A few gulls had begun to show--strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was beginning to grow intense, for no longer was _Nissr_ making a gale that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressed them all. Through the shimmering, quivering air, an arid pallor extended up the eastern sky; a pale, milky illumination, dull-white over the desert, that told of the furnace into which _Nissr_ was drifting--if indeed she could survive till she reached land. The glasses showed tawny reaches of sand, back a little from the coast; and beyond these, low hills, or rather rolling dunes, lay empurpled by vibrant heat-hazes. "It won't be much like navigating over that Hell-spot, three or four miles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed. The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure had raveled his nerve. No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was her suffering. "Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently. Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singular figure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbows on the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated with croton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrol from the final explosion had spattered him. His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his red crop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone, as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, the savage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressing him. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition of the Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun. "What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's damned bad, according to my way of thinking." "What you think and what you say won't have any weight with this problem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we make land, we make it, that's all, sir." He relapsed into silence. Leclair muttered, in Arabic--his words audible only to himself--an ancient Islamic proverb: "Allah knows best, and time will show!" Then, after a moment's pause, the single word: "Kismet!"