Ascertaining that several members of the party were poorly mounted, he sent us six horses, the very best of his blood stock. The Amir lives in semi-regal style, and, as paramount chief of the Afshar tribe, is lord of his people and the arbiter of the lives {144} and fortunes of about five thousand tribal families, who render him unswerving, unquestioning obedience. Here was ancient feudalism in the heart of the twentieth-century Persian Empire! Although owing a nominal allegiance to the "King of Kings" in Teheran, the Amir apparently did not bother his head very much about party intrigues or the trend of national politics at the Court of the Shah. He did his own intriguing, and did it exceptionally well. A man of extraordinary ability and political shrewdness, he first coquetted with the Turks and then with the British, adroitly playing one off against the other in the great game of politics. Too careful to commit himself irrevocably to one side or the other while the Great World War was still undecided, this Oriental Vicar of Bray nevertheless contrived to maintain a cordial and unbroken friendship with both Turk and Briton. If a Turkish emissary, backing up his persuasive pleadings with a bag of gold, besought him to put an end to neutrality and to place his resources and his small army of irregulars at the service of his blood relatives, the Amir always accepted the gold cheerfully, and fervently wished success to the Turkish arms. Then the British, not to be outdone by the Turk, would ask, as a guarantee of his good faith, for fifty or a hundred armed levies from amongst his tribesmen. The Amir invariably agreed in principle, but he would point out that no self-respecting Afshari could fight at his best unless equipped with a British rifle. The latest pattern {145} army rifle would be forthcoming to the number required, but then a border foray would always be staged about the same time, and the wily Amir would plead, and with some show of reason, that he needed every sowar he had to prevent his territory being overrun by his powerful and unscrupulous tribal neighbours. Still, for all that, during the darkest of the famine days, he kept the British commissariat well supplied with grain, and that, too, at a reasonable price.