“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.”

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.”