The whole history
of the world for the last few hundred years would have been different.
It is the greatest of all the lost chances in history.' Tommy waxed
pathetic over the loss.

"I was a little surprised at his eloquence, especially when he seemed
to remember himself and stopped all of a sudden. But for the next week
I got no peace with his questions. I told him all I knew of Bokhara,
and Samarkand, and Tashkend, and Yarkand. I showed him the passes in
the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush. I traced out the rivers, and I
calculated distances; we talked over imaginary campaigns, and set up
fanciful constitutions. It a was childish game, but I found it
interesting enough. He spoke of it all with a curious personal tone
which puzzled me, till one day when we were amusing ourselves with a
fight on the Zarafshan, and I put in a modest claim to be allowed to
win once in a while. For a second he looked at me in blank surprise.
'You can't,' he said; 'I've got to enter Samarkand before I can...'
and he stopped again, with a glimmering sense in his face that he was
giving himself away. And then I knew that I had surprised Tommy's
secret. While he was muddling his own job, he was salving his pride
with fancies of some wild career in Asia, where Tommy, disguised as the
lord knows what Mussulman grandee, was hammering the little states into
an empire.

"I did not think then as I think now, and I was amused to find so odd a
trait in a dull man. I had known something of the kind before. I had
met fellows who after their tenth peg would begin to swagger about some
ridiculous fancy of their own--their little private corner of soul
showing for a moment when the drink had blown aside their common-sense.
Now, I had never known the thing appear in cold blood and everyday
life, but I assumed the case to be the same. I thought of it only as a
harmless fancy, never imagining that it had anything to do with
character. I put it down to that kindly imagination which is the old
opiate for failures. So I played up to Tommy with all my might, and
though he became very discreet after the first betrayal, having hit
upon the clue, I knew what to look for, and I found it. When I told
him that the Labonga were in a devil of a mess, he would look at me
with an empty face and change the subject; but once among the Turcomans
his eye would kindle, and he would slave at his confounded folly with
sufficient energy to reform the whole East Coast.