Our host was usually "at home" to distinguished visitors from four to five a.m. He sent to say that the state of his health forbade his receiving us at the more conventional hour of noon. The Amir, I learned afterwards, was a confirmed opium-eater, his daily dose of the drug being far in excess of the quantity consumed by our own candid de Quincey. He was an old man, verging on eighty, but although his physical health was indifferent, his mental energies were unimpaired. He rarely ventured abroad, and spent his days and nights in the privacy of his apartment, abandoning himself to the full enjoyment of his enthralling passion of opium-eating. At daylight he was usually recovering from his latest dose of the drug. Then he would partake of a little food, see callers, read his letters, and depart for dreamland again, carried thither on the wings of the insidious and baneful poppy extract. One morning at dawn the members of the Wagstaff Mission paid a ceremonial call on the Amir. {146} Fortunately we were accustomed to early rising. We were conducted to his presence with considerable ceremony, and found him reclining on the floor of a large apartment covered with rare Persian rugs. There was little else in the way of furniture in the place. I saw before me an old man with shrivelled, sunken features, piercing black eyes, and a grey beard growing on a face the colour of yellow parchment. A long, thin, bony hand was held out for us to shake in turn, the Amir excusing himself from rising on account of physical weakness. He bade us welcome in a quavering, piping voice. Whatever else may have been his infirmities, it soon became clear that he had a remarkably alert brain. The most recent phases of the European War, the varying fortunes of the participants engaged therein, the latest tit-bit of scandal from Teheran, and the pretensions of the Turks to territorial occupation of Azarbaijan and possible aggrandizement at the expense of Persia, all these topics drew from the aged but mentally virile potentate pungent and sagacious criticism. He talked high strategy with all the assurance of a Field-Marshal, and gleefully told how he had politically out-manoeuvred the wily, calculating Turk in a recent little _affaire à deux_. While he spoke he ran his hand idly through a pile of correspondence, read and unread, opened and unopened, which littered the floor beside him. Letter-filing has evidently not reached any high standard at Karasf. {147} I think we all fell under the spell of our host's well-informed mind and his world-wide interests, and when he asked if there had been any Cabinet changes recently in London, and whether Lloyd George was still Chief Minister of our King, we felt that the march of contemporary events, rapid indeed as they can be sometimes, had failed to outstrip the keen alertness of the overlord of Karasf.