the Great who has seen what it might
be. It is not so impossible that I might open again those choked-up
canals which once made these burnt plains a paradise. In those mountains
I have found--what I have found. What right have you to interfere with
me, who are only out for a lark? Or what right have your countrymen?
They have already, as you so gracefully express it, bitten off so much
more than they can chew. The Gulf, the Karun, the oil-wells--they are
yours. Take them. But Baghdad is ours: if not today, then tomorrow. And
if you will exercise that logical process of which your British mind
appears to be not altogether destitute, you can hardly help seeing that
this part of your famous neutral zone, if not the whole of it, falls
into the sphere of Baghdad. You know, too, that we do things more
thoroughly than you. Therefore I must very respectfully but very firmly
ask you, at your very earliest convenience, to leave Dizful. I am quite
willing to believe, however, that your interference with my arrangements
was accidental. And I dislike to put you to any unnecessary trouble. So
I shall be happy to compensate you, in marks, _tomans_, or pounds
sterling, for any disappointment you may feel in bringing this
particular lark to an end. Do you now understand me? How much do you
want?"

He perceived, Guy Matthews, that his lark had indeed taken an unexpected
turn. He was destined, far sooner than he dreamed, to be asked of life,
and to answer, questions even more direct than this. But until now life
had chosen to confront him with no problem more pressing than one of
cricket or hunting. He was therefore troubled by an unwonted confusion
of feelings. For he felt that his ordinary vocabulary--made up of such
substantives as lark, cheek, and bounder, and the comprehensive
adjective "rum"--fell short of coping with this extraordinary speech. He
even felt that he might possibly have answered in a different way, but
for that unspeakable offer of money. And the rumble of Magin's bass in
the dark stone room somehow threw a light on the melancholy land
without, somehow gave him a dim sense that he did not answer for himself
alone--that he answered for the tradition of Layard and Rawlinson and
Morier and Sherley, of Clive and Kitchener, of Drake and Raleigh and
Nelson, of all the adventurous young men of that beloved foggy island at
which this pseudo-Brazilian jeered.

"When I first met you in the river, Mr. Magin," he said, quietly,