“Do you propose to start a match-factory for the benefit of the inhabitants?”
“Perhaps. That and other things even more useful. I don’t think I shall want to hurry home. This is going to be an amusing experience, I fancy.”
“No. I can’t say I want to hurry home either. The war will probably take two or three months, and after that I should like to explore the country and study the people and the language. Also, I want to see if the beautiful Euphrosine is anything like her picture. Did Aryenis tell you where she was?”
Forsyth was rather keen on what I annoyed him by referring to as the Euphrosine myth. Since my conversation with Aryenis below the cliffs, however, and Euphrosine’s materialization into a real living person and a friend of Aryenis, I had had to admit that my classing her as a myth was unjustifiable.
“No. But I expect we’ll meet her in a day or two.”
“Well, we shall be here most of the winter, and it’s not much good going back till well on next year, so there’s lots of time to look round,” said the doctor as he turned in. “I’m for sleep now, however.”
“If the place is what it seems to be, a year is mighty little to explore it,” said Wrexham. “I’m inclined to think that several years would not be too much. It’s a sort of Middle Ages Europe tucked away into the heart of Asia, by the little we’ve seen.”
As he put out the light and we settled down to sleep, I also felt that it would want more than a year or so to explore. Indeed, I was beginning to think that even the matter of Aryenis would require a lifetime. She is so intensely vivid, and has a knack of hanging about your mind and popping up at odd moments just when you’re trying to go to sleep, or lazily contemplating the smoke of your pipe. And once Aryenis did slide into your mental vision—well, everything else seemed to slide out. The desert and the camels and the long road back through Kashgaria, the hills and the high passes, got dimmer and dimmer in perspective, and the Bombay or Karachi docks refused to be visualized at all when Aryenis’s eyes and her mouth and her red-gold hair entered—as of right—into what up till then I had always considered as my mind.
CHAPTER XIV
WE VISIT THE BORDER
We slept late next morning, and I was awakened by the men moving in our room. Dressing hurriedly, we went into the dining-hall to find Kyrlos and Stephnos. Aryenis was evidently enjoying to the full the delights of a real bed in a real house once more.