The soft roes on toast arrived and he ordered another beer. And then on to the desert. The aeroplane on which he was making the journey to Baghdad had a mishap and landed in the desert. For four or five days no relief arrived. The little party soon exhausted their stock of sandwiches and had to fall back on bully-beef and biscuits. They made tea in petrol tins. A wise friend had insisted on giving Sir Walter a present of a bottle of whisky just before he left for the East. At the time he thought the present superfluous. But during the stay in the desert, it was invaluable. It made him most popular. He found it difficult to get on with the hard food. He was sixty-one. But it was another adventure and he loved it. He must have been the life of the little party. He invented a game. They chased paper boats to a given point on the sand, made a bet and then each ran after his fancy. They organized sweepstakes as to the time and hour and direction from which relief would come. Sir Walter never won. Relief came with Sir Edward Ellington on his way to Baghdad. The journey was resumed. At Baghdad Sir Walter sickened. But he flew to Mosul. At Mosul he fell sick of a fever. But his adventure was not over, so he shook off his fever and flew back to Baghdad. He saw and talked with everybody he could. He was delighted with Baghdad. The dream of years had come true and the truth was finer than the dream. That is how he found life. He recalled the taste of Baghdad. How an apparent mist was hanging over the city when they came to it from the air. How it was found to be not a mist, but the mud of centuries. He still had the curious taste of it, he said, as he gulped a little beer, as if to wash it away. The following morning he came to the office before leaving for Oxford. He made a few additional corrections to his book. The next news we had told us of his illness. But he was still light-hearted and we never knew how ill he was. In a letter to Colonel Daniel, written on May the 4th in reply to an invitation to dinner, he says: “It can’t be done. They work away at my temperature but without much success. They are of course tyrannical and refuse me beer, which I pine for. When I can get up to London we will have some beer. They also fill me with things the taste of which to any reverent natural theologian is sufficient proof that God never intended these things for human consumption. I hope it won’t be very long, but I am sure it can’t be next week.” The next week his fever had been diagnosed as typhoid, and on May the 13th he was dead. His last adventure was over. At the height of his powers he was touched and taken by the long arm of war.