It was a wretched thing, and had got the Oxus two hundred miles
out of its course. I pointed this out to Tommy, and to my amazement he
became quite excited. 'Nonsense,' he said. 'You don't mean to say it
goes south of that desert. Why, I meant to--,' and then he stammered
and stopped. I wondered what on earth he had meant to do, but I merely
observed that I had been there, and knew. That brought Tommy out of
his chair in real excitement. 'What!' he cried, 'you! You never told
me,' and he started to fire off a round of questions, which showed that
if he knew very little about the place, he had it a good deal in his
mind."

I drew some sketch-plans for him, and left him brooding over them.

"That was the first hint I got. The second was a few nights later,
when we were smoking in the billiard-room. I had been reading Marco
Polo, and the talk got on to Persia and drifted all over the north side
of the Himalaya. Tommy, with an abstracted eye, talked of Alexander
and Timour and Genghis Khan, and particularly of Prester John, who was
a character and took his fancy. I had told him that the natives in the
Pamirs were true Persian stock, and this interested him greatly. 'Why
was there never a great state built up in those valleys?' he asked.
'You get nothing but a few wild conquerors rushing east and west, and
then some squalid khanates. And yet all the materials were there--the
stuff for a strong race, a rich land, the traditions of an old
civilisation, and natural barriers against all invasion.'

"'I suppose they never found the man,' I said.

"He agreed. 'Their princes were sots, or they were barbarians of
genius who could devastate to the gates of Peking or Constantinople,
but could never build. They did not recognise their limits, and so
they went out in a whirlwind. But if there had been a man of solid
genius he might have built up the strongest nation on the globe. In
time he could have annexed Persia and nibbled at China. He would have
been rich, for he could tap all the inland trade-routes of Asia. He
would have had to be a conqueror, for his people would be a race of
warriors, but first and foremost he must have been a statesman. Think
of such a civilisation, THE Asian civilisation, growing up mysteriously
behind the deserts and the ranges! That's my idea of Prester John.
Russia would have been confined to the line of the Urals. China would
have been absorbed. There would have been no Japan.