Into the fumes and smother, half a dozen men fought their way. From the bulkheads they snatched down the little fire-grenades. The Master went first. Bohannan was second, with Rrisa a close third. Leclair in his forward rush almost stumbled over Alden. The "Captain," masked and still unrecognized as a woman by any save the Master, was thrust back from the door by the Celt, as she too tried to enter. "No, not you!" he shouted. "You, with only one arm--faith, it's worse than useless! Back, you!" Then he and many plunged into the blazing engine-room. Thus they closed with the fire-devil now licking ravenous tongues about the vitals of _Nissr_. CHAPTER XIX HOSTILE COASTS An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacle she made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun now lowering toward the horizon. Her helicopters were droning with all the force that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant. Her propellers--some charred to mere stumps on their shafts--stood starkly motionless. Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind. Her rudder was burned clean off; her stern, warped, reeking with white fumes that drifted on the late afternoon air told of the fury that had blazed about her. Flames no longer roared away; but the teeth of their consuming rage had bitten deep. Where the aft observation pit had been, now only a twisted net of metal-work remained, with all the plate-glass melted and cracked away. The body of Gorlitz, trapped there, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at any rate, no longer remained. Four Legionaries were in the pilot-house: the Master, Bohannan, Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence. There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke. "Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of the altimeter. "Some situation! Two men dead and others injured. Engines crippled, propellers the same, and two floats so damaged we couldn't stay on the surface if we came down. Well, by God!" Leclair looked very grim. "I regret only," said he in broken English, "that the stowaway escaped us. Ah, _la belle exécution_, if we had him now!" The Master, at the starboard window, kept silence. No one sat at the wheel. Of what use could it have been? The Master was looking far to eastward, now with the naked eye, now sweeping the prospect with binoculars. He was studying the African coast, clearly in sight as a long, whitish line of sand with a whiter collar of foamy surf, fifteen miles away.