A light breeze, lazying over the plain, stirred the fronded tufts of the date-palms' thick plantations.
Beyond a massy grove, stretching for nearly two miles out from the northernmost gate of the city, a grassy level quite like a parade-ground invited the liner to rest.
As she sank still lower, the Master's glass again picked up the city wall and ran along it.

Here, there, white dots were visible; human figures, surely--the figures of men in snowy burnouses, on the ramparts of heavy metal.
The Master smiled, and nodded.
"My men think they are surprised," he mused.

"What will these Jannati Shahr men think, when I have opened my little box of tricks and shown them what's inside ?" He pressed a button on the rail.

A bell trilled in the pilot-house; another in the engine-room.

The Norcross-Brails died to inactivity.
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.