‘There’s a dry wind blowing through the East and the parched grasses wait and spark.’ This is not the sort of language we associate with a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, but things were different in 1916. Not altogether different, however. ‘Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then?’ ‘Then there will be hell let loose in these parts pretty soon.’
Happily, for this is fiction, that hell will be arrested, the dry wind calmed, thanks to the efforts of our four heroes: a South African mining engineer of Scots extraction, the Eton- and Oxford-educated younger son of a Scottish peer, a dyspeptic American whose eyes have previously ‘seen nothing gorier than a Presidential election’, and an Afrikaner hunter with a dubious past: ‘He had been in Swaziland with Bob Macnab,
and you know what that means.’
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