ancient than anything in that ancient land. There is a green fringe of palm and
prickly pear round the black mouth of the well; but nothing of the upper
masonry remains except two bulky and battered stones standing like the pillars
of a gateway of nowhere, in which some of the more transcendental
archaeologists, in certain moods at moonrise or sunset, think they can trace the
faint lines of figures or features of more than Babylonian monstrosity; while
the more rationalistic archaeologists, in the more rational hours of daylight,
see nothing but two shapeless rocks. It may have been noticed, however, that
all Englishmen are not archaeologists. Many of those assembled in such a
place for official and military purposes have hobbies other than archaeology.
And it is a solemn fact that the English in this Eastern exile have contrived to
make a small golf links out of the green scrub and sand; with a comfortable
clubhouse at one end of it and this primeval monument at the other. They did
not actually use this archaic abyss as a bunker, because it was by tradition
unfathomable, and even for practical purposes unfathomed. Any sporting
projectile sent into it might be counted most literally as a lost ball. But they
often sauntered round it in their interludes of talking and smoking cigarettes,
and one of them had just come down from the clubhouse to find another
gazing somewhat moodily into the well.
Both the Englishmen wore light clothes and white pith helmets and
puggrees, but there, for the most part, their resemblance ended. And they both
almost simultaneously said the same word, but they said it on two totally
different notes of the voice.
"Have you heard the news?" asked the man from the club. "Splendid.""Splendid," replied the man by the well. But the first man pronounced the
word as a young man might say it about a woman, and the second as an old
man might say it about the weather, not without sincerity, but certainly without
fervor.
And in this the tone of the two men was sufficiently typical of them. The
first, who was a certain Captain Boyle, was of a bold and boyish type, dark,
and with a sort of native heat in his face that did not belong to the atmosphere
of the East, but rather to the ardors and ambitions of the West. The other was
an older man and certainly an older resident, a civilian official—Horne Fisher;
and his drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the
paradox of the Englishman in the East. He was much too hot to be anything
but cool.
Neither of them thought it necessary to mention what it was that was
splendid. That would indeed have been superfluous conversation about
something that everybody knew. The striking victory over a menacing
combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by troops under the