ABSTRACT
And so I embarked on my last and most important charas venture. The charas adventure, I might well call it. An affair that occupied and preoccupied nearly a year of my life, that was to set the diplomatic agents of three governments in action, keep the telegraph wires of half the world humming for months, and bring me into a twilight region of intrigue whose existence I had not suspected outside the world of movies and melodrama. It was as if I had ripped off the lid from a seething underworld of greed and envy. A hornePs nest-it was a miniature volcano I set in action, and not so miniature at that! Volikis was right, a thousand times more so than I had dreamed.
