offered to raise him to the rank and title of Itizad el-Dowleh, 'Grandeur of the State,' since it is evident that Hajji Akhbar Khan will never return from the far places. But Al Nakia refused. He wants no higher title than his present one: Sadr Azem, 'Prime Minister.' Strange, isn't it?”
“Strange indeed. He is the government. He controls the finances, the palace household, and the army. He works like a beaver and sleeps like a hare. He is a deer in running, a tiger in pouncing, a hawk in clutching. And he does not intrigue for the throne. He does not ask the princess' hand in marriage. He does not even want money or fame. Strange—as strange as the ancient prophecy of the swords!”
And Mahsud Hakki shook his kinky poll.
Yet, had the two Nubians known or, knowing, been able to understand, the strangest aspect of the whole affair was less the actuality of Hector's success as de facto ruler of Tamerlanistan than the contrast of this success with his, of course hypothetical, failure had Fate thrown him to a different corner of the earth.
For, had he taken his father's quite well-meant suggestion and gone to Canada or South Africa, he would by this time have become a remittance man, including all that the term implies—he would have been crushed beneath the wheels of that juggernaut like so many other of Britain's younger sons who leave home “for a reason.”
But it is a racial, almost a historical, phenomenon that these same younger sons who go under in the far places colonized by their own countrymen, make
