ler's habit
of finishing a sentence with a gesture. "Archdukes and that sort of
thing don't seem to matter much in Dizful. I have even lost track of the
date."

"I would not have thought an Englishman so--_dolce far niente_," said
Magin. "It is perhaps because we archaeologists feed on dates! I happen
to recollect, though, that we first met on the eighteenth of July. And
to-day, if you would like to know, is Saturday, the first of August,
1914." The flicker of amusement in his eyes became something more
inscrutable. "But there is a telegraph even in Elam," he went on. "A
little news trickles out of it now and then. Don't you ever catch,
perhaps, some echo of the trickle?"

"That's not my idea of a lark," laughed Matthews.

Magin regarded him a moment.

"Well," he conceded, "Europe does take on a new perspective from the
point of view of Susa. I see you are a philosopher, sitting amidst the
ruins of empires and wisely preferring the trickle of your fountain to
the trickle of the telegraph. If Austria falls to pieces, if Serbia
reaches the Adriatic, what is that to us? Nothing but a story that in
Elam has been told too often to have any novelty! Eh?"

"Why," asked Matthews, quickly, "is that on already?"

Magin looked at him again a moment before answering.

"Not yet! But why," he added, "do you say already?"

His voice had a curious rumble in the dim stone room. Matthews wondered
whether it were because the acoustic properties of a _serdab_ in Dizful
differ from those of a galley on the Karun, or whether there really were
something new about him.

"Why, it's bound to come sooner or later, isn't it? If it's true that
all the way from Nish to Ragusa those chaps speak the same language and
belong to the same race, one can hardly blame them for wanting to do
what the Italians and the Germans have already done. And, as a
philosopher sitting amidst the ruins of empires, wouldn't you say
yourself that Austria has bitten off rather more than she can chew?"

"Very likely I should." Magin took a cigar out of his pocket, snipped
off the end with a patent cutter, lighted it, and regarded the smoke
with a growing look of amusement. "But," he went on, "as a philosopher
sitting amidst the ruins of empires, I would hardly confine that
observation to Austria-Hungary. For instance, I have heard"--and his
look of amusement verged on a smile--"of an island in the Atlantic Ocean
not much larger than the land of Elam, an island of