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the pass,” Sam Sorrows proposed suddenly.
    “A good idea. Might be more of them.”
    They clambered back in the tank, which was now silvery with its bright armor of frost where the ray of deadly cold had touched it. The defile narrowed before them, then broadened, and they lumbered across a high sandstone plateau.
    They looked beyond the range.
     
    Price had half expected to see a fertile, inhabited oasis, but the endless plain that stretched away beyond the Jebel Harb, shimmering in a smoky haze of heat, was grim and lifeless desolation.
    Long drear dunes of red sand, like stilled seas of death. Dark gravel-barrens. Lurid streaks of yellow clay. Salt-pans, glaring leprous white. Low and age-worn hills of livid limestone and black basalt; grim, denuded skeletons of ancient ranges.
    The accursed land, indeed! All its swart vastness showed no hint of life. Nothing moved upon it save the ceaseless, silent flicker of heat, like waves of ghost-seas. Or perhaps, when the winds blew, red and ancient sands, whispering secrets of the immemorial past.
    Across those wastes of desolation led the road of skulls. With his binoculars, Price could trace the white gleams of the grisly landmarks for many miles, far out into the dead solitude of the forbidden land.
    What would they find at the end of that road? That is, he thought , if they lived to reach it! The perils of alien science—the encounter in the pass had assured him of that. The peril that had been promised in the yellow man’s flourish of the great mace, in the mirage about the mountains. And the peril Price had read in the taunting, tawny-greenish eyes of the golden woman.
    Jacob Garth met them, alone and on foot, as the tank lumbered back down the gorge. Icy apprehension had dawned in Price’s heart before they heard him speak. The pale eyes in his fat, bland face were coldly unreadable as ever; his deep, suave voice carried neither concern nor self-reproach, when he said:
    “Durand, Fouad got away.”
    Throat suddenly dry, Price managed to whisper, “The camels?”
    “Gone. We’re stranded. As the Spaniard was.”
    Price’s despair gave way to a flame of useless anger.
    “I told you to watch! How—”
    “We were watching the tank. When it turned white, and stopped, the Arabs wheeled and dashed off, before we could stop them. Drove off the baggage-camels too. We’re on foot.”
    Scathing criticism was on Price’s tongue, but he checked it. It would do no good. Nothing, now, would do any good. Only a hopeless battle remained; battle, not with man but with the world’s cruelest desert.

6. THE WHITE DROMEDARY
     
    THE BLACK GRANITE massif of the Jebel Harb was six days behind. Still the order of march was the same: old sheik Fouad el Akmet upon his hejin, leading the caravan along the road of skulls; the endless line of weary camels behind, carrying the Bedouin renegades, the whites of the “Secret Legion,” the paraphernalia of modern war; the tank roaring and clanging in the rear.
    Two days they had rested at the well in the mountains; the white men, during the first bitter night, alone, unmounted, helpless. But dawn had brought the fugitive Arabs back from their panic-stricken flight, slipping up cautiously to see how the battle had gone. Their situation was nearly as desperate as that of the others, for both camels and men were suffering for water, obviously unable to cover the distance back to the last alkaline well. Convinced, to his own amazement, that the whites had been victorious over the evil djinn of the accursed land, old Fouad had been glad to rejoin the expedition.
    Twice since they left the range the trail of skulls had led them to brackish, bitter pools. But no living thing had they seen, in this domain of death within the mountain barrier.
    The fleet gazelles, the hyenas and prowling jackals, the occasional ostriches of the desert’s fringes had long been left behind. In this lifeless land, even the tamarisks and acacia and sere camel-grass