“Now with yet another player joining the Great Game—All-Turkic, for pity’s sake—the level of complication, for many of the old Inner Asia hands, grew far too harrowing, mental damage within Colonel Prokladka’s shop being perhaps the most spectacular, with its midnight explosions, mysterious cases of hallucination, actual invisibility, and unannounced howling exits out through mud archways and into the wind-ruled wastes forever.”