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There ensued an arduous effort, as journalists like to say, or, in my own words, a long and very hot scramble. The whole scale of the place was far vaster than the area we had left behind us, the other side of the broken ridge out of which the circle had formed itself. Here rocks which seemed, when one first saw them, stones on which one might sit, turned out to be, when one came up to them after a quarter of an hour's walking, high platforms on which one could easily have put a house. After some surveying, however, and a good deal of looking back to the big Friar's Heel and getting its line, Mr. Mycroft said, “An early lunch; we have just time,” and we returned to our stores in the shadow of the great circle.

When we came back to our former “furthest out” the sun was already making the mesa monolith begin to throw up its finger of shadow far out to the northeast across a desolation of smaller stone. We set out, but always the great avenue of shadow seemed to advance far faster than we were moving. At last, however, we were abreast of the monolith itself and by bearing toward it we passed into its shadow.

“We shall be late after all,” said Mr. Mycroft, hurrying me far faster than I liked, for quick movement after meals has never agreed with me. “The scale of this country deceived me. Still, though we may not be exactly where we should, at two-forty, still we shall be on the road to our goal if we take the line of the shadow at that moment and mark some outstanding rock to keep us going straight.” So we panted on, and at last Mr. Mycroft called, “The time is due; now we must take our line. From now on the shadow will only mislead us.”

We looked ahead, but as far as I could see there were no outstanding stones to guide us; the wilderness on this side, too, was subsiding into the same chaos as it presented on the other side of the stone circle. It was as featureless as a frozen sea of ice-hummocks. Mr. Mycroft, though, forged ahead. I was, indeed, getting pretty badly winded and am glad, if not proud, to say Mr. Mycroft was carrying the parcel.

I suppose it was because my fatigue was rising that after what seemed an interminable tramp and stumble I could not say when I first noticed that the going itself was getting better. I felt a strong feeling of relief, however, when I noticed that my old leader was not pressing the pace as he had been. His speed slackened, he almost seemed to be sauntering, and finally he came to a standstill. Then I had time to notice that not far ahead of us the boulder-strewn surface suddenly “improved”; it looked as though it were no more than a shingle beach, and still further on, I thought it might have been even sand, Mr. Mycroft, however, was not taking a view ahead or around. He had dropped the parcel and was crouched on the ground examining something in the palm of his hand through a lens in the other.

As I came up he remarked, “I think the mesa monolith has served its purpose and led us to our spot. We are arrived, or so near that we shall need only our own eyes to lead us to the actual goal.”

“I see nothing,” I said, looking around and then peering down at the ground from which he had picked up, I now saw, a handful of sand-grains. “And I can't see what clue you can be finding here.”

“Look at these,” was his reply, emptying his small runnel of silica dust into my hand, “through this,” handing me the lens.

“All I see is that the grains look like pebbles, as they should under such magnification.”

“Pebbles, yes,” he replied, “but that's the point.”

“No, I don't see.”

He was just about to say something more to enlighten my mind, to give me understanding as well as information, as usual, when his eye was evidently caught by something else on the ground near by. He hurried over to it and I saw something like a piece of crystal glitter as he picked it up.

“Look at this. This is a far clearer proof than the sand, though the sand is indubitable evidence in itself.” He was holding out to me what looked more than anything else like a piece of half-sucked candy dropped by a dirty child into the dust. Fortunately in this place it couldn't be that—there are some advantages in being in a wilderness and one is the absence of dirty children—so I took it from him and examined it.

“Now,” he said rallyingly—that tone of his entire repertoire tried me, I think, the most—“here's the riddle: the first point is some sand and the point of that is that it is pointless.”

He was in high spirits, I suppose because he felt the goal was near. But I was just tired.

“Oh, stop it!” I snapped.

“Very well. But I understood that in your branch of detection you use a lens occasionally and find evidence that way. Please look again at the grains.” I was still holding them. He had taken his lens from me as he had handed me the “false candy.” Now he relieved me of that and gave me his magnifier again. As under its power the sand looked like pebbles, his voice at my side said: “Silica grains have naturally very distinct and sharp edges. That's why sand is a sharp polisher and cutter. For millennia men could carve such super-hard stones as jade and porphyry only with sand. For sand is a natural glass, a hard crystal shattered into grains. But look at this stuff. It is sand right enough, but all the edges are rounded and smoothed.” It was true.

“Looks like sugar lumps that have just begun to melt.”

“Good,” he commended. “You're right, I'm sure. That is precisely what has happened. These little cubes of silica have been melted.”

I looked up. “Why, that's nonsense. I know enough about chemistry to know that.”

“Well, that's the way glass is said to have been invented,” he replied. “Men lighting a bonfire on the shore and, after, finding this.” He held out to me the piece of “false candy.”

“But who's been lighting huge bonfires here?” I asked.

“The real difficulty isn't that,” he said. “It's the chemical fact that though some sands will melt into a glass of a sort at a heat given by an ordinary big fire, they need, if they are to melt, a ‘flux' mixed with them: sea kale used for the ‘shore glass' or beach twigs used for the ‘forest glass.' Well, look around here. Where is there any weed or wood to help?” There certainly was none. “That's why,” he went on holding up the “candy,” “this is so remarkable. On the one hand, here are half-melted grains and here, on the other hand, is actually a piece of half-made glass. The heat required to melt sand into glass without a flux is immense. We have only just begun to be able to do so in the most modern furnaces. Yet this took place in the open desert and”—he was now walking about rapidly, every now and then stopping and picking up more small fragments of the “candy”—“over a large area. Yes, we are arrived, and the spot itself lies just ahead of us—the fused silica lumps increase in that direction.”

He pointed to where the ground became progressively smoother and seemed to dip down.

“Well,” I said, I must say with considerable relief, “now we are going to clear up the cache mystery for good. We have followed the indications given by the code to the letter and the minute. Though why you should think this odd little geological puzzle we have blundered on here, will help us in the human mystery, heaven only knows!”

His reply was, “In a way, heaven
has
taken a hand; indeed, it made the deal which started the game and it left its print to guide us.”

With that piece of rhetoric, what should he do but go back, unpack the parcel we had lugged so far, take out the huge black rubber gloves and proceed to put them on.

“If you are coming with me,” he said, “I'd advise you to do the same.”

I wasn't going to be left out now, at the last. “I'm coming,” I said resolutely.

“Then if you are going to accompany me, I am obliged to see that you are protected from every risk that it is possible to guard against. Please do me the favor of donning these gauntlets.”

It was still hot, quite hot. The rubber gloves when I put my hands in them were clammy—“fuggy,” that nasty schoolboy word, alone describes them. I hate damp hot hands.

“What's the need of all this dressing up?” I asked crossly. “Are we going to find a ring of rattlers guarding the hidden treasure of a desiccated Scotchman?”

“I beg you to act as I ask or to stay behind.” He said it so earnestly that I paused. “There's just ahead of us a danger which may be much more ‘striking,' if ignorantly handled,” he continued, “than a thousand rattlers or Python himself.”

He was evidently serious enough. Here we were at the trail's end. I might as well humor him this once and last. I pulled on the beastly things and we trudged off, down what had now become a slight slope. Indeed, as I looked about over the clearer ground we were covering, it seemed that we were in a sort of saucer-like depression which now appeared to be perhaps as much as a quarter of a mile across, a circular arena ringed with the rocks normal in this desolation. And this arena's surface seemed to get increasingly smooth as it centered down. The actual center, though, I couldn't see. Why, a few minutes' walk made clear. For the ground which had been gently sloping, now began to rise again. We were, in fact, it soon became clear, going over a series of concentric rings or what might be called huge ripples in the ground itself. These grew increasingly marked until we found ourselves on one as steep as those mounds running round a primitive earth fortress.

As I puffed up it, I asked Mr. Mycroft, “Don't you think this may be the crater of a small extinct volcano?” His “No,” didn't invite me to waste more breath on making helpful suggestions. But he turned as he crested the rim, a few yards ahead of me, and modified his flat contradiction with, “That might account for the sand's being melted. But here's been an even bigger force.”

“Bigger?” I asked as I struggled up beside him. We were looking into a crater, there could be no doubt. It was steep and cupshaped. And right in the middle was a hole, the beginning of a shaft, a digging. There were tools also, I could see—coils of rope, pickaxes, buckets.

“Now will you, please, follow me carefully,” said Mr. Mycroft, and began sidling down the steep slope. Certainly the place was eerie enough, already in shadow and with the signs, in this utter desolation, of a secret activity which had already led to three deaths and to which my own life had nearly yielded a fourth. I therefore followed the old man pretty closely and looked to my steps as we scrambled and almost slid down toward the bottom of the cup. So I nearly bumped into him as he had come to an abrupt halt when we reached where the slope flattened, but were still some distance from the center itself.

“Still another life,” were the words I heard him saying to himself. He was looking at something now nearly at our feet. I'd seen it from the top of the slope, as one piece of the abandoned and scattered gear round the central hole or shaft. It looked like a piece of tarpaulin which, maybe, had been meant to cover drilling machinery from the weather. But now, looking at it, I saw under the edge a boot sticking out. I drew back, but Mr. Mycroft went on a step or two, bent down, pulled back the stiff black cover and exposed, stiff and brown, lying on the sand, a corpse. Peering over his shoulder, I saw that the body was nothing like so desiccated as our last desert death-find. The face, though, was turned to the ground. It was, however, with hardly any surprise that I heard Mr. Mycroft's voice saying, “So Kerson's curiosity was also awakened.”

Without a word more he drew back again the black stiff covering over the stiff body and went on slowly—almost gingerly, I thought, as I followed, skirting the black pall on the ground. I came up with him as he stopped at the very center of the crater. There was a windlass hoisted over a small shaft; some considerable heaps of sand speckled with the “desert candy” lay about. We peered down the shaft. It was not very deep, I judged twenty or thirty feet perhaps. But I couldn't properly see to the bottom. The sides seemed, at some point, suddenly to open out.

“It looks,” I said, to get an opinion out of my silent companion, “as though whoever dug this shaft struck on an underground cavern?”

Mr. Mycroft said nothing, but took from the remnants of the parcel which had yielded our black gauntlets, and had been stuffed in his capacious coat pocket, a line, an electric torch, and a small recording instrument of some sort. This and the torch, which he switched on, he then tied to the line and let down the shaft. I followed the slowly revolving light as it ran down the shaft until its beams shone in the cavern itself. I leaned forward to see what it would show and to prevent the daylight from getting in my eyes. It looked all black as far as I could see. Then I thought I could detect where there must be a floor of some sort, for on it I was pretty certain, though the waving light was very poor, I could see something lying that might have been a pickax. As I was straining further, Mr. Mycroft's voice said warningly, “I'd keep back as far as possible. This
is
rather a disappointment as far as danger and developments are concerned. Still, it wasn't
not
to be expected, and, on the other hand, we can't be sure there's not some considerable risk still. Wait till I haul up my line and then we'll know a little more.”

He brought up his queer tackle; the torch he switched off and at once slipped into his pocket. “We're not looking for what we can see,” was his enigmatic comment. The instrument he scanned carefully; he made a note of some readings it apparently gave him and then said definitely, “Yes, we'd better not stay here.”

“And, and,” I hesitated, “what about
him?
”

“He's past any help for himself and I must be sure he's past any harm to others before we handle him, or what's left of him.”

Though the drift of this was lost on me, I was quite scared enough of the whole place to wish to be out of it. Already in the deep hollow the clear air of the fall day was getting dusk. As we climbed the slope I looked back at that desolate pit. It seemed, where the shadow was deepest, as though an infernal glow was hovering over the pit. I felt that my nerves were getting the better of me and hurried down the outer rim of the escarpment after the old man.