“Gaston. He’s not my Frenchman, though,” replied Matthews. “He went back long ago.”
“Oh!” uttered Magin. He declined the refreshments which Abbas at that point produced, even to the cigarette Matthews offered him. He merely glanced at the make. Then he examined, with a flicker of amusement in his eyes, the bare white-washed room. A runnel of water trickled across it in a stone channel that widened in the centre into a shallow pool. “A bit of a lark, eh? I remember that mot of yours, Mr. Matthews. To sit steaming, or perhaps I should say dreaming, in a sort of Turkish bath in the bottom of Elam while over there in Europe——”
“Is there anything new?” asked Matthews, recognising his caller’s habit of finishing a sentence with a gesture. “Archdukes and that sort of thing don’t seem to matter much in Dizful. I have even lost track of the date.”
“I would not have thought an Englishman so—dolce far niente,” said Magin. “It is perhaps because we archæologists feed on dates! I happen to recollect, though, that we first met on the eighteenth of July. And to-day, if you would like to know, is Saturday, the first of August, 1914.” The flicker of amusement in his eyes became something more inscrutable. “But there is a telegraph even in Elam,” he went on. “A little news trickles out of it now and then. Don’t you ever catch, perhaps, some echo of the trickle?”
“That’s not my idea of a lark,” laughed Matthews.
Magin regarded him a moment.
“Well,” he conceded, “Europe does take on a new perspective from the point of view of Susa. I see you are a philosopher, sitting amidst the ruins of empires and wisely preferring the trickle of your fountain to the trickle of the telegraph. If Austria falls to pieces, if Serbia reaches the Adriatic, what is that to us? Nothing but a story that in Elam has been told too often to have any novelty! Eh?”
“Why,” asked Matthews, quickly, “is that on already?”
Magin looked at him again a moment before answering.
“Not yet! But why,” he added, “do you say already?”