"Only my fun!" he said. "Look here, Keith, there's nothing for you to be ashamed of in the fact that you can talk these Eastern languages. My word! I wish I could! For it would be worth quite a handsome little addition to my daily pay--and that to a Commander in the Royal Navy is something always worth considering. Besides, think of the added interest it gives you in a campaign such as this is! How free it makes you! And what possibility it presents of splendid adventure! Now I wouldn't mind guessing that if you were surrounded by the enemy, and were, as it were, blockaded in one of their towns, you would be quite capable of turning out as a Turk, provided you could get the disguise, and of giving them the slip. How's that, eh?" Geoff admitted the possibility with a cheery laugh, for no one could be serious when Commander Houston was addressing him. "I've done it already, sir," he told him, with a grin. "You see, Major Douglas--who's an Indian 'political', and who happens to be my guardian--brought me to Mesopotamia some while ago, and we went right into the heart of the country. The Major knows all sorts of Arabs and other people, and it's part of his job--or was, at any rate, in peace times--to find out everything that was going on; what the Turks were doing, what the Arabs thought of them, and how the various nationalities lived." "Half a minute!" smiled the Commander. "What about the Germans?" "Germans! Of course," admitted Geoff, "they were to be met with in all sorts of odd corners, and conducting every sort of extraordinary business. My suspicion is that their businesses, on many occasions, were absolutely fictitious; in fact, they had no real business in many cases, and were simply agents of the German Government sent into the country to worm out the secrets of the Turks, and more particularly to find out precisely what opportunities there were for trade, and what portion of it the British had secured." "Hear! Hear!" echoed the Commander. "You can quite understand that being ordered to the Persian Gulf, and having to steam up and down that extremely uninteresting, not to say unhealthy part, left a man plenty of time for ruminating, for discussing matters in general, and for learning in particular something of what was happening in this portion of Turkey and in Persia. A fellow couldn't steam up to Basra--as we did now and again in one of our pinnaces--without knocking up against Germans--fat Germans, thin Germans, ugly Germans (lots of ugly ones, my boy)--Germans who were conducting some sort of trade, and who appeared at first sight to be the most harmless and almost the most helpless people under the sun. But that's your wily German all over!