ent of air began to blow upon him. He heard the creak of a
rusty hinge.

"He has opened the door," Suvaroff whispered. His teeth began to
chatter. "Nevertheless, I shall sleep to-night," he said to himself
reassuringly.

A faint footfall sounded upon the threshold.... Suvaroff drew the
bedclothes higher.

THE EMPEROR OF ELAM[8]

[Note 8: Copyright, 1917, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1918,
by H. G. Dwight.]

BY H. G. DWIGHT

From _The Century Magazine_.

_I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time
and chance happeneth to them all._

_Ecclesiastes_, ix, 11.

I

The first of the two boats to arrive at this unappointed rendezvous was
one to catch the eye even in that river of strange craft. She had
neither the raking bow nor the rising poop of the local _mehala_, but a
tall incurving beak, not unlike those of certain Mesopotamian
sculptures, with a windowed and curtained deck-house at the stern.
Forward she carried a short mast. The lateen sail was furled, however,
and the galley was propelled at a fairly good gait by seven pairs of
long sweeps. They flashed none too rhythmically, it must be added, at
the sun which had just risen above the Persian mountains. And although
the slit sleeves of the fourteen oarsmen, all of them young and none of
them ill to look upon, flapped decoratively enough about the handles of
the sweeps, they could not be said to present a shipshape appearance.
Neither did the black felt caps the boatmen wore, fantastically tall and
knotted about their heads with gay fringed scarves.

This barge had passed out of the Ab-i-Diz and was making its stately
enough way across the basin of divided waters below Bund-i-Kir, when
from the mouth of the Ab-i-Gerger--the easterly of two turbid threads
into which the Karun above this point is split by a long island--there
shot a trim white motor-boat. The noise she made in the breathless
summer sunrise, intensified and reechoed by the high clay banks which
here rise thirty feet or more above the water, caused the rowers of the
galley to look around. Then they dropped their sweeps in astonishment at
the spectacle of the small boat advancing so rapidly toward them without
any effort on the part of the four men it contained, as if blown by the
breath of jinn. The word _Fireng