Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/192

 an immense expanse of land, a scalped, flayed wilderness where, to use the Arab saying, there lived nobody but Allah. Yet a land that had once been a granary, that had once been green with wheat and yellow with pulse, that had once fed hundreds of thousands—and that would again bear fruit, given irrigation, development, the granting of—“concessions.”

And it was of “concessions” that, three days later, the stranger talked to Mr. Preserved Higgins, who was stretched at ease beneath the silken dome of Abderrahman Yahiah Khan's tent of state, the Babu Bansi squatting at his feet and looking up at the eccentric Cockney millionaire with adoring eyes.