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A regular line of caravan stations is maintained by the constant traffic both in winter and summer. But we were now on a bit of the genuine Gobi—that is, “Sandy Desert”—of the Mongolian, or “Shamo” of the Chinese.
And this notion developed another; if one were seeking the wreck of any one of these treasure caravans he would be more likely to find it in the El-Khali than in the Shamo." Barclay moved away from the fire, got a chair and sat down. He was across the hearth from me. He looked about the room and at the curtained windows that shut out the blue night.
Such travellers as intend to pass through the great desert of Shamo, which is forty days journey in extent, must provide all their provisions in this place, as they afterwards meet with no habitations, except a few straggling people here and there on the mountains and valleys. Called also Kamul, Chamul, Khami, and Came-xu. Forst. The desert of Noman-Cobi; or Tzokurin of modern maps.
No white man knows anything about the Shamo. "It's a trick to lay off these great waste areas and call them elevated plateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane's Open Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought the Shamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something in it.
"'But I can't go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping's over. That was no fit I had on the dock. "He looked at me with his dead eyes in his tan-colored plaster face. You've heard of the hemp-chewers and the betel-chewers; well, all that's baby-food to a thing they've got in the Shamo.
This immense extent of forty days journey through deserts, seems to include the deserts of Sultus, Cobi, and Shamo, and to reach to the frontiers of Kathay, or Northern China. Cascar, Chascar, Cassar, Kaschgar, or Hasicar, according to Forster.
We ask ourselves with surprise, whether some extraordinary revolutions may have carried away the earth and plants; or whether the granite nucleus of our planet shows itself bare, because the germs of life are not yet developed on all its points. The same phenomenon seems to be found also in the desert of Shamo, which separates Mongolia from China.
I've said that he looked like plaster, and he did look like it, but he looked like a plaster man with a thin coat of tan colored paint on him." Barclay paused. "It's hardly a wonder that no message reached me. The devil couldn't have got word out of the hell land he'd been in. Lost is no name for it. He'd been all over the Shamo, and the big Sahara's a park to it.
I was listening in a big chair, my feet extended toward the hearth; a smoking jacket had replaced my dinner coat. "It was five years ago, in London," Barclay went on, "that I fitted Charlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf of Pe-chi-li and go into the great desert of the Shamo in Central Mongolia. You'll find the Shamo all dotted out on the maps; but it's faked dope.
I have faced alike the bourrans of the steppes and the Samieli of Shamo, and the result of my vandal life is best epitomized in those grand but grim words of Bossuet: 'On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le neant. Nineteen years ago, to satisfy my hunger, I set out to hunt the daintiest food this world could furnish, and, like other fools, have learned finally, that life is but a huge, mellow, golden Osher, that mockingly sifts its bitter dust upon our eager lips.
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