"Is there anything new?" asked Matthews, recognizing his caller's habit of finishing a sentence with a gesture. "Archdukes and that sort of thing don't seem to matter much in Dizful. I have even lost track of the date." "I would not have thought an Englishman so--_dolce far niente_," said Magin. "It is perhaps because we archaeologists feed on dates! I happen to recollect, though, that we first met on the eighteenth of July. And to-day, if you would like to know, is Saturday, the first of August, 1914." The flicker of amusement in his eyes became something more inscrutable. "But there is a telegraph even in Elam," he went on. "A little news trickles out of it now and then. Don't you ever catch, perhaps, some echo of the trickle?" "That's not my idea of a lark," laughed Matthews. Magin regarded him a moment. "Well," he conceded, "Europe does take on a new perspective from the point of view of Susa. I see you are a philosopher, sitting amidst the ruins of empires and wisely preferring the trickle of your fountain to the trickle of the telegraph. If Austria falls to pieces, if Serbia reaches the Adriatic, what is that to us? Nothing but a story that in Elam has been told too often to have any novelty! Eh?" "Why," asked Matthews, quickly, "is that on already?" Magin looked at him again a moment before answering. "Not yet! But why," he added, "do you say already?" His voice had a curious rumble in the dim stone room. Matthews wondered whether it were because the acoustic properties of a _serdab_ in Dizful differ from those of a galley on the Karun, or whether there really were something new about him. "Why, it's bound to come sooner or later, isn't it? If it's true that all the way from Nish to Ragusa those chaps speak the same language and belong to the same race, one can hardly blame them for wanting to do what the Italians and the Germans have already done. And, as a philosopher sitting amidst the ruins of empires, wouldn't you say yourself that Austria has bitten off rather more than she can chew?"