"Well," said Edwards, "I hope that this time we shall keep them, and take them safely back to Baghdad."
Arrived at our quarters in Nejf, we packed up our belongings, and were off again in half an hour, the Commandant seeing us for about a mile on our road, and then bidding us a friendly farewell. In order to make certain that we should not get lost again, he gave us an escort of twenty irregular cavalry, and I firmly believe, although Dimitri denied it, that they had instructions not to let us out of their sight until we had entered the courtyard of the Residency at Baghdad. At any rate, during our uneventful journey of the next four days, they were always about us, and on reaching the city, their sergeant requested the Consul-General to give him a letter practically amounting to a receipt for us.
What the Consul-General said to us, and what we said to him, are things best left untold. Suffice it to say, therefore, that at the conclusion of the interview, we still found ourselves alive. Moreover, on that night, and on many subsequent nights, we were the great man's guests at dinner.
After the life I had been leading, the humdrum existence in the city soon began to pall on me. I had, within a few days, seen everything that there was to be seen, and I grew tired of morning and evening canters outside the walls, and of trying to make the round wicker-work kufas go straight up and down the river. I longed to be back in the free desert, and one day, more out of fun than anything else, I suggested to Edwards that we should pay our promised visit to Adiba. He looked at me for a minute, as if he doubted my sanity.
"What you want," said he, "is sea air. You will never be quite right until you have taken a voyage."
"That does not sound very hospitable," said I, "considering that only yesterday you begged me to stay with you as long as I could."
"Yesterday," said Edwards, "I did not know that you were so unwell."
"To tell you the honest truth," said I, "I am sick to death of this life, and if Faris does not let me have some news of the Golden Girdle soon, I shall chuck the whole thing and go home."
"You do not mean to say," said Edwards, "that you are still building castles in the air."
"No," said I, "not in the air, I hope. But if you mean that you want to know whether I am still thinking of Queen Sophana's belt, I will break it to you gently that, much as I love you, George, nothing earthly would have induced me to hang about here for the last six weeks, unless I had been in daily expectation of getting news either from Faris or from Kellner."