As no one came to inform us of the readiness of the body, we went to Matti’s office there to wait. Matti was much affected by the sad event, and seemed to have no inclination for business that morning, and as the talk was bound to turn upon the ways and means of getting out of Sulaimania, we once more got to the subject of my leaving, and we arranged that if it were possible I should do so as soon as any opportunity offered, by caravan to Keui, whence I could get to Altun Keupri, or by one of the Shuan donkey-owners, who struck away from Sulaimania and reached Kirkuk by a long detour through their own country. And in that way, things being thus settled, it came about that Matti brought himself to the point of asking a question I suppose he must have wanted to put many a time. “Now, as you are soon going to leave us,” he said, “I want to put a question to you, at which, if you do not approve, you must not be offended, and will not answer. It is some time now since you first came here, and we have come to know one another pretty well, and I have done my best to help you. But I have seen one thing, and that is, that you have never done business before in Kurdistan, and that even had you, you are not sufficiently interested in the getting of money to succeed. You do not seem to care whether your speculations render you a profit or not, and your conversation, unlike that of a merchant, is never of money, but of such subjects as those talk of who are at no need to study business. You seem at more pains to cultivate a knowledge of Kurdish and Kurdistan than of its business, and you put yourself at more pains to buy a book than to do anything else. Habib, too, has noticed this, and we have often wondered the reason for a Persian, and a Persian of Shiraz at that, coming here at all; for though there were Persians in the old days here, they were of Hamadan, and a Shirazi has never been seen before. Still, you never volunteered any information, and I have not ventured to put any questions, for fear of offending. I must say that it is this very characteristic, this neglect of business for which you are ostensibly here, that has caused the police to notice you, and had you not won your way out of their clutches, Habib and myself would have suffered severely, for they lose no opportunity of bleeding one, and we might have been put under suspicion and blackmailed unmercifully.” “The only reply to frankness,” I said, “is frankness itself, and I will tell what may possibly surprise you, and which will not, I hope, lead you to consider me an impostor. You, like all the rest, have been deceived into thinking me what I originally represented myself to be, and I have a satisfaction in feeling that while I shall leave the others still under the delusion, I shall have been able to pay you part of the debt of gratitude I owe you by putting you alone in possession of the truth. [Sidenote: A CONFESSION OF IDENTITY]