at made him hesitate, so portentously that he
sent Abbas for horses. And before the Ramazan gun boomed again he was
well on his way back to Meidan-i-Naft.

There was something unreal to him about that night ride eastward across
the dusty moonlit plain. He never forgot that night. The unexpectedness
of it was only a part of the unreality. What pulled him up short was a
new quality in the general unexpectedness of life. Life had always been,
like the trip from which he was returning, more or less of a lark.
Whereas it suddenly appeared that life might, perhaps, be very little of
a lark. So far as he had ever pictured life to himself he had seen it as
an extension of his ordered English countryside, beset by no hazard more
searching than a hawthorne hedge. But the plain across which he rode
gave him a new picture of it, lighted romantically enough by the moon,
yet offering a rider magnificent chances to break his neck in some
invisible nullah, if not to be waylaid by marauding Lurs or lions. It
even began to come to this not too articulate young man that romance and
reality might be the same thing, romance being what happens to the other
fellow and reality being what happens to you. He looked up at the moon
of war that had been heralded to him by cannon and tried to imagine
what, under that same moon far away in Europe, was happening to the
other fellow. For it was entirely on the cards that it might also happen
to him, Guy Matthews, who had gone up the Ab-i-Diz for a lark! That his
experience had an extraordinary air of having happened to some one else,
as he went back in his mind to his cruise on the river, his meeting with
the barge, his first glimpse of Dizful, the interlude of Bala Bala, the
return to Dizful, the cannon, Magin. Magin! He was extraordinary enough,
in all conscience, as Matthews tried to piece together, under his
romantic-realistic moon, the various unrelated fragments his memory
produced of that individual, connoisseur of Greek kylixes and Lur
nose-jewels, quoter of Scripture and secret agent.

The bounder must have known, as he sat smoking his cigar and ironizing
on the ruins of empires, that the safe and settled little world to which
they both belonged was already in a blaze. Of course he had known
it--and he had said nothing about it! But not least extraordinary was
the way the bounder, whom after all Matthews had only seen twice, seemed
to color the whole adventure. In fact, he had been the first s