Long walls came to view, pierced by gates with fantastic arches.

Domes rose to heaven.

Delicate minarets, carved into a fretwork of amazing fineness, pointed their fingers at the yellow shimmering sky.

The contrast of that brilliance, with the soft green gardens and feathery palm-groves before, the grim black cliffs behind, filled the Legionaries with a kind of silent awe.
But most wonderful of all was the metallic shimmer of those walls, domes, minarets, under the high sun of this lost Arabian paradise.

So amazing was the prospect that, as _Nissr_ hurled herself in over the last ranges of the mountains and shot out across the open plain itself, only one man found words.
This man was Leclair.