly two miles out from
the northernmost gate of the city, a grassy level quite like a
parade-ground invited the liner to rest.

As she sank still lower, the Master's glass again picked up the city
wall and ran along it. Here, there, white dots were visible; human
figures, surely--the figures of men in snowy burnouses, on the
ramparts of heavy metal.

The Master smiled, and nodded.

"My men think they are surprised," he mused. "What will these Jannati
Shahr men think, when I have opened my little box of tricks and shown
them what's inside?"

He pressed a button on the rail. A bell trilled in the pilot-house;
another in the engine-room. The Norcross-Brails died to inactivity.

With a last long swoop, an abandonment of all the furious energies
that for so long had been hurling her over burning sand and black
crag, _Nissr_ slanted to the grassy sward. A sudden, furious hissing
burst out beneath her, as the compressed-air valves were thrown and
the air-cushions formed beneath her thousands of spiracles. Then, with
hardly a shudder, easily as a tired gull slips down into the quiet of
a still lagoon, the vast air-liner took earth.

She slid two hundred yards on her air-cushions, over the close-cropped
turf, slowed, came to rest there fronting the northern gate of Bara
Jannati Shahr. And the shimmer of those golden walls, one mile to east
of her, painted her all a strangely luminous yellow.

Journey's end, at last!

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE GREETING OF WARRIORS

Without delay, everything was put in complete readiness for whatever
eventualities might develop. If these strange people meant peace and
wanted i