[3] In 1916 he decided to take advantage of the academic lull of World War I[4] and spend a long spell in India, to serve as a Methodist missionary and to research and lecture on Zoroastrianism where it is still practiced by certain groups.

[5] While in Karachi, he availed of the friendship and library of Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla, a U.S.-educated Zoroastrian scholar and the high priest of the Parsi community there.

He left Karachi aboard the S.S. City of Paris, headed for Egypt where he met with his friend and colleague Dr J. Rendel Harris.

The pair set sail from Port Said but as their ship passed the Gulf of Lion it was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine.

Almost 3 years previously he opened up his book From Egyptian Rubbish Heaps with this paragraph "On July 31, 1914, the ill-fated Lusitania landed at New York after what proved her last peace voyage.