“Middle Ages for a cert,” said Wrexham. “I wonder if the Shamans’ front door is anything like their back one? If so, I wish I had a few bags of blasting-powder or a box or two of guncotton or ammonal. Otherwise, I rather visualize Kyrlos’s troops sitting down in front of it with wooden towers, and wet hides, and all the usual accessories one reads of in Virgil, and not getting very much farther.” “That means to say that it’s merely a question of starving them out, then.” “Yes, or else some kind of treachery, or a Trojan wooden horse stunt. I wonder if there’s any nitre in the country?” He was turning over the pages of a sort of compendium book he had made up while we were fitting out in Calcutta, and which never left his valise. It contained, I think, every known recipe for the manufacture of what Wrexham comprehensively but vaguely referred to as “engineer stores.” “Also phosphorus?” “What’s the phosphorus wanted for?” I asked. “Matches, dear man, matches. We’ve not many left, and the Sakae flint and steel doesn’t attract my cultured taste.” “Do you propose to start a match-factory for the benefit of the inhabitants?” “Perhaps. That and other things even more useful. I don’t think I shall want to hurry home. This is going to be an amusing experience, I fancy.” “No. I can’t say I want to hurry home either. The war will probably take two or three months, and after that I should like to explore the country and study the people and the language. Also, I want to see if the beautiful Euphrosine is anything like her picture. Did Aryenis tell you where she was?” Forsyth was rather keen on what I annoyed him by referring to as the Euphrosine myth. Since my conversation with Aryenis below the cliffs, however, and Euphrosine’s materialization into a real living person and a friend of Aryenis, I had had to admit that my classing her as a myth was unjustifiable. “No. But I expect we’ll meet her in a day or two.” “Well, we shall be here most of the winter, and it’s not much good going back till well on next year, so there’s lots of time to look round,” said the doctor as he turned in. “I’m for sleep now, however.” “If the place is what it seems to be, a year is mighty little to explore it,” said Wrexham. “I’m inclined to think that several years would not be too much. It’s a sort of Middle Ages Europe tucked away into the heart of Asia, by the little we’ve seen.”