"No such place!" they repeated.
"What about El Boob?" asked the Chancellor.
"There is no such person."
"And the Shriek-el-Foozlum?"
Powers shook his head.
"But do you mean to say," said the Premier in astonishment, "that there are no Wazoos? There you must be wrong. True we don't just know where they are. But our despatches have shown too many signs of active trouble traced directly to the Wazoos to disbelieve in them. There are Wazoos somewhere, there—there must be."
"The Wazoos," said Powers, "are there. But they are Irish. So are the Ohulîs. They are both Irish."
"But how the devil did they get out there?" questioned the Premier. "And why did they make the trouble?"
"The Irish, my lord," interrupted the Chief Secretary for Ireland, "are everywhere, and it is their business to make trouble."
"Some years ago," continued Powers, "a few Irish families settled out there. The Ohulîs should be properly called the O'Hooleys. The word Wazoo is simply the Urdu for McGinnis. El Boob is the Urdu for the Arabic El Papa, the Pope. It was my knowledge of Urdu, itself an agglutinative language——"