Adventure Magazine Cover — page 55: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The King in Check punishment. Sikhs are a fine race—but curious—distinctly curious and given to un- usual amusement. When Mabel had fin- ished with me at last I stuck a needle into him, and he laughed accepting the stab as a compliment. A strange thing is how men settle down after excitement. Birds do the same thing. a hawk swoops down a hedgerow; there is a great flutter, followed by sudden silence. A minute later the chattering begins again, without any reference to one of their num- ber being torn in the plunderer’s beak. And so we; even Grim loosened up and gossiped about Feisul and the already an- cient days when Feisul was the up-to-date Saladin leading Arab hosts to victery. But there was an even stranger circum- stance than that. We weren’t the only people in the train; our car for instance, was fairly well occupied by Armenians, Arabs, and folk whose vague nationality came under the general head of Levantine. The car ahead where the fight teok place, though not crowded wasn’t vacant, and there were others in the car behind. Yet not one of them from first to last made a move to interfere. They minded their own ~ business, which proves, I think, that man- ners are based mainly on discretion. As the train gasped slowly up the grade and rolled bumpily at last along the fertile, neglected Syrian highland, all the Armenians on the train removed their hats and substi- tuted the red tarboosh, preferring the head- gear of a convert rather than be the target of every Bedouin with a rifle in his hand. The whole journey was a mix-up of things to wonder at—not least of them the matter- of-fact confidence with which the train pro- ceeded along a single track, whose condition left you wondering at each bump whether the next wouldn’t be the journey’s violent end. There were lamps, but no oil for light when evening came. Once, when we bumped over a shaky culvert and a bushel or two of coal dust fell from the rusty tender, the engineer stopped the train and his assistant went back with a shovel and piece of sacking to gather up the precious stuff. There was nothing but squalid villages and ruins, goats and an occasional rare camel to be seen through the window—not a tree anywhere, the German General Staff having attended to that job thoroughly. There is honey in the country and it’s plentiful as well as good, because bees are 4 49 not easy property to raid and make away with; but the milk is from goats, and as for overflowing, I would hate to have to punish the dugs of a score of the brutes to get a jug- ful for dinner. Syria’s wealth is of the past and the future. _ — Long before it grew too dark to watch the landscape we were wholly converted to Grim’s argument that Syria was no place for a man of Feisul’s caliber. The Arab owners of the land are plundered to the bone; the men with money are foreigners, whose only care is for a government that will favor this religion and that breed. To set up a kingdom there would be like preaching a new religion in Hester Street; you could hand out text, soup and blankets, but you’d need a whale’s supply of faith to carry on and the offertories wouldn’t begin to meet expenses. Until that journey finally convinced me, I had been wondering all the while in the back of my head whether Grim wasn’t in- tending an impertinence. It hasn’t been my province hitherto to give advice to kings; for one thing, they haven’t asked me for it. If I were asked, I think I’d take the problem pretty seriously and hesitate before suggesting to a man on whom the hope of fifty million people rests that he’d better pull up stakes and eat crow in exile for the present. I’d naturally hate to be a king, but if I were one I don’t think quitting would look good, and I think I’d feel like kicking the fellow who suggested it. But the view from the train, and Grim’s talk with Hadad put me in a mood in which Syria didn’t seem good enough for a soap- box politician, let alone a man of Feisul’s fame and character. And when at last a few lights in a cluster down the track pro- claimed that we were drawing near Damas- cus, | was ready to advise everybody, Feisul included, to get out in a hurry while a chance remained. CHAPTER XIII “Bismillaht What a mercy that I met youl” VV Bite the fireman scraped the iron floor for his last two shovelfuls of coal-dust and the train wheezed wearily into the dark station Grim began to busy him- self in mysterious ways. Part of his own costume consisted of a short, curved simi- tar attached to an embroidered belt—the sort of thing that Arabs wear for ornament COnniclboooks (C@