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“What do you mean,” asked Boyle, “what mistakes?”

“Well, everybody knows it looked like biting off more than he could chew,” replied Horne Fisher. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that he always said that everybody knew things which about one person in two million was ever allowed to hear of. “And it was certainly jolly lucky that Travers turned up so well in the nick of time. Odd how often the right thing’s been done for us by the second in command, even when a great man was first in command. Like Colborne at Waterloo.”

“It ought to add a whole province to the Empire,” observed the other.

“Well, I suppose the Zimmernes would have insisted on it as far as the canal,” observed Fisher, thoughtfully, “though everybody knows adding provinces doesn’t always pay much nowadays.”

Captain Boyle frowned in a slightly puzzled fashion. Being cloudily conscious of never having heard of the Zimmernes in his life, he could only remark, stolidly:

“Well, one can’t be a Little Englander.”

Horne Fisher smiled, and he had a pleasant smile.

“Every man out here is a Little Englander,” he said. “He wishes he were back in Little England.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m afraid,” said the younger man, rather suspiciously. “One would think you didn’t really admire Hastings or–or–anything.”

“I admire him no end,” replied Fisher. “He’s by far the best man for this post; he understands the Moslems and can do anything with them. That’s why I’m all against pushing Travers against him, merely because of this last affair.”

“I really don’t understand what you’re driving at,” said the other, frankly.

“Perhaps it isn’t worth understanding,” answered Fisher, lightly, “and, anyhow, we needn’t talk politics. Do you know the Arab legend about that well?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about Arab legends,” said Boyle, rather stiffly.

“That’s rather a mistake,” replied Fisher, “especially from your point of view. Lord Hastings himself is an Arab legend. That is perhaps the very greatest thing he really is. If his reputation went it would weaken us all over Asia and Africa. Well, the story about that hole in the ground, that goes down nobody knows where, has always fascinated me, rather. It’s Mohammedan in form now, but I shouldn’t wonder if the tale is a long way older than Mohammed. It’s all about somebody they call the Sultan Aladdin, not our friend of the lamp, of course, but rather like him in having to do with genii or giants or something of that sort. They say he commanded the giants to build him a sort of pagoda, rising higher and higher above all the stars. The Utmost for the Highest, as the people said when they built the Tower of Babel. But the builders of the Tower of Babel were quite modest and domestic people, like mice, compared with old Aladdin. They only wanted a tower that would reach heaven– a mere trifle. He wanted a tower that would pass heaven and rise above it, and go on rising for ever and ever. And Allah cast him down to earth with a thunderbolt, which sank into the earth, boring a hole deeper and deeper, till it made a well that was without a bottom as the tower was to have been without a top. And down that inverted tower of darkness the soul of the proud Sultan is falling forever and ever.”

“What a queer chap you are,” said Boyle. “You talk as if a fellow could believe those fables.”

“Perhaps I believe the moral and not the fable,” answered Fisher. “But here comes Lady Hastings. You know her, I think.”

The clubhouse on the golf links was used, of course, for many other purposes besides that of golf. It was the only social center of the garrison beside the strictly military headquarters; it had a billiard room and a bar, and even an excellent reference library for those officers who were so perverse as to take their profession seriously. Among these was the great general himself, whose head of silver and face of bronze, like that of a brazen eagle, were often to be found bent over the charts and folios of the library. The great Lord Hastings believed in science and study, as in other severe ideals of life, and had given much paternal advice on the point to young Boyle, whose appearances in that place of research were rather more intermittent. It was from one of these snatches of study that the young man had just come out through the glass doors of the library on to the golf links. But, above all, the club was so appointed as to serve the social conveniences of ladies at least as much as gentlemen, and Lady Hastings was able to play the queen in such a society almost as much as in her own ballroom. She was eminently calculated and, as some said, eminently inclined to play such a part. She was much younger than her husband, an attractive and sometimes dangerously attractive lady; and Mr. Horne Fisher looked after her a little sardonically as she swept away with the young soldier. Then his rather dreary eye strayed to the green and prickly growths round the well, growths of that curious cactus formation in which one thick leaf grows directly out of the other without stalk or twig. It gave his fanciful mind a sinister feeling of a blind growth without shape or purpose. A flower or shrub in the West grows to the blossom which is its crown, and is content. But this was as if hands could grow out of hands or legs grow out of legs in a nightmare. “Always adding a province to the Empire,” he said, with a smile, and then added, more sadly, “but I doubt if I was right, after all!”