The talk had run on treasure.
I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in. I had the big South
room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris. It looks down on the
Casino and the Mediterranean. Perhaps you know it.
Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when one
begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil's a friend.
Barclay was standing before the fire. The others had drifted out. He's
a big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging out his
hand toward the door.
“That bunch thinks there's a curse on treasure, Sir Henry. That's one of
the oldest notions in the world... it's unlucky.”
“But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it was
not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was no
curse on it that reached to him. It helped poor Charlie finish in style.
He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a
line of lackeys.”
Barclay paused.
“Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. I
bar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonous
plateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... but
he had no business sense, anybody could fool him. He found the stock of
bar silver on the west face of the Andes that made old Nute Hardman a
quarter of a million dollars, clear, after the cursed beast had split it
a half dozen ways with a crooked South American government.”
Barclay's teeth set and he jerked up his clinched hand.
“It was a damned steal, Sir Henry. A piece of low down, dirty robbery;
and it was like taking candy away from a child.... 'Sign here, Mr.
Tavor,' and Charlie would scrawl on his fist.. .. Some people think
there's no hell, but what's God Almighty going to do with Old Nute?”
He flung out his hand again.
“Still the thing didn't dent Charlie. He never missed a step. 'Don't
bother, Barclay, old man,' he'd say, 'I'll find something else,' and
then he'd go off into this dream he had of coming back when he'd struck
it, to the old home county in England and laying it over the bunch that
had called him 'no good.' He never talked much, but I gathered from odds
and ends that he was the black sheep in a pretty smart flock.
“Then, I'd stake him to a cheap outfit--not much, I've said he could
push through the Libyan desert with a nigger--and he'd drop out of
the world. It wasn't charity. I got my money's worth. The clay pots he
brought me from Yucatan would sell any day for more cash than I ever
advanced him.”
Barclay moved a little before the fire. I was listening in a big chair,
my feet extended toward the hearth; a smoking jacket had replaced my
dinner coat.
“It was five years ago, in London,” Barclay went on, “that I fitted
Charlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf of
Pe-chi-li and go into the great desert of the Shamo in Central Mongolia.
You'll find the Shamo all dotted out on the maps; but it's faked dope.
No white man knows anything about the Shamo.
“It's a trick to lay off these great waste areas and call them elevated
plateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane's
Open Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought the
Shamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something in
it. You see the great gold caravans used to cross it, three thousand
years ago... and as Charlie kept saying, 'What's time in the Shamo?'
“Well, I bought him a kit of stuff, and he took a P. and O. through the
Suez. I got a long letter from Pekin two months later; and then Charlie
Tavor dropped out of the world. I went back to America. No word ever
came from Charlie. I thought he was dead. I suppose a white man's life
is about the cheapest thing there is northwest of the Yellow River; and
Charlie never had an escort. A coolie and an old service pistol would
about foot up his defenses.
“And there's every ghastly disease in Mongolia.... Still some word
always came from Tavor inside of a year; a tramp around the Horn would
bring in a dirty note, written God knows where, and carried out to the
ship by a naked native swimming with the thing in his teeth; or some
little embassy would send it to me in a big official envelope stamped
with enough red wax to make a saint's candle.
“But the luck failed this time. A year ran on, then two, then three and
I passed Charlie up. He'd surely 'gone west!'”
Barclay paused, thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket
and looked down at me.
“One night in New York I got a call from the City Hospital. The
telephone message came in about ten o'clock. I was in Albany; I found
the message when I got back the following morning and I went ever to the
hospital.
“The matron said that they had picked up a man on the North River docks
in an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my New
York address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stiff
for hours, and they had undertaken to reach me in order to identify him.
But he did not die. He was up this morning and she would bring him in.”
Barclay paused again.
“She brought in Charlie Tavor!... And I nearly screamed when I saw the
man. He was dressed in one of those cheap hand-me-downs that the Germans
used to sell in the tropics for a pound, three and six, his eyes looked
as dead as glass and he was as white as plaster. How the man managed to
keep on his feet I don't know.
“I didn't stop for any explanation. I got Tavor into a taxi, and over to
my apartment.”
Barclay moved in his position before the fire.
“But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played in
for a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into Fifth
Avenue, and our taxi pulled up by a limousine.”
Barclay suddenly thrust out his big pock-marked face.
“The thing couldn't have happened by itself. Some burlesque angel put
it over when the Old Man wasn't looking. Spread out on the tapestry
cushions of that limousine was Nute Hardman!
“There they were side by side. Not six feet apart; Old Nute in a
sable-lined coat and Charlie in his hand-me-down, at a pound, three and
six.”
The muscles in Barclay's big jaw tightened.
“Maybe there is a joker that runs the world, and maybe the devil runs
it. Anyhow it's a queer system. Here was Charlie Tavor, straight as a
string, down and out. And here was Nute Hardman, so crooked that a fly
couldn't light on him and stand level, with everything that money could
buy.
“I cast it up while the taxi stood there beside the car. Nute was consul
in a South American port that you couldn't spell and couldn't find on
the map. He didn't have two dollars to rub together, until Charlie Tavor
turned up. There he sat, out of the world, forgotten, growing moss and
getting ready to rot; and God Almighty, or the devil, or whatever it is,
steered Charlie Tavor in to him with the bar silver.
“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.
“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.”
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...”