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“The thing made me ugly. I wanted to have a plain talk with the devil. He wasn’t playing fair. Old Nute couldn’t have been worth the whole run of us; I’ve legged some myself, and I had a right to be heard. The devil ought to make old Nute split up with Charlie. True, Charlie belonged in the other camp, but I didn’t. And if I wanted a little favor I felt that the devil ought to come across with it . . . I put it up to him, or down to him, as you’d say, while I sat there in that taxi.”

There was a grim energy in Barclay’s face. He was no ordinary person.

“I got Tavor up to my apartment, and a goblet of brandy in him. I never saw anybody look like Tavor as he sat there propped up in the chair with a lot of cushions around him. It was winter and cold. He had no clothes to speak of, but he did not seem to notice either the cold outside or the heat in the apartment, as though, somehow, he couldn’t tell the difference.

“And he was the strangest color that any human being ever was in the world. I’ve said that he looked like plaster, and he did look like it, but he looked like a plaster man with a thin coat of tan colored paint on him.”

Barclay paused.

“It’s hardly a wonder that no message reached me. The devil couldn’t have got word out of the hell land he’d been in. Lost is no name for it. He’d been all over the Shamo, and the big Sahara’s a park to it. He’d been North to the Kangai where they used to get the gold that the caravans carried across the Shamo, and he’d followed the old trails South to the great wall.

“It’s all a Satan’s country. I don’t know why God Almighty wanted to make a hell hole like the Shamo!”

He paused, then he went on.

“But it wasn’t in the Shamo that Tavor got track of the thing he was after. He said that the age he was trying to get back into was much more remote than he imagined. It must have been a good many thousands of years ago. He couldn’t tell; long before anything like dependable history at any rate . . . . There must have been an immense age of great oriental splendor in the South of Asia and along the East African coast, dying out at about the time our knowledge of human history begins.”

Barclay went on, unmoving before the fire.

“I don’t know why we imagine that the legends of a little tribe in Syria running back to the fifth or sixth century begins the world . . . . Anyway, Tavor got the notion, as I have said, of an age in decay at about the time these legends start in; with a trade moving west.

“He nosed it all out! God knows how. Of course it was only a theory – only a notion in fact. He hadn’t anything to go on that I could see. But after two years’ drifting about in the Shamo, this is how he finally figured it:

“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.”