Well, I told him. Of course he already knew quite a lot about Iran's
new railroad--the many-million dollar toy of the "Brother of the
Moon and Stars," as the fancy-tongued Iranians like to call their
shah. This road writhes and twists and climbs through eight hundred
miles of queer, mountainous country--a country of mud and rocks and
salt-swamps--and carefully avoids all the important towns. You see,
the "King of Kings"--another pet name for Shah Pahlavi--is afraid some
of his neighbors might get control of the road and use it against him.
These same neighbors sneeringly refer to it as the road that leads from
"nowhere to nowhere."
Perhaps they aren't far wrong. But this road was the reason for my
meeting up with Dr. Champ Chadwick.
The last spike, a gold one, had just been hammered into its tie by
the "Most Lofty of Living Men" himself. That put our outfit out of
a job temporarily. You see, I'd been working for McKardin-Malroy, an
American contracting company, to whom the Shah had let out part of the
constructional works on his railroad.
So, in the end, I of course took the job this Chadwick had sort of
dangled under my nose. The pay wasn't anything worth mentioning; but,
as I found out later, he himself was supplying the cash for this trip
out of his own pocket. He didn't have much, and so expenses had to be
cut to the limit.
Things moved fast after that. I'd always had an idea that such trips
were planned carefully, months in advance, detail by detail. But this
Doc Champ, as I got to calling him, didn't seem to plan anything--he
just acted.
The next day Doc and I rode back over that crazy railroad I'd helped
build--a road that winds through a maze of tunnels, one a grotesque
spiral affair, over high bridges and gorge viaducts. We passed through
Dizful, famed city of rats; Sultanabad, city of rugs; and on to the
holy city of Qum.
Two days later, with Doc's whole scant outfit stored in the truck he'd
managed to purchase, we were grinding out through squalid towns of
ancient, one-story huts toward the salt swamp of Kavir and the lonely
stretch of mountains to the north.
"Notice the way the dew lies there on the grass?" he said to me one
morning, just as the sun was rising and we were breaking camp. "We
slept right over the foundation walls of what was once part of an
ancient city."
I squinted at where he was pointing, and, sure enough, I could see the
grass was all marked out in big squares--showing up only in the way the
dew sparkled, or didn't sparkle, in the slanting sunlight.
"Difference in heat and moisture conductivity," explained Doc. "Those
walls are probably only a little way beneath the surface."
"You want to dig here?" I asked him.
He shook his head. Since that time when he told me about the Ice Stone,
he'd never mentioned it again. But I had noticed him squinting at all
the mountains we passed, and sometimes I'd see a queer expression on
his face, like a man who catches himself doing something that hasn't
got good sense back of it.
In fact, by the end of the week, I had about decided that he didn't
have any better idea as to why we'd come out here than I did.
I think it was on the seventh day that we came upon a queer-looking
country--isolated masses of rock, like big blocks, sticking up out of
the ground. Beyond these was a range of low mountains, or big hills,
whichever way you look at it.
"We'll camp here for a day," said Doc. "How's the water?"
"About gone," I told him.
"Good," he nodded. "We'll run the truck up to the foot of those big
hills and find some."
I headed that old bus for a sort of fold in the hills ahead, and when
the ground began to get pretty rough we stopped and went on afoot, each
carrying a couple of empty water buckets. It wasn't long before we
found a shallow stream.
"There may be a spring farther up," said Doc.
He started splashing along the creek bed, for it was bordered by dense
thickets of "jangal"--birch and box--through which you could scarcely
squeeze.