“Pride,” O’Hara answered promptly. “Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast. I know that you received my letter telling of the fakir’s ill treatment and the order of cotton—my friend Holmes here told me as much during one of our long Morse code conversations through the stones. But the means of my uncovering the thread, of picking it free from the surrounding design and following it to the source, I did not tell of that. I was clever,” he said, making it sound like a character flaw. “When I was good at The Game, there was none better; this time, two years and more ago, it happened I had my son with me, a son any man might be happy to claim, and I wanted him to witness his father’s cleverness and skill. The Wheel of Life turns hard and fast, and my pride rode its top but for a moment, before it spun down to crush me underneath.”

He saw Nesbit’s impatience with the metaphor, and relented. “I went more deeply into suspect territory than I ought, and asked questions more pointed, and became more visible than any player of The Game dare do. I became, in short, a rank amateur, showing off for my son. His mother had died of the cholera when he was six, and he lived with his Tibetan grandparents for the three years after that. I thought the time had come to take him by my side, and as this was to be my last such expedition, I saw no harm in showing him some of the rules of our Game.”

He sighed, and shook his head. “My Holy One spent long hours expounding on the Wheel that is life, trying to re-form me from the imp I was. In the Wheel that holds the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, the hub is formed of the conjoined animals whose individual natures are ignorance, anger, and lust. Taken together, the hub of Illusion is pride.

“Yes, Nesbit, I see you wish fact and not philosophy. Very well. The boy and I went into Khanpur itself, selling copper pots. Which might have been innocent enough, but why then should a seller of pots take himself north out of the town for six or seven miles, to a place where there is no village, only a fort? Why should a seller of copperware be so interested in the maharaja’s air field, he ventures into the very buildings where the aeroplanes are stored? In my eagerness to come up with a prize for my last round in The Game, I chose to forget the danger of my opponent.