from the river--bore Turkish spoils of battle.
Here hung more rifles, there a Kurdish yataghan with two hand-grenades
from Gallipoli, and a blood-red banner with a crescent and one star
worked in gold thread. Aviator's gauntlets draped the staff of the
banner.

Along the eastern side of this eyrie a broad divan invited one to
rest. Over it were suspended Austrian and Bulgarian captures--a lance
with a blood-stiffened pennant, a cuirass, entrenching tools, a steel
helmet with an eloquent bullet-hole through the crown. Some few framed
portraits of noted "aces" hung here and elsewhere, with two or three
photographs of battle-planes. Three of the portraits were framed in
symbolic black. Part of a smashed Taube propeller hung near.

As for the western side of _Niss'rosh_, this space between the two
broad windows that looked out over the light-spangled city, the Hudson
and the Palisades, was occupied by a magnificent Mercator's Projection
of the world. This projection was heavily annotated with scores of
comments penciled by a firm, virile hand. Lesser spaces were occupied
by maps of the campaigns in Mesopotamia and the Holy Land. One map,
larger than any save the Mercator, showed the Arabian Peninsula. A
bold question-mark had been impatiently flung into the great,
blank stretch of the interior; a question-mark eager, impatient,
challenging.

It was at this map that the master of _Niss'rosh_, the eagle's nest,
was peering as the curtain rises on our story. He was half reclining
in a big, Chinese bamboo chair, with an attitude of utter and
disheartening boredom. His crossed legs were stretched out, one heel
digging into the soft pile of the Tabreez rug. Muscular arms folded
in an idleness that irked them with aching weariness, he sat there,
brooding, motionless.

Everything about the man spelled energy at bay, forces rusting,
ennui past telling. But force still dominated. Force showed in the
close-cropped, black hair and the small ears set close to the head;
in the corded throat and heavy jaws; in the well-muscled shoulders,
sinewed hands, powerful legs. This man was forty-one years old,
and looked thirty-five. Lines of chest and waist were those of the
athlete. Still, suspicions of fat, of unwonted softness, had begun to
invade those lines. Here was a splendid body, here was a dominating
mind in process of going stale.

The face of the man was a mask of weariness of the soul, which kills
so vastly more efficiently tha