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 it, the Legion would give them peace. If war, then by no means was the Legion to be unprepared. The gangplank was put down from the starboard port in the lower gallery. The helicopters were cut off. Nothing was left running but one engine, at half-speed, to furnish current for the apparatus the Master had decided to use in dealing with the Jannati Shahr folk in case of need--some of this having been evolved on the run from Mecca. Four hampers were carried down the gangplank and set on the grass, about fifty feet ahead of _Nissr's_ huge beak, that towered in air over the men like an eagle over sparrows. These hampers contained the chosen apparatus. Wires were attached, and run back to the ship, and proper connections made at once by Leclair and Menendez, under the Master's instructions. The machine-guns were dismounted and taken "ashore," to borrow a nautical phrase. These were set up in strategic positions before the liner, and full supplies of ammunition both blank and ball were served to them. About a quarter of a mile to north of _Nissr's_ position, one of the small watercourses or irrigating ditches that cut the plain glimmered through a grove of Sayhani dates.[1] To this ditch the Master sent two men in search of the largest stone they could find there. When they returned with a rock some foot in diameter, he ordered it placed half-way between _Nissr_ and the palm-grove. [Footnote 1: Sayhani (the Crier), so called because one of these palms is fabled to have cried aloud in salutation to Mohammed, when the Prophet happened to walk beneath it.] These preparations made, the Master lined up his Legionaries for inspection and final instructions. Standing there in military array, fully armed, they made rather a formidable body of fighters despite their paucity of numbers. Courage, eagerness, and joy--still unalloyed by all the fatigues and perils of the long trek after adventure--showed on every face. Even through the eyeholes of "Captain Alden's" mask, daring exultation glimmered.