"I
confess I did not realize how much of the spoils of Susa you were
carrying away in your chests. And I didn't take your gold anklet as a
bribe, though I didn't take you for too much of a gentleman in offering
it to me. But all I have to say now is that I shall stay in Dizful as
long as I please--and that you had better clear out of this house unless
you want me to kick you out."

"Heroics, eh? You obstinate little fool! I could choke you with one
hand!"

"You'd better try!" shouted Matthews.

He started in spite of himself when a muffled boom suddenly answered
him, jarring even the sunken walls of the room. Then he remembered that
voice of the drowsing city, bursting out with the pent-up brew of the
day.

"Ah!" exclaimed Magin strangely--"The cannon speaks at last! You will
hear, beside your fountain, what it has to say. That, at any rate, you
will perhaps understand--you and the people of your island." He stopped
a moment. "But," he went on, "if some fasting dervish knocks you on the
head with his mace, or sticks his knife into your back, don't say I
didn't warn you!"

And the echo of his receding stamp in the corridor drowned for a moment
the trickle of the invisible water.

V

The destiny of some men lies coiled within them, invisible as the blood
of their hearts or the stuff of their will, working darkly, day by day
and year after year, for their glory or for their destruction. The
destiny of other men is an accident, a god from the machine or an enemy
in ambush. Such was the destiny of Guy Matthews, as it was of how many
other unsuspecting young men of his time. It would have been
inconceivable to him, as he stood in his dark stone room listening to
Magin's receding stamp, that anything could make him do what Magin
demanded. Yet something did it--the last drop of the strange essence
Dizful had been brewing for him.

The letter that accomplished this miracle came to him by the hand of a
Bakhtiari from Meidan-i-Naft. It said very little. It said so little,
and that little so briefly, that Matthews, still preoccupied with his
own quarrel, at first saw no reason why a stupid war on the Continent,
and the consequent impossibility of telegraphing home except by way of
India, should affect the oil-works, or why his friends should put him in
the position of showing Magin the white feather. But as he turned over
the Bakhtiari's scrap of paper the meaning of it grew, in the light of
the very circumstances th