"Very poor shooting, my Captain," smiled Leclair, leaning far out the port window of the pilot-house. "But then, we can't blame the gunners for being a bit excited, trying to bag a bit of international game like this Legion." "And beside," put in Alden coolly, "our shifting position makes us rather a poor target. Ah! That shell must have gone home!" _Nissr_ quivered from nose to tail. A violent detonation flung echoes from sea and shore; and bits of splintered wreckage spun down past the windows, to plunge into the still swirling, bubbling sea. The Master made no answer, but rang for the propellers to be clutched in. _Nissr_ obeyed their quickening whirl. Her altitude was already four hundred and fifty feet, as marked by the altimeter. Lamely she moved ahead, sagging to starboard, badly scarred, ill-trimmed and awry, but still alive. Her great black shadow, trailing behind her in the water, passed on to the beach, wrinkled itself up over the dunes and slid across the sand-drifts where little flutters of cloth, uncovered by the ghoulish jackals, showed from the burning stretch of tawny desert. Flocks of vultures rose and soared away. Jackals and hyenas cowered and slunk to cover. The tumult of the guns and this vast, drifting monster of the air had overcome even their greed for flesh. Another shot, puffing white as wool from the bow-chaser of the destroyer, screeched through the vultures, scattering them all ways, but made a clean miss of _Nissr_. The air-liner gathered speed as the west wind got behind her, listed her, pushed her forward in its mighty hands. Swifter, ever swifter, her shadow slipped over dune and wady, over hillock and _nullah_, off away toward the pellucidly clear-golden tints of the horizon beyond which lay the unknown. Rrisa, at his gun-station, gnawed his fingers in rage and scorn of the pursuing Feringi, and cried: "Allah make it hard for you! _Laan'abuk!_" (Curses on your fathers!) Old Sheik Abd el Rahman, close-locked in a cabin, quivered, not with fear, but with unspeakable grief and amazement past all telling. To be thus carried away through the heavens in the entrails of the unbelievers' flying dragon was a thing not to be believed. He prostrated himself, with groans and cries to Allah. The Legionaries, from galleries and gun-stations waving derisive arms, raised shouts and hurrahs. Sweaty, spent, covered with grease and dirt, they cheered with leaping hearts. Another shell, bursting in mid-air not fifty yards away, rocked _Nissr_, keeled her to port, and for a moment sent her staggering down. She righted, lifted, again gathered speed. More and more wild became the shooting, as she zigzagged, rose, soared into something like her old-time stride. Behind her the sea drew back, the baffled destroyer dwindled, the harmless shots crashed in.