“He picked Charlie to the bone and cut for the States.  And this damned crooked luck went right along with him.  He was in a big apartment, now, up on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of the compass.  His last stunt was `patron of science.’  He’d gotten into the Geographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society in London.  He had a Harvard don working over in the Metropolitan library, building him a thesis!

“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.