Most of the big things in life hinge on very small beginnings. I wonder if the people who pose as pure materialists ever reflect on that fact when they hold forth on their complete and absolute certainty that there is no guiding hand in men’s affairs or in the conception, creation, and control of that most wonderfully intricate piece of machinery, the universe.

Most

Missing a train, accepting an invitation, having a dance cut, all may prove the turning-point in a life if you take the trouble to trace things back to their beginnings.

Take my own case, as I sit writing here with a glimpse of the twin snow-peaks of Saghar Mor through my open window, rose-red in the last light of the setting sun, above a level haze of lilac. Here am I with all I ever sought of life, all and far more. And yet, but for a chance visit to the Karachi Gymkhana Club some two years ago, I should probably to-day be smoking a pipe in my old Sussex manor farmhouse, after a day in the stubble, leading a quiet uneventful life, content—in a way—but having savoured only a fraction of what life really holds.

A gymkhana club bar does not sound the ideal starting-point for a life’s romance, for a complete change in all that life may mean, and yet it so happened to me, as doubtless it has happened before and may happen again to others.

I’ve been thinking for some time of writing down the events of the last two years, partly because they sometimes seem so unreal that the only way to bring home their concreteness—if[4] I may coin a word—is to put them down in cold, hard black-and-white, partly because I think they may serve to show others that romance is not yet dead, and that adventure is still to be found for those who will but pluck up heart and seek.

[4]

What is that passage of Kipling’s about Truth being an undressed lady at the bottom of a well, and that if you meet her—well, as a gentleman there are only two things to do, one to look away, the other to give her a print dress? So I, being, I hope, a gentleman, choose the latter.

To begin at the very beginning, I must revert to the bar at the gymkhana club which I have mentioned, and, before beginning my tale, I suppose I had better introduce myself as I was when the story started, late in 1920.

My name is Lake, and Harry Lake is what most people call me. My father—God rest his soul—was the owner of a small 

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