It was a short half block to the flea trap we called home. We kept out
of it as much as we could, holding our long daily conferences across
the street at the Novedades. The roaches scurried as we passed up the
dark stairway to our not much brighter room. I crossed to the bureau
and opened a drawer.
"The globe," Foster said, taking it in his hands. "I wonder if perhaps
he meant a ten-thousandth part of the circumference of the earth?"
"What would he know about----"
"Disregard the anachronistic aspect of it," Foster said. "The man
who wrote the book knew many things. We'll have to start with some
assumptions. Let's make the obvious ones: that we're looking for a
plain on the west coast of Europe, lying----" He pulled a chair up to
the scabrous table and riffled through to one of my scribbled sheets:
"50/10,000s of the circumference of the earth--that would be about 125
miles--west of a chalk formation, and 3675 miles north of a median
line...."
"Maybe," I said, "he means the Equator."
"Certainly. Why not? That would mean our plain lies on a line
through----" he studied the small globe "----Warsaw, and south of
Amsterdam."
"But this part about a rock outcropping," I said. "How do we find out
if there's any conspicuous chalk formation around there?"
"We can consult a geology text. There may be a library in this
neighborhood."
"The only chalk deposits I ever heard about," I said, "are the White
cliffs of Dover."
"White cliffs...."
We both reached for the globe at once.
"One hundred twenty-five miles west of the chalk cliffs," said Foster.
He ran a finger over the globe. "North of London, but south of
Birmingham. That puts us reasonably near the sea----"
"Where's the atlas?" I said. I rummaged, came up with a cheap tourists'
edition, flipped the pages.
"Here's England," I said. "Now we look for a plain."
Foster put a finger on the map. "Here," he said. "A large plain--called
Salisbury."
"Large is right," I said. "It would take years to find a stone cairn
on that. We're getting excited about nothing. We're looking for a hole
in the ground, hundreds of years old--if this lousy notebook means
anything--maybe marked with a few stones--in the middle of miles of
plain. And it's all guesswork anyway...." I took the atlas, turned the
page.
"I don't know what I expected to get out of decoding those pages," I
said. "But I was hoping for more than this."
"I think we should try, Legion," Foster said. "We can go there, search
over the ground. It would be costly, but not impossible. We can start
by gathering capital----"
"Wait a minute, Foster," I said. I was staring at a larger-scale map
showing southern England. Suddenly my heart was thudding. I put a
finger on a tiny dot in the center of Salisbury Plain.
"Six, two and even," I said. "There's your Pit of the Hunters...."
Foster leaned over, read the fine print.
"Stonehenge."
* * * * *
I read from the encyclopedia page:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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