`What you require, Sir, is the example case of some new
exploration - one that you have yourself conducted.'
"That bucked me; the devil was on the job!"
Barclay stopped again. He sat for a moment watching the smoke
from the cigarette climb in a blue mist slowly into the beautiful
fresco of the ceiling.
"I told old Nute precisely what I've told you. How I'd backed
Tavor for his last adventure, and where he'd been; all over
Central Mongolia and finally across the Great Sandy Desert of
El-Khali. And I told him what Charlie was after; the theory he
started with and his final conclusion when he made his last push
along the old caravan route west from Muscat.
"I went into the details, and the big notion that Tavor had
slowly pieced together; how the gold was mined in the ranges
south of Siberia, carried in green skins to lower Mongolia,
melted there and taken for trade Southwest across the El-Khali to
an immense Babylon of Commerce of which the present Mecca is
perhaps a decadent residuum.
"I put it all in; the accessibility of this desert from the coast
on three sides, how the old caravan route parallels the
thirty-third meridian and how Charlie struck it four hundred
miles out into the desert in a hundred miles travel due south in
longitude between 50 and 55 degrees; all the details of Tavor's
hunt for the wreck of one of these treasure caravans.
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