‘Had he talked to his friend about it then?’
‘No. He had talked to no one that I know of. That was my own deduction. What is to hinder the discovery being made that way?’
‘Nothing, of course, nothing; if the place exists at all. I have said: it is a legend almost universal throughout the world. But where stories of ruins have been tracked to their source the “ruins” have always proved to be something else. Natural rock formation, mirage, cloud-formation even. I think what poor Kenrick saw was the crater of a meteor. I have seen the place myself. A predecessor of mine discovered it when he was looking for Wabar. It is unbelievably like a place made with hands. The thrown-up earth makes pinnacles and jagged ruinous-looking heights. I think I have a photograph somewhere. You might like to see it: it is a unique affair.’ He got up and slid back a panel in the bare painted-wood wall, disclosing shelves of books all the way from floor to ceiling. ‘It is, perhaps mercifully, not every day a meteor of any size falls on the earth.’
He picked a photograph album from one of the lower shelves, and came back across the room looking for the place in the collection. And Grant was seized without warning by a strange sense of familiarity; a feeling of having met Lloyd somewhere before.
He looked at the photograph that Lloyd laid before him. It was certainly an uncanny thing. An almost mocking pastiche of human achievement. But his mind was busy with that odd moment of recognition.
Was it just that he had seen Heron Lloyd’s photograph somewhere? But if it had been that, if he had merely seen Lloyd’s face as adjunct to some description of his exploits, then the sense of recognition would have come when he had first walked into the room and seen him. It was not so much a recognition as a sense of having known Lloyd somewhere else. In some other surroundings.
‘You see?’ Lloyd was saying. ‘Even on the ground, one has to go close up to it before one can be sure that the thing is not a collection of human dwellings. How much more misleading it must be from the air.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Grant, and did not believe it. For one very good reason. From the air the crater would have been plainly visible. From the air it would have looked exactly what it was: a circular hollow surrounded by the thrown-up earth. But he was not going to say that to Lloyd. Let Lloyd talk. He was growing very interested in Lloyd.
‘That lies very close to the Kenrick boy’s route across the desert, as described by himself, and I think that that is what he saw.’
‘Did he pin-point the place, do you know?’