Perhaps they aren't far wrong. But this road was the reason for my meeting up with Dr. Champ Chadwick.
The last spike, a gold one, had just been hammered into its tie by the "Most Lofty of Living Men" himself. That put our outfit out of a job temporarily. You see, I'd been working for McKardin-Malroy, an American contracting company, to whom the Shah had let out part of the constructional works on his railroad.
So, in the end, I of course took the job this Chadwick had sort of dangled under my nose. The pay wasn't anything worth mentioning; but, as I found out later, he himself was supplying the cash for this trip out of his own pocket. He didn't have much, and so expenses had to be cut to the limit.
Things moved fast after that. I'd always had an idea that such trips were planned carefully, months in advance, detail by detail. But this Doc Champ, as I got to calling him, didn't seem to plan anything—he just acted.
The next day Doc and I rode back over that crazy railroad I'd helped build—a road that winds through a maze of tunnels, one a grotesque spiral affair, over high bridges and gorge viaducts. We passed through Dizful, famed city of rats; Sultanabad, city of rugs; and on to the holy city of Qum.
Two days later, with Doc's whole scant outfit stored in the truck he'd managed to purchase, we were grinding out through squalid towns of ancient, one-story huts toward the salt swamp of Kavir and the lonely stretch of mountains to the north.
"Notice the way the dew lies there on the grass?" he said to me one morning, just as the sun was rising and we were breaking camp. "We slept right over the foundation walls of what was once part of an ancient city."
I squinted at where he was pointing, and, sure enough, I could see the grass was all marked out in big squares—showing up only in the way the dew sparkled, or didn't sparkle, in the slanting sunlight.
"Difference in heat and moisture conductivity," explained Doc. "Those walls are probably only a little way beneath the surface."
"You want to dig here?" I asked him.