e 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 ce