Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
Nor did he make of Matthews any but the most perfunctory inquiries. "And Monsieur What was his name? Your Frenchman?" he continued. "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.
Deserter, you have taken the road which, in war time, ends between a firing-squad and a stone wall." Gaston, evidently, had not reflected on that. He stared at his nickel cap, turning it around in his fingers. "You see?" continued Magin. "Well then, what about that little Gaston?
The German, at any rate, did not seem to trouble himself about it. When Gaston next looked over his shoulder, Magin was lying flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, with his hands under his head and his eyes closed. And so he continued to lie, silent and apparently asleep, while his troubled companion, hand on wheel and béret on ear, steered through the waning moonlight of the Karun.
It was answered, as before, by the deep voice of the Brazilian. He stood at the rail of the barge as the motor-boat glided alongside. "Ah, mon vieux, you are alone this time?" said Magin genially. "Where are the others?" "I do not figure to myself," answered Gaston, "that you derange yourself to inquire for my sacred devil of a Bakhtiari, who has taken the key of the fields.
Magin's heavy voice resounded in the portico very like a bellow. "You, Ganz, sent this man to the Father of Swords? He might be one of those lieutenants from India who go smelling around in their holidays, so pink and innocent!" "What is that to me?" demanded the Swiss, raising his own voice. "Or to you either? After all, Senhor Magin, are you the Emperor of Elam?" The Brazilian laughed.
Magin himself bent over to listen to the ripple, partly showing his face as he turned his ear to the keys. He showed, too, in the lessening gloom, a smile Matthews had never seen before, more extraordinary than anything. Yet even as Matthews watched it, in his stupefaction, the smile changed, broadened, hardened.
Spades exist, but there's no inherent virtue in talking about them. In fact it's often better not to mention them at all. There's something very funny about words, you know. They so often turn out to mean more than you expected." At that Magin regarded his companion with a new interest. "I would not have thought you knew that, at your age!
Nor could our incipient connoisseur of rum towns pretend that the sight of Magin bowing in the doorway was wholly unwelcome, so long had he been stewing there in the sun by himself. What annoyed him, what amused him, what in spite of himself impressed him, was to see how the bounder ignored advantages of position. Matthews had forgotten, too, what an imposing individual the bounder really was.
For it was entirely on the cards that it might also happen to him, Guy Matthews, who had gone up the Ab-i-Diz for a lark! That his experience had an extraordinary air of having happened to some one else, as he went back in his mind to his cruise on the river, his meeting with the barge, his first glimpse of Dizful, the interlude of Bala Bala, the return to Dizful, the cannon, Magin. Magin!
"Is there anything new?" asked Matthews, recognizing 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!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking