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black ramparts of the Jebel Harb loomed hostile against the dusk.
    Price sat on his camel, his automatic still covering Fouad El Akmet—and wondered.
    The weird beings of the accursed land, then, were not all fiction. People lived beyond the mountains, people whose skins were the color of gold—not the yellow-brown of the Mongolian, but golden; people who had domesticated the tiger, and who must command strange powers of science.
    The apparition, he was sure, had been some sort of mirage. He recalled the Fata Morgana, that he had seen once at the Strait of Messina, remembered accounts of that uncanny light-phenomenon of the German mountains, known as the Specter of the Brocken, in which colossal shadows are cast upon the clouds. But had this lost race mastered the laws of the mirage? Did they rule illusion?
    If this fantastic madness had already greeted them, what would they encounter beyond the range?

5. THE SIGN OF THE SNAKE
     
    “CONSIDER THIS ALSO,” Price said: “if any man turns back, we shall pursue him with the chariot of death, and leave his skull to make a nest for scorpions.”
    Fouad El Akmet muttered, and twisted his finger in his scrawny beard. The Arabs had refused to go farther, on the night before, had protested, even, at camping on the spot. Now, on the following morning, the old sheikh was vainly opposing any further advance.
    “Sidi, you know that the shadow was a warning. We may yet save our lives from the golden king of djinn—”
    “If we go on and conquer him!”
    “There is water in the pass,” Garth said. “A clear, sweet well. And you know the bitter waters of the last well are many days behind. Few of you would live to taste them.”
    Fouad wavered visibly.
    “Remember the chariot of death,” Price urged. “And the gold in it that is already yours, if you but stay.”
    “Wallah!” the Bedouin cried at last, though with obviously tepid enthusiasm. “We ride into the pass.”
    The rugged masses of the Jebel Harb loomed ragged and black against a pallid glow of pearl in the east, as the caravan toiled wearily upward again, over rolling foothills that were darkly purple in the dawn.
    The long line of camels wound into the pass, between soaring, cyclopean walls of elemental granite. The patch of sky ahead became a lurid high curtain of scarlet flame; the desert behind was lit with pastel hues of saffron and lavender.
    Price rode in the lead, beside Fouad, to keep alive the uncertain spark of the old man’s courage. Garth was back among the men; the tank, as usual, at the rear.
    The lower pass was a titanic gorge, a gargantuan gash through living rock. Its beetling walls, marching in rough parallel, seemed almost to close above its rugged, boulder-strewn floor. As Price and the old Arab picked a cautious way upward for the tender-footed camels, the sun rose to touch the high cliffs with a brush of scarlet fire, but the canyon remained shadow-filled.
    Scanning the narrowing walls ahead, Price saw a glittering flash at the base of a sandstone column, a mile up the gorge. Instinctively he goaded his camel into cover behind a gigantic fallen mass of granite.
    “The pass is guarded,” he called out to Fouad. “I saw the gleam of a blade, ahead. Better have your men take cover.”
    The old Arab groaned.
    Price saw that the old sheikh, struck motionless with terror, was staring at the man who had been riding just behind him.
    That man was the Arab Mustafa, a young warrior, mounting a black she-camel of whose gait and endurance he was inordinately proud. From the shelter of the fallen megalith, Price saw Mustafa freeze suddenly into strange immobility.
    The young Arab and his black camel became utterly motionless. The camel was poised rigid, in the very act of stepping, one forefoot lifted. The man leaned forward, mute wonder on his thin face, one hand lifted as if to shade his eyes. His brown abba and flowing white kafiyeh had become stiff as cast metal.
    “Ya, Mustafa!” old Fouad