Pharos, the Egyptian by Guy Boothby — Read

If any one had told me on the night that I first met Pharos at the foot of Cleopatra's Needle that within a very short space of time I should be driving from Pompeii to Naples alone with him, I believe I should have laughed that person to scorn. And what is perhaps stranger, seeing how intense my dislike for him had been less than two hours before, I was not only paying attention to what he said to me, but was actually deriving a certain measure of enjoyment from his society. In my time I have met some of the cleverest talkers in Europe, men whose conversational powers are above the average, and to whom it is rightly enough considered a privilege to listen. Pharos, however, equalled if he did not exceed them all. His range of topics was extraordinary, and his language as easy and graceful as it was free from the commonplace.

Upon every conceivable subject he had some information to impart, and in the cases of events in the world's history, he did so with the same peculiar suggestion of being able to speak from the point of an eye-witness, or, at least, as one who had lived in the same period, that I had noticed when he conducted me through the ruins of Pompeii that afternoon. The topography of the country through which we were passing he also had at his fingers' ends.