four o'clock
One lone light at a window on the top floor suggested that the officer of the night might be awake , but what with the screeching of owls and a wind that sighed among the shrubs , headquarters looked and sounded more like a deserted ancient castle than the cranium and brain-cells of Administration . We heard Yussuf Dakmar stop his cab two hundred yards away . The cabman turned his horses and drove back toward Jerusalem without calling on Allah to witness that his fare should have been twice what he received ; he did n't even lash the horses savagely ; so we supposed that he had n't been paid , and went on to deduce from that that Yussuf Dakmar had driven away again , after satisfying himself that the Feisul letter had reached headquarters . It was lazy , bad reasoning -- the sort of superficial , smart stuff that has cost the lives of thousands of good men times out of number -- four o'clock o ' the morning intelligence that , like the courage of that hour , needs priming by the foreman , or the sergeant-major , or the bosun as the case may be . The sentry turned out the guard , who let us through the gate after a word with Narayan Singh ; and the man who leaned on his bayonet under the portico at the end of the drive admitted us without any argument at all . I suppose he thought that having come that far we must be people in authority . Ever since then I have believed all the stories told me about spies who walked where they chose unchallenged during wartime ; for we three -- a Sikh enlisted man , an Australian disguised as an Arab , and an American in civilian clothes -- entered unannounced and unwatched the building where every secret of the Near East was pigeonholed .