Prologue Summary

The narrator (Woodford Green) is having drinks with Rutherford, a novelist, and Wyland Tertius, a secretary of a British embassy at the Tempelhof airport near Berlin. All three are old school chums. They have a good view of the airplanes as they chat. The meeting is not as interesting as the narrator anticipated.

A young man named Sanders joins them. He has been in the Service in Baskul, a town in Persia. He tells a strange story of how he and others were evacuating people from Baskul to Peshawar in May 1931. One plane completely disappeared with four passengers: three men and one female missionary.

The others are acquainted with one of the passengers, "Glory" Conway. They all went to Oxford University together with him. Since then, each has seen Conway a few times. At university, Conway was an extraordinarily brilliant student. He was...