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Page 79
"Northern Asia traded gold in the west; the mined product would
be molded into bricks in lower Mongolia. It was then carried
over land to the southwest coast of Arabia. There was some great
center of world commerce low down on the Red Sea about eight
hundred miles south of Port Said.
"Tavor said that when he began to think about the thing the
caravan route was pretty clear to him. Arabia seemed to have
been connected, in that remote age, with Persia at the Strait of
Ormus, so there was a direct overland route . . . . That put
another notion into Tavor's head; these treasure caravans must
have crossed the immense Sandy Desert of El-Khali. And this
notion developed another; if one were seeking the wreck of any
one of these treasure caravans he would be more likely to find it
in the El-Khali than in the Shamo."
Barclay moved away from the fire, got a chair and sat down. He
was across the hearth from me. He looked about the room and at
the curtained windows that shut out the blue night.
"You can't sleep," he went on, "so I might just as well tell you
this. A good deal of it is what the lawyers called dicta . . .
obiter dicta; when the judge gets to putting in stuff on the side
. . . but it's a long time 'til daylight."
He had taken a small chair and he sat straight in it after the
manner of a big man.
"You see the treasure carried south across the Shamo would be
`gold wheat' (dust, we'd call it), packed in green skins . . .
you couldn't find that. But the caravans crossing the El-Khali
would carry this gold in bricks for the great west trade. Now a
gold brick is indestructible; you can't think of anything that
would last forever like a gold brick. Nothing would disturb it,
water and sun are alike without effect on it . . . .
"That was Tavor's notion, and he went right after it. Most of us
would have slacked out after two years in the hell hole of
Central Mongolia. But not Charlie Tavor. He got down to Arabia
somehow; God knows, I never asked him, - and he went right on
into the Great Sandy Desert of Roba El Khali. The oldest caravan
route known runs straight across the desert from Muscat to Mecca.
It's a thousand miles across - but you can strike the line of it
nearly four hundred miles west in a hundred miles travel by going
due South from the coast between fifty and fifty-five degrees.
"You'll find this old caravan route drawn on the map, a dead
straight line across the thirty-third parallel. But the man that
put it on there never traveled over it. He doesn't know whether
it is a sunken plateau, or an elevated plateau, or what the devil
it is that this old route runs across. And he doesn't know what
the earth's like in the great basin of the El-Khali; maybe it's
sand and maybe it's something else."
Barclay stopped and looked queerly at me.
"The Doctor Cooks have put a lot of stuff over on us. The fact
is, there's six million square miles of the earth's surface that
nobody knows anything about."
He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket,
selected one and lighted it with a fragment of the box thrust
into the fire.
"That's where Tavor was the last year. When the ambulance picked
him up, he'd crawled around the Horn in a Siamese tramp."
He paused.
"Great people, the English; no fag-out to them. Look how Scott
went on in the Antarctic with his feet frozen . . . It's in the
blood; it was in Tavor.
"I sat there that winter night in my room in New York while he
told me all about it.
"It was morning when he finished - the milk wagons were on the
street, - and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a
matter of no importance
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