The two men gripped hands most cordially and firmly, and then Major Joseph Douglas turned on his heel and strode from the roof of the fortress, just as quietly and unostentatiously as he had strolled into the mess bungalow. This going away at a moment's notice was nothing new to him. An hour was sufficient in which to see that his servant had packed all his belongings. Half an hour later, in fact, saw him riding down the rough track which led from the mountain, and three days later he was in Bombay itself. The journey before him was something a little out of the ordinary. There was war in the air. There was already talk of a giant European conflagration, and of an outbreak of hostilities between Germany and Austria on the one hand, and France and Russia on the other. We all know now that that war quickly drew into its toils other combatants. That Great Britain came into the struggle to uphold her honour, and with the object of retrieving the downfall of Belgium and of wrecking the power of the German Kaiser. Yet this tale has little to do with the main theatre of that gigantic conflict. It deals with a part of the world hardly known in Europe, a part consisting of wide wastes of sand and gravel, and peopled by Arab and Turk and Armenian and Jew, not to mention Persians and peoples of other Asiatic races. What Major Joseph Douglas did not know of Mesopotamia and of the valleys of the Euphrates and of the Tigris may be said to have been hardly worth knowing. As a "political" he had made perhaps a dozen trips to this out-of-the-way part of the world, and being by nature attracted by the desert, and being vastly interested in the peoples living therein, those trips had become a source of huge enjoyment to him, so that return to his regiment in India had, after a while, become a sort of penance. His heart leapt at the thought of a further trip, yet, when he had read the papers, and when he had had an interview with the Governor at Bombay, even he--even light-hearted, cheerful, confident Joe Douglas--could not fail to see that danger, perhaps death, lay before him in those deserts. Yet he took ship for the Persian Gulf without hesitation, and, having landed at the township of Basra, disappeared entirely.