She smiled up at him, through the vapor.  “It’s the impossible that happens, these days!  The soul within me tells me some of our chaps are still alive, out there!”

She waved her smoky wand toward the large-scale map of Arabia on the wall.

“But Rrisa,” said he.  “About the others, there’s no sense of guilt.  I feel, though, like a murderer about Rrisa.”

“Rrisa still lives!”

He shook his head.

“The incense tells me.”  She insisted.  “My heart tells me!”

“Allah make it so!  But even if he is dead, he died like the others—­a man!”

“In pursuit of an ideal.  We all had that, a dream and an ideal.”

“Yes.  It wasn’t the treasure, of course,” he mused.  “It wasn’t material things.  It was adventure.  Well—­you and I have had that, at all events.  And they had it too.  They and we—­all of us—­we changed the course of history for more than two hundred million human beings.  And as for you and me—­”

He turned, looking at the map.  Then he got up from the table, went to that map and laid a hand on the vast, blank expanse across which was printed only “Ruba el Khali”—­the Empty Abodes.

“It would wreck the whole structure of civilization if we told,” said he.  The woman put back the incense-stick into its holder, got up and came to stand beside him.  “Imagine the horrible, vulture-like scramble of capitalism to exploit that dyke of gold!  There’d be expeditions, pools, combines, wars—­we’d have the blood of uncounted thousands on our heads!

“It’s not the treacherous El Barr people I’m thinking of.  If they perished, as they would to the last man defending their gold, all well and good.  But in case any of our men are still alive there, they’d be butchered.  And then, the destruction of gold as a medium of exchange, by its gross plenty, would wreck the world with panics.  And the greatest catastrophe of history would lie on our shoulders.  That is why—­”

“Why the secret must remain here,” she said, touching her breast.

“But!” he exclaimed, and turned and took a pencil from the table.

In a bold hand he wrote, across the blank white spaces of the map, these characters in Arabic: 

[Illustration]

“Nac’hna arivna!” he exclaimed. “‘We know!’”

A long silence followed.  Both, with deep memories, were peering at those words, as the light slowly faded in the west over the Palisades.  The man was first to speak.

“This secret is ours,” said he.  “I have another, that even you don’t know!”

“You have kept something from—­me?”

“Only until I have quite dared tell you.”

“Dared?”

“It isn’t the mere, simple thing itself.  It’s the symbolism back of it.  Maybe even now I’m premature in telling you.  But, somehow—­”

He hesitated.  This man of action, hard, determined, strong, seemed afraid.