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There were still thirty miles to do, and fresh horses were to be hired of some fasting charvadar who would never consent in Ramazan, Matthews very well knew, to start for Meidan-i-Naft under the terrific August sun. But he was not ungrateful for a chance to rest. He discovered in himself, too, a sudden interest in all the trickle of the telegraph.
But as he turned over the Bakhtiari's scrap of paper the meaning of it grew, in the light of the very circumstances that made him hesitate, so portentously that he sent Abbas for horses. And before the Ramazan gun boomed again he was well on his way back to Meidan-i-Naft. There was something unreal to him about that night ride eastward across the dusty moonlit plain. He never forgot that night.
"Bitumen, eh?" exclaimed the slim young man. "Where did you get it?" "Do you ask, you who drill oil at Meidan-i-Naft?" "As it happens, I don't!" smiled the slim young man. "At any rate," continued the stranger, after a scarcely perceptible pause, "let me welcome you on board the Ark."
It would have been inconceivable to him, as he stood in his dark stone room listening to Magin's receding stamp, that anything could make him do what Magin demanded. Yet something did it the last drop of the strange essence Dizful had been brewing for him. The letter that accomplished this miracle came to him by the hand of a Bakhtiari from Meidan-i-Naft. It said very little.
And what a touch!" Matthews heard from Ganz's private quarters a welling of music so different from the pipes and cow-horns of Dizful that it gave him a sudden stab of homesickness. "I say," he said, brightening, "could it be any of the fellows from Meidan-i-Naft?" The ambiguous blue eye brightened too. "Perhaps! It is the river music from Rheingold. But listen," Ganz added with a smile.
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