I will start at the very nadir of my fortunes, at their very lowest depths, and you shall see them rise to their zenith, that highest point where they are crowned by Failure.
That's the first line and, alas, it might be the best. P. C. Wren is famous for Beau Geste, and for the story of the men who died but could not fall at Zinderneuf; this novel is tied into that story at several points, but doesn't need them.
It isn't quite an all-out swashbuckling novel, although it manages to combine the heroic characters of the square-jawed English gentry, the subtle and nationalist French gentry, the dashing Sheik, and the jes' natural Western cowboy into fewer actual characters than you'd think that would take. The narrative structure is more complicated than I expected, and does the combined identities proud. It might be just a little too late (1926) to carry off the noble burden of the colonizer. Anyway, something didn't jell. It wasn't a bad waste of time, but it wasn't good.
Find in a Library
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).