"You ought to be buried up to the neck and fed with a shovel!" Jeremy
informed him in blunt English after listening to the solo for a while.

"Aha! That is the way they used to treat criminals in Persia," he
answered pleasantly, with his mouth full of goat's milk cheese. "Only
they put plaster of Paris in the hole, and when it rained the wretched
man was squeezed until the blood came out of his mouth and eyes, and he
died in agony. But how comes it that you speak to me in English? If we
are both Arabs, why not talk the mother tongue?"

"My rump is my rump and the land is its rulers," Jeremy answered in
Arabic, quoting the rudest proverb he could think of on the spur of the
moment.

"Ah! And who is its ruler? Who is to be its ruler?"

Yussuf Dakmar made a surreptitious face at Grim, and his little cold
eyes shone like a hungry pariah dog's. It began to be interesting to
watch his opening gambit.

"I have heard tales," he went on, "of a new ruler for this country.
What do you think of Feisul's chance?"

As he said that he eyed me sideways swiftly and keenly. Grim sat back
in his own corner and folded up his legs, watching the game contentedly.
Jeremy, intercepting Yussuf Dakmar's glance, put his own construction on
it. He is a long, lean man, but like the Fat Boy in Pickwick Papers he
likes to make your flesh creep, and humor, to have full zest for him,
has to be mischievous.