n that it must be Egypt," said I. "A long march, but
friends at the other end. Who but doubts Russians?"

He shook his head. "Syria and Palestine," he said, "are full of an
army gathering to invade Egypt. It eats up the land like locusts. An
elephant could march easier unseen into a house than we into Syria!"

"So we must double back?" said I. "Good! By now they must have
ceased looking for us, supposing they ever thought us anything but
drowned. Somewhere we can surely find a ship in which to cross to
Gallipoli!"

He laughed and shook his head again. "We slipped through the one
unguarded place," he said. "If we had come one day later that place,
too, would have been held by some watchful one, instead of by the
fool we found in charge."

Then at last I thought surely I knew what his objective MUST be. It
had been common talk in Flanders how an expedition marched from
Basra up the Tigris.

"Bagdad!" I said. "We march to Bagdad to join the British there!
Bagdad is good!"

But he answered, "Bagdad is not yet taken--not yet nearly taken.
Between us and Bagdad lies a Turkish army of fifty or sixty thousand
men at least."

I sat silent. I can draw a map of the world and set the rivers and
cities and boundaries down; so I knew that if we could go neither
north--nor south--nor westward, there remained only eastward,
straight-forward into Persia. He read my thoughts, and nodded.

"Persia is neutral," he said, with a wave of his hand that might
mean anything. "The Turks have spared no army for one section of the
Persian frontier, choosing to depend on savage tribes. And the
Germans have given them Wassmuss to help out."

"Ah!" said I, making ready to learn at last who Wassmuss might be.
"When we have found this Wassmuss, are we to make him march with us
like Tugendheim?"

"If what the Germans in Stamboul said of him is only half-true," he
answered, "we shall find him hard to catch. Wassmuss is a remarkable
man. Before the war he was consul in Bagdad or somewhere, and he
must have improved his time, for he knows enough now to keep all the
tribes stirred up against Russians and British. The Germans send him
money, and he scatters it like corn among the hens; but the money
would be little use without brains. The Germans admire him greatly,
and he certainly seems a man to be wondered at. But he is the one
weak point, nevertheless--the only key that can open a door for us."

"But if he is too wary to be caught?" said I.