llen pretty flat. The
ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back
number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet--I don't know. I do
not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number.'

'Look at it in another way,' he went on. 'If it were Enver and Germany
alone dragging Turkey into a European war for purposes that no Turk
cared a rush about, we might expect to find the regular army obedient,
and Constantinople. But in the provinces, where Islam is strong, there
would be trouble. Many of us counted on that. But we have been
disappointed. The Syrian army is as fanatical as the hordes of the
Mahdi. The Senussi have taken a hand in the game. The Persian Moslems
are threatening trouble. There is a dry wind blowing through the East,
and the parched grasses wait the spark. And that wind is blowing
towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?'

Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and
distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window,
and far off the hoot of taxis in Whitehall.

'Have you an explanation, Hannay?' he asked again.

'It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought,'
I said. 'I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a
scattered empire.'

'You are right,' he said. 'You must be right. We have laughed at the
Holy War, the jehad that old Von der Goltz prophesied. But I believe
that stupid old man with the big spectacles was right. There is a
jehad preparing. The question is, How?'

'I'm hanged if I know,' I said; 'but I'll bet it won't be done by a
pack of stout German officers in _pickelhaubes_. I fancy you can't
manufacture Holy Wars out of Krupp guns alone and a few staff officers
and a battle cruiser with her boilers burst.'

'Agreed. They are not fools, however much we try to persuade ourselves
of the contrary. But supposing they had got some tremendous sacred
sanction--some holy thing, some book or gospel or some new prophet from
the desert, something which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of
German war the glamour of the old torrential raids which crumpled the
Byzantine Empire and shook the walls of Vienna? Islam is a fighting
creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one
hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of
the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams
of Paradise? What the