So this morning Grant was going in to Scoone to find out what might possibly have interested Bill Kenrick in the interior of that bleak and stony immensity; in the desert and forbidding half-continent that was Arabia. And for that, of course, he was going to Mr Tallisker. Whether it was the rateable value of a cottage or the composition of lava that one wanted to be enlightened about, one went to Mr Tallisker.
The Public Library in Scoone was deserted at this hour of the morning and he found Mr Tallisker having a doughnut and a cup of coffee. Grant thought the doughnut an endearingly childish and robust choice for a man who looked as though he lived on gaufrettes and China tea with lemon. Mr Tallisker was delighted to see Grant, asked how his study of the Islands was progressing, listened with interest to Grant’s heretic account of that Paradise, and was helpful about his new search. Arabia? Oh, yes, they had a whole shelf of books about the country. Almost as many people wrote books about Arabia as about the Hebrides. There was, too, if Mr Tallisker might be permitted to say so, the same tendency to idealise the subject in its devotees.
‘You think that, boiled down to plain fact, they are both just windy deserts.’
Oh, no; not entirely. That was being a little—wholesale. Mr Tallisker had had much happiness and beauty from the Islands. But the tendency to idealise a primitive people was perhaps the same in each case. And here was the shelf of books on the subject, and he would leave Mr Grant to study them at his leisure.
The books were in a reference room, and there was no other reader there. The door closed on the silence and he was left with his search. He went through the row of books very much as he had gone through the row about the Hebrides in the sitting-room at Clune, gutting each book with a swift practised eye. The range was much the same as it had been in the earlier case: all the way from the sentimentalists to the scientists. The only difference was that in this case some of the books were classics, as befitted a classic subject.
If Grant had had any last lingering doubt that the man in B Seven was Bill Kenrick, it went when he found that the desert part of south-eastern Arabia, the Empty Quarter, was called the Rub’al-Khali.
So that was what ‘robbing the Caley’ had been!
After that he devoted his interest to the Empty Quarter, picking each book from the shelf, flipping through the pages on this one region, and putting it back again to go on to the next. And presently a phrase caught his eye. ‘Inhabited by monkeys.’ Monkeys, said his mind. Talking beasts. He turned the page back to see what the paragraph had been talking about.
It was talking about Wabar.
Wabar, it seemed, was the Atlantis of Arabia. The fabled city of Ad ibn Kin’ad. Somewhere in the time between legend and history it had been destroyed by fire for its sins. For it had been rich and sinful beyond the power of words to express. Its palaces had housed the most beautiful concubines and its stables the most perfect horses in the world, the one no less finely decked than the other. It stood in country so fertile that one had only to reach out a hand to pluck the fruits of the soil. There was infinite leisure to sin old sins and devise new ones. So destruction had come on the city. It had come in a night, with cleansing fire. And now Wabar, the fabled city, was a cluster of ruins; guarded by the shifting sands, by cliffs of stone that for ever changed place and form; and inhabited by a monkey race and by evil jinns. No one could approach the place because the jinns blew dust-storms in the faces of those who sought it.
That was Wabar.
And no one, it seemed, had ever found the ruins although every Arabian explorer had looked for them, openly or secretly. Indeed, no two explorers agreed as to which part of Arabia the legend referred to. Grant went back through the various volumes, using the magic key, the word Wabar, and found that each authority had his own pet theory, and that the argued sites lay as far apart as Oman and the Yemen. None of the writers, he noticed, attempted to belittle or discount the legend as palliation of their failure; the story was universal in Arabia and constant in its form, and sentimentalist and scientist alike believed that it had its basis in fact. It had been every explorer’s dream to be the discoverer of Wabar, but the sands and the jinns and the mirages had guarded it well.
‘It is probable,’ wrote one of the greatest, ‘that when the fabled city is at last found it will be by no striving or calculation but by accident.’
By accident.
By a flyer blown off his course by a dust-storm?
Was that what Bill Kenrick had seen when he came out of the solid brown cloud of sand that had blinded and buffeted him? Empty palaces in the sand? Was that what he had gone out of his way to look for—perhaps to look at—when he ‘began to come in late as a habit’?
He had said nothing after that first experience. And that, if what he had seen was a city in the sand, was understandable . He would have been teased about it: teased about mirages, and one over the eight, and what not. Even if any of the OCAL boys had ever heard the legend—and in so shifting, so easy-come a crowd it was unlikely—they would still have teased him about wish-fathered ideas. So Bill, who wrote those tight-closed M’s and N’s and was ‘just a bit cagey’, said nothing and went back to have another look. Went back again and again. Either because he wanted to find the place he had seen, or to look at a place he had already pin-pointed.
He studied maps. He read books about Arabia. And then—?
Then he decided to come to England.
He had arranged to go to Paris with Tad Cullen. But instead he wanted a little time by himself in England. He had no people in England. He had not been in England for years, and according to Cullen had never seemed homesick for the place nor written to anyone there in any kind of regular correspondence. He had been brought up by an aunt when his parents were killed and she too was now dead. He had never until then had any desire to go back to England.
Grant sat back and let the stillness fall round him. He could almost hear the dust coming to rest. Year after year the dust falling in the quiet. Like Wabar.
Bill Kenrick came to England. And about three weeks later, when he is due to meet his friend in Paris, he turns up in Scotland as Charles Martin.
Grant could imagine why he wanted to come to England, but why the masquerade? Why the flying visit to the North?
Whom was he going to visit as Charles Martin?
He could have paid that flying visit and still have met his friend in Paris on the appointed date if it had not been for the accident of his tipsy fall. He could have interviewed someone in the Highlands and then flown from Scoone to meet his friend at the Hotel St Jacques for dinner.
But why as Charles Martin?
Grant put the books back on their shelf with an approving pat that he had never wasted on the Hebrides selection, and went to call on Mr Tallisker in his little office. He had at least got his line on Kenrick. He knew how to cross his trail.
‘Who would you say was the greatest authority on Arabia in England today?’ he asked Mr Tallisker.