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.
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