He perceived, Guy Matthews, that his lark had indeed taken an unexpected turn. He was destined, far sooner than he dreamed, to be asked of life, and to answer, questions even more direct than this. But until now life had chosen to confront him with no problem more pressing than one of cricket or hunting. He was therefore troubled by an unwonted confusion of feelings. For he felt that his ordinary vocabulary--made up of such substantives as lark, cheek, and bounder, and the comprehensive adjective "rum"--fell short of coping with this extraordinary speech. He even felt that he might possibly have answered in a different way, but for that unspeakable offer of money. And the rumble of Magin's bass in the dark stone room somehow threw a light on the melancholy land without, somehow gave him a dim sense that he did not answer for himself alone--that he answered for the tradition of Layard and Rawlinson and Morier and Sherley, of Clive and Kitchener, of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson, of all the adventurous young men of that beloved foggy island at which this pseudo-Brazilian jeered. "When I first met you in the river, Mr. Magin," he said, quietly, "I confess I did not realize how much of the spoils of Susa you were carrying away in your chests. And I didn't take your gold anklet as a bribe, though I didn't take you for too much of a gentleman in offering it to me. But all I have to say now is that I shall stay in Dizful as long as I please--and that you had better clear out of this house unless you want me to kick you out." "Heroics, eh? You obstinate little fool! I could choke you with one hand!" "You'd better try!" shouted Matthews. He started in spite of himself when a muffled boom suddenly answered him, jarring even the sunken walls of the room. Then he remembered that voice of the drowsing city, bursting out with the pent-up brew of the day. "Ah!" exclaimed Magin strangely--"The cannon speaks at last! You will hear, beside your fountain, what it has to say. That, at any rate, you will perhaps understand--you and the people of your island." He stopped a moment. "But," he went on, "if some fasting dervish knocks you on the head with his mace, or sticks his knife into your back, don't say I didn't warn you!" And the echo of his receding stamp in the corridor drowned for a moment the trickle of the invisible water. V