At this rate the Master understood the Flying Legion was slated for very speedy destruction.
"It's touch-and-go now," he pondered.

"We've got to annihilate these infernal Bedouins, repair the liner and get ahead, or--but there's no 'or' in this! None, at all!" As dark settled down over the Sahara, the leprous patches of white, saline earth took on a ghostly pallor.

The light of the southern stars began to glow with soft radiance.

A gigantic emptiness, a rolling vacancy of sea and earth--brine-waves to rear of the Legion, sand-waves ahead--shrank the party to seeming insignificance.
A soft, purple tapestry of night unrolled across the desert; the wind died, and the suffocating breath of overheated sands began to emanate from the baked earth.

And ever more and more pestiferously the infernal torment of the flies increased.
Inflamed with chagrin, rage, and grief for the lost comrades, the Legionaries lay in waiting.