—or try to, and there you are. Moslem blood shed by a dog of a giaour—the old excuse!"
"Don't the Armenians know what's in store for them?" I asked.
"Some of them know. Some guess. Some are like the villagers on Mount Vesuvius—much as we English were in '57 in India, I imagine—asleep—playing games—getting rich on top of a volcano. The difference is that the Armenians will have no chance."
"Did you ever hear tell of the Eye of Zeitoon?" asked Will, apropos apparently of nothing.
"No," said the consul, staring at him.
Will told him of the individual we had talked with in the khan the night before, describing him rather carefully, not forgetting the gipsies in the black tent, and particularly not the daughter of the dawn who schooled a gray stallion in the courtyard.
The consul shook his head.
"Never saw or heard of any of them."
We were sitting in full view of the roadstead where Anthony and Cleopatra's ships had moored a hundred times. The consul's garden sloped in front of us, and most of the flowers that Europe reckons rare were getting ready to bloom.
"Would you know the man if you saw him again, Will?" I asked.
"Sure I would!"
"Then look!"
I pointed, and seeing himself observed a man stepped out of the shadow of some oleanders. There was something suggestive in his choice of lurking place, for every part of the oleander plant is dangerously poisonous; it was as if he had hidden himself among the hairs of death.
