“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.”
He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket, selected one and lighted it with a fragment of the box thrust into the fire.
“That's where Tavor was the last year. When the ambulance picked him up, he'd crawled around the Horn in a Siamese tramp.”
He paused.
“Great people, the English; no fag-out to them. Look how Scott went on in the Antarctic with his feet frozen... It's in the blood; it was in Tavor.
“I sat there that winter night in my room in New York while he told me all about it.
“It was morning when he finished—the milk wagons were on the street,—and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a matter of no importance,
“'But I can't go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping's over. That was no fit I had on the dock.'