island; therefore it will be useless for you to lie to me."

"Ah, that is the Sidi Doctor Stephens," Abdul said, puffing not too happily upon his cigarette. "His is the only house upon this island; also, I am his flunky and so I ought to know."

"'Stephens' will do," said Colonel Glinka, thwacking him smartly with the Malacca cane. "Lead on. And you may dispense with the gutter American dialect. I am not American, and besides I speak Arabic fluently."

"But I not so well," Abdul said, "for I was raised in the Kuwait oil-fields."

"By whom? A camel breeder?"

"Socony Vacuum," Abdul said.

They toiled up the face of the cliff. At once, half a dozen of the white-robed gallery fell in behind them. When Colonel Glinka stopped and looked back, they stopped. When he continued upon his way, they continued.

"Have they no homes to which to go?" he complained. "Have they nothing to do?"

"They are a very backward people, who live in the open," Abdul said. "They do not work."

"How, then, do the wretches live? Wall Street charity, I presume."

"Oh, no, when they are not able to forage, the Sidi Doctor Stephens feeds them."

"The reactionary old fool! But you may be sure that they knew how to work in the old days, before he came."

"I do not think so."

"And why, in your ageless wisdom, not?"

"Because the Sidi Doctor made them," Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar said.

Colonel Glinka did not reply, for they had reached the summit of the path by this time and were looking down upon a small, white villa that nestled in a green microcosm between the naked chines of the dark, interior hills. A miniature Eden indeed, thought Colonel Glinka, of figs and cinnamons, of date palms and patchouli, all enclosed within a high wire fence.

They descended, and Abdul Hakkim ben Salazar, with a flourish, produced a great bronze key and unlocked the iron gate. "The Sidi Doctor," he said, "will doubtless be in his conservatory, making flowers."

"A godlike pastime," said Colonel Glinka with heavy irony. "And where may this hotbed of new life be found?"

"Over there," Abdul said, pointing toward a narrow, screened, quonsetlike annex which protruded from the rear of the villa. "Come with me and I will show you."

"You will not," Colonel Glinka said, smiting him upon the thigh once again with the heavy cane. "You will remain here and keep silent."

"Ouchdammit!" Abdul exclaimed. "You be careful with that thing, Joe, okay?"

"You be careful, my boy," Colonel Glinka said and marched swiftly around the corner of the house, opened the screen door of the conservatory, and entered.

Here, amid long, terraced rows of tropical plants, a bearded dwarf in a green coat crouched before an earthen tray of lilies of the valley, tranquilly puffing up a massive, tobacco-stained meerschaum. He did not look up at the sound of the intruder, for he was engaged in a delicate business, the transfer of pollen from corolla to corolla with a toothpick.

"So you are, after all, only a minor god," Colonel Glinka said.

"I heard your plane and I watched you come up the path," the black bearded little man said. "Glinka, is it not?"

"You remembered me!" Colonel Glinka, quite affectedly, removed his goggles and dabbed at his eye with a perfumed handkerchief. "A humble policeman, a fat little nobody, to be remembered by the great Dr. Stefanik who was once our greatest scientist—yes, our most brilliant geneticist—do not shake your head. Let me see, was it Ankara where last we met? Yes, eight years ago in Ankara. You got away from me in Ankara. I was so ashamed, Comrade, that I cried."

"Nine years," the other corrected. "For one remembers a mad dog. And do not call me 'comrade,' Comrade. You know that I was never anything other than a simple Cossack."

"And, as such, invariably troublesome to us," Colonel Glinka said. "Yet you were our white hope, Comrade Stefanik. We might have led the world, I am told, in