He skipped the Morning News on its own triumph and went on to the far soberer prose of the triumphant explorer himself.
‘We were in the Empty Quarter on scientific errands…no thought in our minds of human history either factual or legendary…a well-explored country…bare mountains that no one had ever considered climbing…a waste of time between one well and the next…in a land where water is life no one turns aside to climb precipitous heights…attention caught by a plane that came twice in five days and spent some time circling low above the mountains…occurred to us that some plane had crashed…possible rescue…conference…Rory Hallard and I to search while Daoud went on to the well at Zaruba and brought a load of water back to meet us…no entrance apparent…walls like the Garbh Coire on Braeriach…giving up…Rory…a track that even a goat would baulk at…two hours to the ridge…a valley of astounding beauty…green almost shocking…kind of tamarisk…architecture reminiscent of Greece rather than Arabia…colonnades…light-skinned Persian type with fine eyes…the grace and small bones of an inbred race…very friendly…greatly excited by the appearance of the plane which they seemed to have taken to be some kind of bird…paved squares and streets…oddly metropolitan…isolation due not to the difficulties of the mountain track but to lack of animal transport to carry water…desert impassable without that…in the position of a small island in an ocean of desert…as unaware what lay beyond that desert or how far it might extend as the Ancients were of what lay beyond the Atlantic…tradition of disaster, but owing to language difficulties this is surmise, being a translation of sign-talk rather than…strip cultivation…monkey god in stone…Wabar…volcanic convulsion…Wabar…Wabar….’
The Morning News had inset a neat outline map of Arabia with crosses in the appropriate place.
Grant lay and stared at it.
So that was what Bill Kenrick had seen.
He had come out of the shouting heart of the storm, out of the whirling sand and the darkness, and looked down at that green civilised valley lying among the rocks. Not much wonder that he had come back looking ‘concussed’, looking as if his mind were ‘still back there’. He had not quite believed it himself. He had gone back to search; to look for, and eventually look at, this place that appeared on no map. This— this —was his Paradise.
This was what he had been writing about on the blank space of an evening paper.
This was what he had come to England to—
To Heron Lloyd to—
To Heron Lloyd —!