Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/164

 waved his arms and poured out a stream of excited vocables.

"Where's that interpreter?" Hannibal demanded.

Two more orderlies dashed off, and after an interminable wait, which the Asiatic filled with gesticulations and floods of unintelligible gabble, all three returned together. The interpreter was across the river, beyond present reach.

Hannibal cursed the interpreter.

"That's what you get," said Mago with exasperating sweetness, "for your insistence on importing bogus experts from the other side of the dawn. If you had left the vestibules of the sunrise undisturbed and hadn't ransacked the Ganges Valley for alleged adepts at elephant driving we should all be better off. You should have been able to spend on something worth while the fortune you lavished on obtaining these dandelion-stem-fingered, spindle-shanked exotic incompetents. And if your elephants were in charge of plain, honest Numidians, even if anything went wrong, which is unlikely, we should be able to understand what it was."

"Talk never accomplished anything," said Hannibal. "Can't anybody else understand this man?"

"I have an idea," said Mago, "that I begin to catch the drift of his. repetitions. I have picked