The whole thing, when all is said and done, resolves itself down to about this: If a war involving operations in this “sphere” comes within the next twenty years, I,--and a couple of other chaps who are doing the same sort of work,--provided I do not lose my life, or my health, or the best of my faculties in the interim, will probably break all records outside of a Central American revolution for quick promotion. I should probably be a brigadier-general at forty, with ten or a dozen letters after my name. But if, as is likely, there is no war, I shall probably continue these little jaunts into the desert until my health gives out, when, at best, I shall be invalided home and retired on the half-pay of a captain or a major. So, you see, my future depends entirely upon whether or not some of our neighbours, or would-be neighbours, see fit to “start something” in this little neck of Central Asia within the next decade or two. And now that Russia is in the Entente, and we are acting so entirely in concert with her in Persia, I’m very much afraid that it’s going to be a case of the “hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.” II The following day we caught the river steamer at Bassorah, and four days later arrived at Bagdad, F---- putting up at the grim brown fort which housed the British Consulate, post office, and telegraph station. I saw him on and off for a week, usually at tiffins or dinners given for him by some of his British friends. At other times he was not to be found. “F---- _Sahib_ gone to bazaar,” his Pathan bearer invariably answered my inquiries; and F---- himself volunteered no more than that he was spending a good deal of time “renewing old acquaintances.” Then, at the end of about ten days, without a good-bye to anybody, so far as I could learn, he dropped from sight. “F---- is off again to his Arabs,” said his friends. “I am much relieved,” the Consul whispered to me. “They hung on him like leeches this time, but F---- got away by togging up as an Armenian _arabana_ driver when they were expecting him as an Arab. The Armenian came here, F---- stained his face, got into the chap’s clothes, and actually drove the _arabana_, with a load of passengers, to Kerbela. The Turks nabbed the real driver when they caught him going out on foot, but got little out of him, and I don’t think they know yet exactly what happened. F---- is far into the desert by this time.”