peoples. But there you must help me. I know nothing about Islam, and
I gather that you do.'

'Why?' he asked.

'Because of what you have done already,' I answered.

Stumm had translated all this time, and had given the sense of my words
very fairly. But with my last answer he took liberties. What he gave
was: 'Because the Dutchman thinks that we have some big card in dealing
with the Moslem world.' Then, lowering his voice and raising his
eyebrows, he said some word like 'uhnmantl'.

The other looked with a quick glance of apprehension at me. 'We had
better continue our talk in private, Herr Colonel,' he said. 'If Herr
Brandt will forgive us, we will leave him for a little to entertain
himself.' He pushed the cigar-box towards me and the two got up and
left the room.

I pulled my chair up to the stove, and would have liked to drop off to
sleep. The tension of the talk at supper had made me very tired. I
was accepted by these men for exactly what I professed to be. Stumm
might suspect me of being a rascal, but it was a Dutch rascal. But all
the same I was skating on thin ice. I could not sink myself utterly in
the part, for if I did I would get no good out of being there. I had
to keep my wits going all the time, and join the appearance and manners
of a backveld Boer with the mentality of a British
intelligence-officer. Any moment the two parts might clash and I would
be faced with the most alert and deadly suspicion.

There would be no mercy from Stumm. That large man was beginning to
fascinate me, even though I hated him. Gaudian was clearly a good
fellow, a white man and a gentleman. I could have worked with him for
he belonged to my own totem. But the other was an incarnation of all
that makes Germany detested, and yet he wasn't altogether the ordinary
German, and I couldn't help admiring him. I noticed he neither smoked
nor drank. His grossness was apparently not in the way of fleshly
appetites. Cruelty, from all I had heard of him in German South West,
was his hobby; but there were other things in him, some of them good,
and he had that kind of crazy patriotism which becomes a religion. I
wondered why he had not some high command in the field, for he had had
the name of a good soldier. But probably he was a big man in his own
line, whatever it was, for the Under-Secretary fellow had talked small
in his presence, and so great a man as Gaudian clearly respected him.
There must be no lack