uns 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..."

Barclay snapped his fingers without adding the word.'

"And you can calculate when the second one will strike you. It's a
hundred and eighty-one days to the hour."

Then he added:

"That was the first one on the dock. Tavor had six months to live."

The big man broke the cigarette in his fingers and threw the pieces into
the fire. Then he