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.
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