Tickets to Paradise

by D. L. JAMES
The ice stone was a time warp, a pathway through 500,000 years!
It all started at Bandar Shahpur. You see, I'm a railroad construction man. Our job was finished, and the whole outfit was waiting at Bandar Shahpur, which is on the inlet Khor Musa of the Persian Gulf, for a boat to take us back to America.
And there, out of nowhere, this Dr. Champ Chadwick showed up. He seemed to be starving for a little good old U.S.A. palaver, and I guess that's why we struck up an acquaintance.
I've been doing a little digging over in Iraq, he said offhand. But things quieted down there. So now I'm bound for the desert and mountains to the north of here. This railroad has opened things up. It's difficult to get an expedition financed, you know, and transportation is sometimes the chief item.
I began to catch on that he was one of those guys who dig up ruins and things, and read a country's whole past from what they find. Then he went on to tell that he'd been sent out by a university in Pennsylvania, but that this present trip was just a sudden idea of his own.
And as he talked I began to like Dr. Chadwick. He was a serious-faced, rawboned little guy—not half my size—with steady eyes, a firm chin, and black hair plastered down slick on his head. By and by he got around to mention that he was looking for a strong-backed man to take along with him.
I intend to strike out from Qum, the holy city, he said. I'll try to get hold of a motor-truck there—and one of these desert men to drive it. They're rotten drivers though, he added, and next to a dead loss on a trip like this. Then he sighed. But I'm getting used to 'em.
What do you expect to find up there? I asked.
The usual thing, he answered, as if that ought to explain everything. This country is full of ruins. It's so old, in fact, that sometimes I think that everything that can happen has already happened here, at one time or another. Take Qum, for instance. A few years back there were twenty thousand ruined and deserted buildings still standing. These walled towns are like coral islands, surrounded and upheld by the dust and decay of their own past. But I'm looking for something farther back—much farther back.