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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

“‘But I can’t go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping’s over. That was no fit I had on the dock.’

“He looked at me with his dead eyes in his tan-colored plaster face. You’ve heard of the hemp-chewers and the betel-chewers; well, all that’s baby-food to a thing they’ve got in the Shamo. It’s a shredded root, bitter like cactus, and when you chew it, you don’t get tired and you don’t get hot . . . you go on and you don’t know what the temperature is. Then some day, all at once, you go down, cold all over like a dead man . . . that time you don’t die, but the next time . . . “

Barclay snapped his fingers without adding the word.’