wind that sighed among the shrubs, headquarters looked and sounded more
like a deserted ancient castle than the cranium and brain-cells of
Administration.

We heard Yussuf Dakmar stop his cab two hundred yards away. The cabman
turned his horses and drove back toward Jerusalem without calling on
Allah to witness that his fare should have been twice what he received;
he didn't even lash the horses savagely; so we supposed that he hadn't
been paid, and went on to deduce from that that Yussuf Dakmar had driven
away again, after satisfying himself that the Feisul letter had reached
headquarters. It was lazy, bad reasoning--the sort of superficial,
smart stuff that has cost the lives of thousands of good men times out
of number--four o'clock o' the morning intelligence that, like the
courage of that hour, needs priming by the foreman, or the
sergeant-major, or the bosun as the case may be.

The sentry turned out the guard, who let us through the gate after a
word with Narayan Singh; and the man who leaned on his bayonet under
the portico at the end of the drive admitted us without any argument at
all.

I suppose he thought that having come that far we must be people in
authority. Ever since then I have believed all the stories told me
about spies who walked where they chose unchallenged during wartime;
for we three--a Sikh enlisted man, an Australian disguised as an Arab,
and an American in civilian clothes--entered unannounced and unwatched
the building where every secret of the Near East was pigeonholed.

We walked about the corridors and up and downstairs for ten minutes,
looking in vain for Grim. Here and there a servant snored on a mat in a